FAQ: How is the teaching going?

February 17, 2010. Frequently asked question: How is the teaching going?

The short answer is it is going well. I am learning a lot and enjoying it. Students in Laos are very motivated to learn English, which makes working with them very fun.

Here’s the long answer, for those who are interested.
I have been pretty conservative with respect to jumping into teaching. I have never taught before and have had no training, so for the first couple of weeks I was mostly observing the teachers and helping out by reading snippets so the students could hear my accent, and helping the students with their pronunciation. Many of the private schools where we volunteer have Lao teachers who are only too willing to hand over their classes to us, but I was not comfortable with this when I first arrived. I had one experience early on where I arrived on my own at an 8:30 class and introduced myself to the teacher (who I tracked down in a back room). He showed me what he was working on (pointed to the place in the text book) and then said he had to go pick up medicine for someone in his family and asked me to start the lesson. He pointed me to the classroom and headed on his way. Yikes! When he arrived back in the classroom he noticed I was drilling the (obscure) grammar incorrectly (not surprising, as I had not bought into the point of the exercise). So he showed me how he wanted me to do it, then left again!!! He said we were working on efflective pronouns. I have no idea what that is. Many of the Lao teachers work on (obscure) grammar because they can, but I prefer the approach which focuses on effective communicating, including proper pronunciation (so that the Lao students can be understood by native English-speakers).

In any case, I spent a couple of weeks watching and learning and helping out on the manual labour front and on the simple things but not taking the lead. I did help the teaching assistants at the Mekong English Centre (aka MEC, formerly the Mano English Centre) with their computers and PowerPoint, and Ron and I introduced the concept of Show and Tell to the MEC. I guess my enthusiasm showed because the main teacher at the MEC invited me to join the Teacher Training classes he is doing for one hour a day for his Teaching Assistants. It has been very useful for me, and now I am comfortable walking into unknown situations and just dealing with whatever comes my way. I am slowly developing the skills to enable learning rather than explain or just involve the students (yes I have been influenced by Scrivener's LEARNING TEACHING). I wasn't sure I would ever be able to walk in cold to a situation without preparation, but I am realizing that I am slowly building a toolkit of activities and even lesson plans and approaches for providing students with clear ideas from which they can go forward and discover patterns. The more I have in my toolkit, the more able I am to (1) assess what the students know at any given point and (2) figure out a next step that reinforces what they already know and allows them to learn more. I am now signing up to work with the Lao teachers (who are apt to hand over the class even when they stay in the room. This has provided the unexpected benefit of helping me to develop skills for including them and sharing the teaching as well as moving a class along). I am much more comfortable and effective volunteering at Big Brother Mouse, too. Big Brother Mouse sets up a space for tourists and English students to converse from 9-11 Monday to Saturday. Last week was the first time I had room in my schedule to go during the week and I loved it so much I went on Saturday as well. A good thing , as I was the only native English speaker there! I was surprised because there was one tourist for every student during the week. I guess the tourists were all sleeping in on Saturday. So it was about ten students and me. It went well and I enjoyed it. I would not have enjoyed it at the beginning of January when I first arrived.

One of the things the students love best is to hear us attempting to speak Lao. Attempting being the operative word. There is much shouting (in an attempt to help us to hear the subtleties) and laughter. However, it is paying off. I tried some of the Lao words I know on the students at Big Brother Mouse and they understood every one of them. Yay!