Role Playing

So,

Last week the high school math teacher just up and left one day. He had had a lot of personal problems, and then 2 weeks ago, when Chris died, it pushed him over the edge I suppose. The whole thing was a huge ordeal and was hard on everybody, but especially on him. They had spent quite a bit of time together and both liked to go out.

Well guess who is taking over? I've been pulled out of Sakthong house as a homestay parent and a new contract is being drafted to instate me officially as full time high school faculty. So I came to Thailand to teach ESL, got a job as a residential advisor, and am now a high school math teacher! Hehe, it's all so sudden it's quite absurd. It's funny, when I was in high school I always wanted to be a high school teacher, and now here I am, living out one of my teenage dreams. It's a heavy load, 23 periods a week - Geometry, Business Math, Math 2 (my same middle school class), Precalculus, an SAT prep course, and 3 computer sections. It's going to be challenging, but I love challenges. It was a little bit difficult for me to make this decision because I was making about 38,000 THB per month by basically sitting on my butt all day watching TV and reading books with the kids, swimming, and taking them on trips to town at Sakthong. Now I'm making 43,000 THB by teaching full time. It's a lot more work for not a lot more money. This was my first week and I was surprised at how exhausted I am. I haven't worked full time since, hm, since Summer 2006, and teaching is especially exhausting - you've got to be "on" the whole time. I like it though. It's not that I was bored working in Sakthong, but I just felt sometimes like I was wasting my time - it was just too easy. This will be good for me, really push me for the rest of the year.

Another perk is that I'll be replacing the old teacher on our Classroom Without Walls trip next week. I'll be going with the 12th graders up to the Burmese border to do volunteer work with a hill tribe that lives there. We'll be doing construction and some of the kids will teach English. It sounds really cool.

So I finished off my first week. Geometry and Business Math are very straight forward. I prepare lesson plans right from the book and it's no problem. Computer class is frustrating for me because there is absolutely no curriculum and I had been told just to make up something for these 3 classes to do. I don't know what to teach them. This week in precal was really difficult for me. The kids were at the end of the chapter where they had "learned" to graph all the complicated trigonometric functions. I essentially had to teach myself how to graph the hardest of the hardest so I could at least have some authority when trying to help them review for my test. I was scared, I thought I made the test too easy and they would finish it way ahead of time. As it turned out, only 3 people we're even capable of attempting the graphing section and none of them got them all right. Apparently they had just been doing all their graphing on a calculator. That's not math!

After Classroom Without Walls we start a brand new chapter together and I have this whole weekend and any free time during CWW to get on top of the new material. I started it today and I love it! It's about verifying and simplifying complex trig functions. It's so much fun, they're like little puzzles or mazes. I totally lost track of time tonight doing my lesson plans. I find the hardest problems and make sure I can do them so that I'll feel comfortable teaching the easy ones and asking questions. I love the mental stimulation. My mind is more mature than when I first took precalculus, so the hard problems are like little brain teasers - they take me awhile to figure out but they're completely doable.

This weekend is the Samoeng Strawberry Festival. I might go tomorrow, but Doi went and brought me back a bunch of strawberries and a starfruit! I can't wait to cut open the starfruit and have a go. I've never had one before.

Latest news on my volunteering aspirations: If I get a holiday I plan on going to Tacloban, Philippines to volunteer in a clinic (I want to so bad), but I may have no break at all, in which case I'll just be working straight from here till June.

I walked out of Central Airport Plaza last night with my KFC soft serve chocolate icecream (bought for 30 cents), smiled, and thought: "I am so happy here".