Where Are Your Keys?

For as long as there have been multiple languages, cultures have worked to communicate with each other.  The first reason was for trade, then for friendship and romance and the last was to negotiate the end of wars.  I will stick with the first two reasons for my approach.

My phrase worksheets worked fairly well but I didn't feel like there was much retention.  I wanted to know how I can teach something they can keep and use later on their own?  That said, I want to find a way to learn Thai using the same process.  Is there such a thing out there?

Google something like Learn A Language Quickly and sooner or later you come up with a fellow who says you can learn any language in 90 days.  He talks about how many languages he can speak and how he mostly just forces himself to start speaking the language mistakes and all.  I tried that for about 20 minutes and decided to continue my search.

A popular teaching method in the US is called Total Physical Response or TPR.  The idea is that you learn faster when you get your body moving with the language.  A simple example is the song, Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes.  The song has children pointing to such body parts as they sing.  I learned to song when I was probably just four and I still remember it so I figured there must be something to it.  From looking at the program, I could probably do great things if I had the training.

Then I saw something new.  Where Are Your Keys?  Up in the northwest USA there are several native American tribes with long traditions and their own languages.  Over time, though, many of the languages have disappeared.  Tribe leaders have been working desperately to keep what languages are left alive then along comes this programs.

The method is to play a game where there are a limited number of things in front of you and your fellow players.  The demonstration uses a red and black pen, a rock and a stick.  Using American Sign Language, you start with, "What is that?"  From there you move to yours and mine, want, have, give and take and so on.  Using repetition and sign language should help students retain what they learn.

I decided to try this with my students.  First I needed to find four things all students carry because rocks and sticks are not part of their usual arsenal.  After observing several classes, I came up with red pen, blue pen, notebook and bag.  Each student would place these things in a square on their desk and then, while standing on a chair, I lead the class in using sign language.  I had them copy me asking, What is this?  Whose is this?  Is this mine?  I had them say Yes and No.  This all seems quite basic, but my students mostly enjoyed it.  I was able to get some of them to work in small groups asking each other questions and all the classes ended well.

Now I need to work out more conversations about things around them.  The idea is that rather than teach long lists of vocabulary and grammar rules, have them learn by doing.  It is how I have learned most things in life and I want to give them that same opportunity.  I will report how this works in future writings.

Which came first, the grammar or the language?

If you had told me five years ago that I would be teaching English in Thailand, I would have laughed.  My teaching had been either to my sons or to adults at work.  My English grades were never stellar and I can't speak Thai.

None of that has changed except now I have been teaching English for 2 1/2 years to students who can barely understand me.  I said in my last entry that I was surprised to realize that my students speak mostly in the present tense no matter what they are asked and that probably came across as complaining.  The complaint was about myself.  I was annoyed with myself for not recognizing this sooner and now I needed to figure out how to fix it.  That is what I do.  I fix things.  I want to fix my students ability to speak English and have to speak it clearly and confidently.  

Nee is not a native English speaker so she came into this language from the backdoor as do many immigrants to the US.  She learned English here with a very strong background in grammar.  I knew of the grammar rules but couldn't tell them to you without checking them in a book.  So why do I speak better English than her and most of the people around me here in Thailand?  I think it has to do with how I learned the language.  She and a few websites told me to teach English phrases and have them build on that.  I found a list of phrases like I'm verbing and I will verb and such.  I made up some worksheets listing these and tested them on one of my better classes.  

I had them work in teams to figure out how to make sentences with the phrases.  They tackled it with vigor and that lesson went well.  I tried it again in another class and it bombed.  Then it failed again and again.  I usually try sometime five or six times before I move on and I decided to move on.  Keeping on that idea, though, I started to see patterns in English that I had never given any thought to and wondered if I could teach that.  For instance if I ask a present simple question about you doing something, I would ask What do you do or what are you doing; one being present simple and the other present continuous.  Whenever I start using terms like that, my head starts to swim, but I figured the students had been taught these rules and I moved on.

Long before the Internet, we had libraries.  When I wanted to apply for a job, I went to the library to research companies.  When I wanted to teach my sons to read, I went to the library.  When I wanted to build something or fix something...well, you get the idea.  I went to the library.  Jump ahead a few decades and now I am in a small town in Thailand.  We have no libraries, at least none with books in English.  I don't have many fellow foreign teachers to kick around ideas and I don't know how to speak Thai.  Along comes Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and I am off and running.

There are many ESL websites filled with worksheets and ideas.  I try them and keep them if they work.  Most have not for me.  Thus I am still searching.  I do want to make a difference for whomever I can.  

How Do I Keep Going?

Why do students need to be at school 9 hours a day? Why are classes so chaotic?  Why don’t I have so little support from the school to do my job?  I never taught in the US, my home, though I certainly attended school there.  Although Thailand is, in many ways, a wonderful place to be, teaching can be a challenge.  Here are a few examples.

