Back 2 School!

The first week of school is over and I'm starting on my second. The old ITT are making their ways back to the States, along with the CIEE Interns. So basically, by the end of the next couple weeks, I'll have no white friends in Khon Kaen! Freak!

I feel surprisingly comfortable with the fifth graders at Nong Waeng. I look at their faces and simply absolutely love them. They have matured considerably since their first year in P'Noos and P'Aom's classroom (my first semester with KKEI -- see old blog entries). It's impossible not to notice that, and also, how they compare to the sixth and fourth graders this year. It is testament to the value of relaxed routine/discipline, steady role models/teachers, and deep student-teacher relationships. It may also speak to the multi-cultural teaching team, and how that affects their curriculum.

I suppose it could speak to many values cultivated by the intentionality of an ideal KKEI classroom.

Though I get to spend most of my time with these fifth graders -- which I love because such a classroom also cultivates a happy work enviornment -- I spend the other 60% of my time between 3 other classrooms.

Fortunately the municipality has instituted a policy changing all of Nong Waeng's classrooms to be more like P'Noos and P'Aom's, meaning each grade has a teacher pair assigned to them who will for the most part keep that class throughout the day. I'm happy for the teachers and the school because I think the policy leaves potential for a better working and learning environment for everyone. There will be a lot of challenges inherent in such a top-down approach, though.

And meanwhile my job has become more similar to how the school was before. English remains split between 2 teachers, so that I have to teach the fourth and sixth graders by myself one morning each per week. The greatest challenge of this is the number of kids and the behavior of about a third of them, especially when they see they have been left with "just" a foreigner. My first challenge is simply to get to know each of them, so that we can gain each others' trust and not spend the rest of the year bullying each other.

The fourth and final classroom I help take care of is at Non Chai -- 12 kids who don't do well in the regular seventh, eigth, and, ninth grade classrooms. So far we seem to be taking pretty well to each other and I'm excited to work with them on English. My co-teacher for that classroom (it is a KKEI classroom) is P'Gaolee. Unfortunately he's been off doing camps or something outside school about 50% of the time, so my Monday role with this class remains completely unclear. Friday afternoons after I teach English, I'll be teaching violin to one student...so I guess I have to brush up!

In general every challenge has seemed minor, probably because I am so happy to be back at school and at a "real" (and steady) job.

We also had our first KKEI meeting last week. Besides Lukas and me, I think KKEI is extremely fortunate to have two new volunteer members -- P'Goong, an organizer with experience in education, and Jennifer, a Philipino with experience in training and an education in psychology.

P'Goong has agreed to take on our KKEI "action research" as she knows someone who can help us structure it, and who can train us over a day. It was exciting to see all KKEI members leaning forward for that discussion -- a complete win!

I'm off to school; see you next week.

School Utopia

I've been in Kentucky exactly 3 weeks now, and now I'm balancing TWO blogs! So please check out our human rights blog for more updates on what I'm doing.

So I often worry that my life is leading me in too many directions and it's never going to come together and make enough sense. But after some time feeling worried about this, I'm happy to report that it's still all coming together. This is truly turning out to be a sabbatical. My time here is going to help me develop my purpose in life -- somehow.

I was taking a walk today and started talking to myself in Thai, explaining to myself my utopia of education. Here it is.

All of us would start to learn at a very early age about health, law, and learning and teaching. These would be taught in a manner that started with our cultural framework, so as to facilitate an internalization of our ancestors' values. Maybe in kindergarten we would learn gardening and first grade house building, in addition to really simple health, law, and how to learn according to our culture's values.

We would progress towards learning international law, health practices in various other cultures, and other frameworks for teaching and learning. So the teacher has this responsibility to instill cultural values in kids, and then shows them other frameworks that allow for developing students' creativity and critical thinking.

All of this of course is done through participatory learning, place based classrooms, teacher-student, student-teacher relationships...oooh utopia.

I also chose these subjects as a focus because through personal experience I believe that we should all -- whether we have access to higher education or not, be well-enough educated in these areas to not constantly feel we need to rely on experts, some of which only get richer by advocating for our continued and increasing lack of knowledge. So if everyone were educated this way -- whether they could read/write or not, my ideas is that the current societal structures would break down ... from the grassroots on up. The trickle up theory. Just imagine if all of us were lawyers!

Yours, Vanessa.

Coming soon: crazy old activist teachers -- prairie monk, BB lake restorer, mountain forest woman.