Teaching...wtf?

September 15, 2013
4:55PM


             Week one of teaching down. And to be honest the score is: Teaching: 1 Ben: 0. I have a new found respect for people who teach nowadays back home in the states, along with a new found guilt for everything I put my teachers through growing up over the years. Teaching is exhausting but very fulfilling work. Its an amazing feeling when your kids finally understand what "communication" is after thirty minutes of explaining it in twelve different ways and giving a hundred different examples of it.

            The kids I teach make my job easy, they are respectful, kind, hard working, and they truly want to be there. The difference between the view of education out here in Laos and how kids feel about education back home is worlds apart, literally and figuratively. I can only imagine trying to teach anything to the little shit kids back in the United States. But the novice monks I am teaching are extremely dedicated to learning as much as they possibly can in the short time we have together each day. Its motivating to see that amount of effort put into learning something on such a consistent basis. It makes the 3-4 hours of lesson planning a day worth the time.

       It sounds cliché, but I think I'm learning just as much about myself and the English language as these kids. I definitely need to brush up on my grammar and spelling, and its sobering to realize how hard it is to explain a simple concept like a topic sentence to a group of kids that have a 2nd grade speaking and reading level. For example, I didn't realize until today that I had spent a whole lesson explaining the word "necessary" but spelling it wrong the whole time. Whoops. Luckily the other people in my group are fucking up just as much as me and are having the same difficulties I am. But like anything, there is a learning curve, and I'm sure I will be a pro teacher by the end of this shit. As long as these kids are learning something each day then I've done my job.