I have only taught in one school, so I don’t want to say all Thai schools are this way.  I have read stories from teachers around the country with similar problems, though.  My school has students ranging in age from 3 to 18 and there are over 4,500 students.  I teach senior high school with 50 to 55 in each of my 14 classes.  I teach two of them twice a week and the others I teach once.  My students have been “taught” English since first grade yet they don’t seem to remember anything beyond good morning and good afternoon.  They have to check their watches to be sure they say it correctly.

When I started two years ago, I had no idea what I was in for.  I was given the freshmen and sophomore classes, called Mattayom 3 and 4 here, without a textbook or a curriculum.  Few of the teachers can speak English including many of the English teachers, at least in the elementary school.  In only a few classrooms do students actually sit down and become at least moderately quiet before I begin.  Much of my time is spent getting them to settle down to listen to my lesson.  Such experiences bruised my ego and frustrated me.  To that add that there are too many students in the room, no audio visual equipment for me to use and I can barely speak to them.  Some teachers came and went within the same year, finding it too much.  And yet, I stay.

I make up all my lessons from things I find on the internet, books I bought in Bangkok and sometimes ideas I make up in my head.  Each has its successes and failures.  I treat each day as a chance to bring someone along to speaking and understanding better.  

Each day I am greeted by endless smiling faces, both students and teachers, with a good morning.  A common greeting is to ask if I have eaten yet.  I have considered getting a hat made that says, in Thai, gin laeo, I have already eaten.  It is probably no more frustrating than Americans who also ask, “How are you doing?”  In both cases, the person asking doesn't really care; it is just a habit to ask.

What keeps me going is the energy I get when I do get a class to do what I want them to do, whether it is to repeat a lesson, sing a song or play a game.  I don’t flatter myself into believing I am going to get all 800 of them to speak English by the time they leave school.  Still, I want to give it my best effort.  I work at letting them know that English has its fun side and it isn't all about grammar.  Ironically, most of them know English grammar rules far better than I do despite their inability to understand simple questions like, “What are you doing?” and “Where can I find…?”

Next week is midterms for them which will give me a break.  My job will be to help teachers grade their tests, a mechanical process at best.  After that, I want to try something new.  I have read that being able to speak English requires you to know a certain number of words and ten basic phrases.  They know quite a few words.  Now I want to help them express themselves.  Wish me luck.

Finding someone I never knew

Back when I went to the University of California, I studied such things as biology and chemistry.  I wasn't particularly good at them, at least in my college, but I managed to get through.  I graduated thinking I had wasted my time.  Soon I was working as an insurance adjuster and thought I would never see the sciences again.  Over time, I found myself working as an auditor with good pay and benefits.  I got to where I could do the work in my sleep which I gradually came to realize was part of what was causing me to be so bored and depressed.  I knew I needed a change and, when I lost my job in the US, I decided I wanted to do something completely different and found myself teaching English.  I hadn't given science another thought.

Then last year, a former student of mine who had moved to a higher grade approached me.  "Can you teach me science in English?" she asked.  I don't remember why she asked or how she knew I had ever studied such things but I decided to give it a try.

I started researching what she needed to know about.  She said she needed help with photosynthesis.  Oh sure, I thought.  That's easy!  The plants absorb sunlight and turn it into sugar which becomes starch and even wood.  What could be simpler?  Then she showed me her text.  Though it was entirely written in Thai, I could see from the photos and diagrams that I had much to learn.

I knew that one of my professors, a Dr. Calvin, had discovered what was to be called the Calvin Cycle (catchy name, huh?) but it was so new, there hadn't been much teaching of it then.  That had all changed.  I found a website called Khan Academy where I found myself glued to my computer by the hour.  Through his simple, yet meticulous presentations, I learned the mechanics of photosynthesis down to the organic chemistry. Wait!  I died in organic chemistry yet this guy makes it fascinating.  I was hooked.  I couldn't stop watching.  She had also asked me to help with chemistry and from Mr. Khan I learned so much about the periodic table and valence electrons and so on.  I was becoming addicted to science.

Ironically, after all my preparations, she only had time for a few classes.  We tried it again this year, but after two classes, she and the two friends she brought along, said they just didn't have time.  They were tied up with many other outside classes they have to take in order to graduate.  I was heartbroken, though I tried not to show it.

Back when I was in college, most of us had big plans as to what we wanted to do with our degrees yet few of us ever actually used them.  They got up jobs, but rarely in our field of study.  After almost 40 years, I got to step back into my old shoes and live a life I had never had an opportunity for.

This is why I will probably never work in the US again.

Don't Worry, Be......

I am coming up on my second anniversary living in Thailand, along with my second Christmas and birthday.  When I met Nee she told me she was from Thailand and I didn't know where that was.  "It is near Vietnam, right?" I asked.  Well, sort of.  You have to get through Cambodia or Laos first, two more countries I only knew from CBS news and the war.  My picture of southeast Asia was formed from movies like "Good Morning, Vietnam" and similar fare.  I was told it was third world and my only world up until then was the US.  Here, then, are my impressions of living in a "third world" nation.

The new term I am told is "developing" nation.  A movie like, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" comes to mind with little people running around half naked, sitting in the dirt eating their dinner.  A bit like camping year around, though with camping we can always go back to our warm beds and fresh coffee.  Folks in poorer countries are already home.  If you wander around off the main highways here, you will find villages of people living in grass shacks with walls of bamboo and dirt floors.  Still, if you look closely, you might also see a refrigerator or two, motorcycles, satellite dishes and kids playing computer games.

The long metal pipe here is the drive shaft for the potters wheel.

That is a motorcycle wheel she used as a kick wheel.  She said she was too small for the wheel her husband uses.

 That said, yesterday we went looking for some pots for our garden.  The soil at our rental house is poor-quality fill that only lets weeds grow.  We have been growing what we can in pots.  In the US, you go down to Home Depot and can get a car load of pots to bring home.  Here, you have to find where they are made.  Nee heard about a village that made pots somewhere near the town of Chaiprakarn, about 20 km from us.  We decided to take a trip and find it.

 Road signs in Thailand are few and far between and often misleading.  For instance, the immigration office in town has two signs, one points to the office and the other doesn't.  At least they have a sign.  The place we were looking for was found through what I call Thai GPS.  About every few kilometers, Nee stopped anyone she saw, old ladies working in their garden, old men on motorcycles and so on, to get directions.  We drove and drove and drove.

 We passed a few small dairies each with about 40 cows.  In between, we crossed long stretches of farm lands, some already filled with onions and other greens for this growing season.

 Finally, after a few wrong turns, we found three houses together, all making pots.  These are pictures of them.

 Thailand is encouraging everyone to become more self-sufficient, something I have always attempted to live.  I am not one to go off the grid, but whenever I can make something for myself, I will, rather than buying it from a store.

 The pottery business here could be the star of the self-sufficient movement.  Potting wheels were made of car wheels, with small electric motors turning what looked like a drive shaft from a car with a long belt connected to the wheel.  Homes are wooden, unheated, and chairs are mostly the floor.

 Kilns are stacks of bricks which looked homemade, and a wood fire is underneath.  It takes a day to heat it up and another day to fire the pots.  The clay comes from a hole in the grown next to the homes, though they say they are looking for a new supply.  You can only dig so deep.

We bought a few pots and headed back home.  Everyone was friendly and welcoming.  Most of their business is wholesale so they didn't care of we bought anything or not.

 If you are looking for real Thailand, get off the road and get lost.  It is the best thing to do on an quiet afternoon.

What To Do In A Small Town

Back in 1976, I was a student at the University of California at Davis studying agricultural sciences.  I had visions of running a landscaping business though I had no knowledge of what I needed to do to start it.  Through my studies, I always avoided studying business and went to as many other classes as I could. Then I read my graduation requirements.  I had to take a class in marketing.  Disappointed as I was, I took it and it turned out to be one of the best classes I ever took and gave me knowledge that lead up to my project this weekend.

The professor required us all to form teams and to write a marketing plan.  I didn't know anyone in that class of 400 students and was wandering around the hall looking for someone to connect with.

"Are you on a project?" a young lady asked.  No, I said.  She said her dad had invented something and she wanted a team to help her set up a marketing plan.  As she was the only person who asked me, I jumped at the chance.

Her dad was a professor at the university and had been doing research in growing mushrooms; specifically shitake mushrooms.  The only mushrooms I knew about were the button mushrooms my mom put in salads.  Picking wild mushrooms left me with chills worrying about poisoning myself.  Her dad was a charming and affable fellow who was long on research but had never sold anything.  I learned all about shitake mushrooms.

Apparently I had eaten some at a Chinese restaurant.  No one was able to grow them commercially and so they all had to be picked in the wild in China, dried and sent in bags around the world.  Good though they were, they weren't as good as fresh.  He explained how he and a fellow in Japan had come up with a process to grow them on sawdust.

We ended the class with a big party at his house with all the team members.  He fed us at least a dozen different mushrooms cooked in every way imaginable.  Years later, I saw home kits for growing them at home though I was not tempted to buy one.

Jump forward about 40 years to the present.  Nee has moved to Fang to be with me and she is looking for some way to bring in some income of her own.  While she was in Bangkok, she took a class on how to grow mushrooms.  I won't go into the details here now.  I will leave that for other blogs.  I will say that we were finally able to find a farm nearby and we spent a few hours there yesterday.

