Birthday:
Today we went to breakfast at our up-the-hill neighbor's house. It was for his oldest daughter's 2nd birthday (yesterday a pig was purchased at the vaccination village and driven all the way back to JSMK by a very dedicated and persistent pig-handler - it was the main course for the celebration). The party started happening at 7AM. I commented to Gabe, "This is thinly sub-culture know of that would have a turn out of 35 people for a birthday party at 7AM with all ages on a Friday morning." But, when the ENTIRE community wakes up sometime between 4:30 and 5:30AM and goes to bed by 8 or 9PM, 7AM feels more like 9 or 10AM in my home culture!
Anyhow, at the birthday today, there was a ceremony - singing, scripture message, a time for the mom to briefly share - and then a feast of rice, broth, pork, and spices. The child's gifts were mostly from the families with other small children, and they were comprised of a box of soy milk boxes, wafer cookies, and various other edible goodies. They weren't really opened or exclaimed over, just scooped up and taken into the back room.
A few hours later, the house was torn down so a new, larger house could be built, I guess!
House Dedication:
At lunch, someone stopped by our window and gestured for us to follow them, speaking to us in Karen. One of our lower-level English students was motioned over to translate, and we got, "Teacher, you go" as the translation. So off we went, following the inviter. We went to a house where the community was gathering again, and apparently we able to participate in some kind of a house dedication service. The gentleman who did the ceremony followed a Catholic-type format, complete with flinging water at everyone out of a shampoo bottle. The candles kept blowing out, which I felt badly for him about, and I'm pretty sure about 9/10ths of the people attending dozed off at some point during the hour long ceremony, but it was still fun to be included.
Teaching Conclusion:
I ended up starting class 15 minutes late because of the house dedication ceremony, but i don't think the students minded too much! After our class finished, I had everyone come pose for a picture with Gabe and me at the front of the room. It was a short, sweet, cheerful goodbye, and the students left on their merry way (as the hillside across from us was engulfed in flames, but that's a separate issue altogether. By the way, did you know that bamboo sounds like a gun shot when the chambers in each section of the bamboo get hot and then explode from the heat of a large brushfire? Yeah, for a few seconds, I thought we were under attack from the army and were needing to flee... In my flip flops! But it was just a clean-up fire).
It's strange for me to reach the end of this teaching gig. For the past seven years, I've been teaching year round, and whenever something "finished" (a quarter or even teaching at a certain place), I was already mentally working on the plan for the next place. I spent so many years developing new curriculum what felt like EVERY quarter at LCC, that I always needed to be jumping in with both feet the second the last quarter was finished and final grades were submitted.
Last year, when I finished at LCC, I had 6 weeks to focus on selling stuff, emptying our apartment, getting our to-be-stored things into storage, and the hundreds of little tasks that needed to be done before we left the country. And at the back of my mind, I was also thinking about how I was going to switch gears from teaching college students to teaching primary school ESL. Once we got to Thailand, besides climate and time zone acclimating, we worked on getting prepped and planned for the year teaching.
Last month, with the conclusion of our time at Bawrirak, we knew we were coming into this month-long gig of teaching ESL to jungle medic students, so I'd started thinking about and planning for our time here, even as we finished up details in Chiang Mai and jetted over to India.
Now, for the first time since I got that job at LCC the week after I graduated college, I'm done. Like, I don't have a teaching gig planned on my calendar. At all.
I think there may be a whole compartment - like a closet-sized office! - of my brain that has been solely dedicated to teaching since I first became a teacher, and all of a sudden, that office space is no longer needed for that work responsibility. I don't even know what I'll do with that part of my brain, but it is a little weird to think of rerouting the brain traffic away from there!
In reality, I'm not sure I'll ever be concluded with teaching, though, or at least not in the near future. It's become such an integrated part of me - making plans in a teacher way, interacting with kids in a teacher way, even structuring myself and my days in a teacher-ish way - that I feel like even if I never go back to a classroom, it's going to take more than a day to just STOP being a teacher.
I think I'm glad of that. There's something comforting to me, even in the presence of rejoicing at the break from lesson planning, that likes having that predefined role to function within for now.
I guess I'll just go into Teacher-on-Holiday mode in that brain office for the time being.
- Dani
Today we went to breakfast at our up-the-hill neighbor's house. It was for his oldest daughter's 2nd birthday (yesterday a pig was purchased at the vaccination village and driven all the way back to JSMK by a very dedicated and persistent pig-handler - it was the main course for the celebration). The party started happening at 7AM. I commented to Gabe, "This is thinly sub-culture know of that would have a turn out of 35 people for a birthday party at 7AM with all ages on a Friday morning." But, when the ENTIRE community wakes up sometime between 4:30 and 5:30AM and goes to bed by 8 or 9PM, 7AM feels more like 9 or 10AM in my home culture!
Anyhow, at the birthday today, there was a ceremony - singing, scripture message, a time for the mom to briefly share - and then a feast of rice, broth, pork, and spices. The child's gifts were mostly from the families with other small children, and they were comprised of a box of soy milk boxes, wafer cookies, and various other edible goodies. They weren't really opened or exclaimed over, just scooped up and taken into the back room.
A few hours later, the house was torn down so a new, larger house could be built, I guess!
House Dedication:
At lunch, someone stopped by our window and gestured for us to follow them, speaking to us in Karen. One of our lower-level English students was motioned over to translate, and we got, "Teacher, you go" as the translation. So off we went, following the inviter. We went to a house where the community was gathering again, and apparently we able to participate in some kind of a house dedication service. The gentleman who did the ceremony followed a Catholic-type format, complete with flinging water at everyone out of a shampoo bottle. The candles kept blowing out, which I felt badly for him about, and I'm pretty sure about 9/10ths of the people attending dozed off at some point during the hour long ceremony, but it was still fun to be included.
Teaching Conclusion:
I ended up starting class 15 minutes late because of the house dedication ceremony, but i don't think the students minded too much! After our class finished, I had everyone come pose for a picture with Gabe and me at the front of the room. It was a short, sweet, cheerful goodbye, and the students left on their merry way (as the hillside across from us was engulfed in flames, but that's a separate issue altogether. By the way, did you know that bamboo sounds like a gun shot when the chambers in each section of the bamboo get hot and then explode from the heat of a large brushfire? Yeah, for a few seconds, I thought we were under attack from the army and were needing to flee... In my flip flops! But it was just a clean-up fire).
It's strange for me to reach the end of this teaching gig. For the past seven years, I've been teaching year round, and whenever something "finished" (a quarter or even teaching at a certain place), I was already mentally working on the plan for the next place. I spent so many years developing new curriculum what felt like EVERY quarter at LCC, that I always needed to be jumping in with both feet the second the last quarter was finished and final grades were submitted.
Last year, when I finished at LCC, I had 6 weeks to focus on selling stuff, emptying our apartment, getting our to-be-stored things into storage, and the hundreds of little tasks that needed to be done before we left the country. And at the back of my mind, I was also thinking about how I was going to switch gears from teaching college students to teaching primary school ESL. Once we got to Thailand, besides climate and time zone acclimating, we worked on getting prepped and planned for the year teaching.
Last month, with the conclusion of our time at Bawrirak, we knew we were coming into this month-long gig of teaching ESL to jungle medic students, so I'd started thinking about and planning for our time here, even as we finished up details in Chiang Mai and jetted over to India.
Now, for the first time since I got that job at LCC the week after I graduated college, I'm done. Like, I don't have a teaching gig planned on my calendar. At all.
I think there may be a whole compartment - like a closet-sized office! - of my brain that has been solely dedicated to teaching since I first became a teacher, and all of a sudden, that office space is no longer needed for that work responsibility. I don't even know what I'll do with that part of my brain, but it is a little weird to think of rerouting the brain traffic away from there!
In reality, I'm not sure I'll ever be concluded with teaching, though, or at least not in the near future. It's become such an integrated part of me - making plans in a teacher way, interacting with kids in a teacher way, even structuring myself and my days in a teacher-ish way - that I feel like even if I never go back to a classroom, it's going to take more than a day to just STOP being a teacher.
I think I'm glad of that. There's something comforting to me, even in the presence of rejoicing at the break from lesson planning, that likes having that predefined role to function within for now.
I guess I'll just go into Teacher-on-Holiday mode in that brain office for the time being.
- Dani
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