Crazy classes (July 15)

Today there was a teacher meeting, where a lot of external people came in to evaluate the school, I think. I didn’t participate in the meeting, besides briefly introducing myself, so I still taught my first and third grade classes in the morning. However, they were really out of control! Normally, I teach in Bu’s classroom, which is in the same building as the teacher office. However, since the meeting was in the office, this time I taught in another building so that we wouldn’t disturb the meeting. Most of the students were in the building in different classrooms, and since all the other teachers were in the meeting, the students were in theory doing worksheets for the morning on their own. However, it seemed like they were mostly bouncing off the walls and screaming rather than “doing worksheets,” so it was extremely loud! Thus there were about six classrooms of unsupervised students in the building, and one class at a time that I was attempting to teach. Also, since I am teaching Bu’s classes while I am here, she is usually around or in and out of the classroom while I am teaching, so I don’t normally have to worry much about keeping control of the class, which was much different from the situation today. The morning was not very enjoyable, and I was happy that this was not my usual teaching situation! During the afternoon, Bu and the students were rearranging the classroom, and they didn’t seem to need me to help, so I retreated down to the teacher office and edited a physics paper that I am finishing up still with people from Stanford, so that was a nice change of pace after the morning. After school, I went to use the internet at the other school, and managed to attach the paper to an email and send off my edits (800 kb attachment is a lot here!). Then back to the house, where I read for a while and finished up my last book here. Since I was really busy until the last minute I left Stanford, I didn’t get as many books to bring as I should have. I brought “Outliers” by James Gladwell, which I read first and enjoyed. Fortunately I had also picked up “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” which is 500 pages, in SFO before I took off, so I read that second and I also enjoyed it a lot, especially since I’ll be moving to New York after this. I’ll definitely be visiting a bookstore with English books when I get back to Bangkok, to stock up for the second part of my trip. I realized that I have a pdf of a book I have been wanting to read for awhile so I will try to print some of that at school for reading during the rest of this week.

After dinner, we made some coconut milk and used it to make a steamed egg custard that we will eat for breakfast tomorrow.