 We drove far out into the countryside to see rice being harvested and cows walking on the side of the road. After asking directions from several people we finally found this farm.  It is a cooperative farm with several growers sharing the labor and expense.  The facilities were all very low tech though they had been given much advice from a professor from a local university.  Shelves and buildings were made of locally grown bamboo.  Sawdust was shipped in from the south where they grow rubber. We were given a tour by one of the ladies working there.  It was a quiet and comfortable farm with thousands of these bags sitting on shelves like the ones I show here.

Mushroom barn with a roof of bamboo and leaves.  We were told the leaves last about three years.

 This is my interpretation of the mushroom shelving.  We bought 20 bags of two different mushrooms, though not shitake.  They do grow shitake there but we were told that they produce only once every three months.  We decided to try some others that are just as tasty and far more prolific.

I don't know if we will try to grow these for income.  We do have land we can develop.  Right now, though, I just want to learn how to do this and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Thanks For the Memories

I am going to take you on a trip back in time.  Back to when students wore bell-bottom jeans and said words like Groovy and Far Out.  I am going to take you back to when I was in high school.  Maybe it will help you understand why I am enjoying my work so much.

Growing up in the San Francisco bay area, my father had us move to many different homes.  He was an difficult and abusive man who managed to lose his job often because he wasn't able to get along with his co-workers.  I grew up assuming that all fathers were like him and the only good dads were on TV.  When I was in the fourth grade we moved from a pleasant suburb in Santa Clara which later became the Silicon Valley.  I remember it more as a farm town that was taken over by subdivisions and strip malls.  We moved to Oakland in the mid 60s when there was much racial strife in the schools.  Black people were angry with white people and white people were angry with the black.  I had never even seen a black person until I moved to Oakland.

My parents decided to have me continue in schools run by our church and there I stayed until tenth grade.  In the meantime we moved several more times, my parents divorced and my home consisted of my brother, mother and myself.  Mom was not able to pay for my school any longer and so I had to find a school.  The high school near where we lived was already a very dangerous place to be, at least that is what people told us.  In the middle of Oakland, though, sandwiched inside three very different neighborhoods, was Oakland High.  I had to meet with the vice principal before starting as I had no history in public schools.  I think they just wanted to see if I was a trouble maker or not and I was mostly just terrified.  Officially I wasn't even supposed to go to Oakland High since it wasn't in my neighborhood but we were able to use the address of my oldest brother's in laws who lived near the school.

My first visit to the school made my heart stop.  I had never been in such a big school or a building that looked, in my eyes, so rundown.  Students were jostling everywhere and I wanted to run.  Still, I wanted to go to college and a high school diploma was the only way I could do it.  I met with the Vice Principal who was a very nice fellow.  He said that he hoped he wouldn't see me again as he only dealt with troublemakers, or words to that effect.  He said there was no majority in his school.  It was a third white, a third black and a third Chinese.  I started the next day.

One of my first classes was geometry.  In my last school, a private Lutheran high school, we had small classes and teachers who spent time talking to each student.  This teacher was the opposite.  He was a lazy man who sat in the back and had one of the best students write the proofs on the board.  I had never had geometry before and had no idea what a proof even was.  The fellow who was writing was named Geoff.  He was Chinese American and had a wonderful smile that never left his face.  I knew I wanted to get to know him.

Over time, I made friends with him and other friends of his as well, including Nora and Peter.  We used to all go out to San Francisco together to eat in Chinatown and ride the cable cars, things I had never done before.  Geoff's and Nora's parents were amazing people.  Where my dad was angry, they were warm and generous and thoughtful.  It was my friendship with those three and a few others who were my saviors in school.   I never would have survived without them.

Why am I writing this today?  Jump forward about 40 years and this is what happened.  After I left high school, I was able to stay friends for a few more years with all of them but then I got married and lost touch with everyone.  Decades later, we got the internet and Facebook and Skype.  In the last two years I have been able to add all three of these old friends to my Facebook and I thought, how nice.  I can see where their lives have gone and maybe we can talk for a minute or two some time.

Today, Geoff posted on Facebook that he wanted to have someone help him check his Skype account.  I had a few minutes free so, just for fun, I sent him my Skype address.  Within minutes we were talking, me on my Android phone and him on his computer.  It was 8 at night in California, Wednesday and 10 in the morning the next day here.  We talked as if it had only been yesterday when we last spoke.  He said he has been following my blog and I have been enjoying his posts.  The conversation left me feeling wonderful for the rest of the day.

Since high school, one has worked for NASA to send people to outer space, another has worked to save the environment and the other has worked to save people's souls.  They found their calling and now I have finally found mine.

Never give up on a friend or a dream.