Teaching in Phuket at Anubhan Phuket

Monday was our first teaching experience in Phuket at a massive government school – Anubhan Phuket. It consisted out of 5 buildings with 5 floors each. 2300 Prathom learners – Prathom 1 – 6 (grade 1 – 7). Steven was assigned to the Prathom 2,3 and 4 classes and I had the Prathom 5’s and 6’s with one Prathom 3 class.

 

 The manager from ECC drove us to the school (driving typical Thai style - like a real moron skipping robots, driving all the way in 1^st gear and cutting in front of cars) to introduce us to the head of the English department (who could of course not speak coherent sentence in English).  She was a very nice lady once you get to understand her short way of doing things and abrupt instructions. She introduced us to our co-teachers and we went to meet our first classes. Pheeeew – bussssy kids. A golden rule of teaching English in Thailand is not to be too phased about keeping your class dead quiet – if you try to achieve this you will have a breakdown before your first day is done. Kids will talk very loud in Thai, some of them will walk around and some of them will not want to listen to you. The trick is to have lessons (and the personality) to get their attention  and to keep it. A bit of chaos is okay – it is not like western schools where kids have to be quiet all the time. “Sanook” is their life philosophy. Sanook – to have fun.  Some photos of our classes and the kids that we taught:

 We also got lunch every day – this included anything from very curried fish to Chinese style cooked eggs in soup, and always served with RICE.

Some pictures of the school:

 After school we went in search of an apartment. One of our friends in Thailand would join us later so he helped us out with a deposit for the apartment. We would now be spending our last money to move in to an apartment. The Head of Department showed us a very nice (bit expensive) place earlier that day, and impulsive as I am I immediately wanted to take it. Steven (always being the voice of reason) said that we should first look around if we can’t find something cheaper. So as we walked back to the hotel we stopped at every place that seemed as if they had apartments to rent out. After stopping at one hundred and twenty five (4) apartments I said to Steven that I’m fed up and we should just go to the hotel and take the other apartment – he was less than happy with that idea. So I said okay we can stop at one more place and if we don’t like it we take the other one. And alas the next place that we walked in was Joe Mansion – cheap, comfortable and had aircon, a bed, a fridge, a table and a hot water shower. So we first went to the hotel and took an afternoon nap.

Well it turned out that our afternoon nap lasted until 21:00. So we woke up and packed all our stuff (and some of the hotel’s stuff) and moved 4 blocks down to our new apartment in the middle of the night. Our apartment: