February 27, 2022

It’s been a couple weeks, and I feel like I ought to post to catch you up, but where to start?

The school year is coming to an end. All last week, the K3 students got dressed in their bright red polyester robes and posed for pictures in the main school building, with their class, and outside with their teachers (the above photo is me dressed in a borrowed shirt and blazer for the photos with the teachers).

For two weeks, the parents of the different classes came in to observe us teach and to meet with us. On three separate days, I had a large group of parents watching me work with the students through the windows, and it felt…awkward. Luckily, the students were mostly well-behaved (and in the class where they weren’t, I don’t think it was super obvious).

And the meetings with the parents went fine—I would meet with a group of K1, K2, or K3 parents, and would talk about each of their kids, one-by-one. I had no guidance on how to do this, except what I got from talking with my fellow English teachers, and though it went ok, I’d do things a little differently next time. I'd try to give more specific feedback on each student, and really focus on their English conversation skills, as it became clear that was what parents were most concerned about—they could hear about their kids' behavior from the Thai teachers, but from me they were most concerned about hearing about their kids' English skills.

But I have gotten a contract for next year, and it’s pretty good news—I get a pay increase and a much larger completion bonus—and it’s a 12-month contract, meaning I get paid through the summer holiday. Enrollment at the school is way down for the second time next year due to Covid concerns, and I found out two of my three classes will no longer exist. There will only be six Kindergarten classes, instead of eight, and three English teachers. The students from my former classes who reenrolled will be put into other classes, and the Thai teachers—the worst effected by this—have, at least for the most part, gotten new positions teaching in the primary school.

While I feel for those teachers, I am also so relieved I won’t have to teach those two classes anymore. They were both pretty hard to manage, and I didn’t have great relationships with either of the head Thai teachers (one seemed supremely indifferent and the other was nice enough but spoke very little English). I will still teach my favorite class, and I think I’ll be inheriting one of Ellen’s classes—one in which the teacher is very organized and creates clear boundaries with the kids. It’s such a relief!

Maybe this is weird, but I also feel some relief realizing that those two classes were the first ones cut—it at least somewhat confirms my suspicion that those were the least-managed, wildest classes, and it makes me go a little easier on myself that I seemed to have to deal with a lot more behavior issues than either of my coteachers.

We also did the invite-only stage reading of The Moment on Friday.

I’m still processing my feelings about it, though I think the reading went well. The audience was small (as I wanted it to be, mostly for Covid reasons), but supportive. They stuck around for the talkback and shared ideas about the characters’ relationships to art and to each other. Some of the advice was useful, some less so, but they were all engaging with the story, which is always a kind of miracle to me—how something goes from being words that only exist in in my head, to something that people perceive as an actual thing in the world—to the point that they can disagree with another audience member about why a character does what they do.

There were a lot of social dynamics that can make me uncomfortable, though—I had a lot of self-doubt afterwards about whether I was gracious enough to the audience as they arrived (I was on greeting/N95 mask duty), whether I thanked Darren and Yamine properly, whether that one audience member realized I didn’t recognize her when I first greeted her, etc. I was surprised, really, that most of my anxieties came not from sharing my writing, but around whether I was a good enough hostess!

I do continue to wonder if I really want to spend my time and money developing this piece into a musical. I think it feels quite insular, and I also think the focus is quite limited. I get the sense, from feedback at the reading and from the actors, that many people doing creative work can relate to the main character's fears and self-induced suffering around making & promoting art, but, I don’t know—this play really speaks to my anxieties feels like a bit of a narcissistic selling point. It all strikes me as a bit young and immature and self-involved, but I can't tell if those are true, objective feelings about the musical, or if they're just arising out of my own insecurity around making a piece that is so personal to me.

We’ll see. I’m going to set it aside for now and return to it when my feelings have had a chance to settle.

Another big thing that happened over the weekend—Roman has strep throat. Step throat! We think he most likely got it from one of his students, though it's a little baffling that happened in spite of all the mask-wearing and hand-washing. Anyway, he's on antibiotics and Ibuprofen, but his throat is a swollen, white-veined mess (he forbade me from posting any pictures), and he's in a lot of pain. 

Once we found out it was strep, we both spent the rest of the weekend isolating—Roman recovering and me avoiding human contact, in case I was infected but pre-symptomatic. I have to say, the Covid era has made us acutely aware of stuff like germs and social responsibility around contagion. 

I am also anxious about getting strep myself, primarily for the ridiculous reason that I lose 1000 baht of bonus pay for every sick day I use (what an utterly fucked up system), but also because I can see how rough it's been on Roman. 

But if I stay well, I'll have one more week of teaching, then a week of doing who-knows-what in the office, and then Arica arrives with Ruby and Julia and we’ll all be on vacation.