The Princess Diary Part Two – The Day Before

Preparations were already well under way when I arrived at work on Thursday. There was a man draping purple and silver cloth over the escalators and another two were apparently busy turning my classroom (naturally) into a throne room without bothering to remove the students’ work I’d left on the wall the night before. They just looked at me blankly as I clambered over the cluttered desks to retrieve the dictionaries I’d left next to the computer. Meanwhile, the main foyer outside was filling with white-draped chairs and a dais.

But really, planning for that night’s lesson was a minor consideration next to having had just a few days notice that Duncan and I would be teaching demo lessons during the ceremony, and that the princess would come in and watch for a few minutes each. And just to make it that little bit more challenging – they wouldn’t be our own students. They would bus kids in from Satit Chula, the BC’s partnership school in central Bangkok. The numbers, approximate ages and levels were only confirmed late Wednesday afternoon. At which life at Chaengwattana settled into its accustomed pattern – I do the kids, Duncan does the teenagers.

To be honest, I wasn’t ever really that nervous about it. Right until virtually the last minute, in my head it was just Russell and HRH coming into the class. No thought given to all the other hangers-on.

Russell and Del (the BC’s Senior Teacher at Satit Chula) suggested I do some kind of storytelling activity with the eight year olds. So, this really not being the moment to re-invent the wheel, from the depths of my hard drive, and with a little bit of help (well, ok, quite a lot) from the BC’s LearnEnglish Kids website, I reconstructed the ‘Goldilocks’ lesson I used with the Jumpies in Vietnam, making full use of the Interactive Whiteboard to cut and paste bits of the handouts, and hyperlink to the story and song on the website.

While Duncan and I were busy tweaking lesson plans and making up our flipcharts (like a PowerPoint presentation but specifically for IWBs), Russell announced that his role for the day was to help us with any additional preparation we needed. Thus, he was sent off into Classroom 1 (aka the Goldfish Bowl on account of the huge window passing shoppers can stop and gawp at your lesson through) to put up the pictures my (real) kids had done for the princess at the weekend. I’m particularly proud of the Kids Green class and their road signs using imperatives and ‘you must/mustn’t’ for royal etiquette.

And while Russell was doing that, Gift from reception and Noi, the cleaner, (we’re just one big happy family here!) were settled in a corner of the classroom sellotaping drinking straw handles to the Goldilocks and the Three Bears masks I’d printed out for the ‘play’ (anyone who remembers the fluttery butterflies I did with the Jumpies at ILA will know the effect I was going for).

And of course, in the midst of all this, a higher power declared it was the perfect time for Gen and I to make our more minor claim to fame, and record the Outgoing Message for the automated switchboard. Sitting in the middle of reception reading the ‘press one for English’ script in your best Radio Four announcer’s voice would be mildly embarrassing at the best of times. With a waiting area full of customers, florists trundling huge arrangements in and out on trolleys (before planting them slap bang in the middle of the corridor) and Russell bouncing around, loudly teasing the kids he was placement testing, it’s frankly a miracle it only took us three attempts.

Starting to feel swept up in the excitement, as you can see, I began wandering around with my camera phone - my real camera being poorly sick at the doctors :-(. Coming back from the loo, I was particularly taken with the ribbon HRH was to cut. ‘Must get a picture of that’, I thought, and came within a whisker of picking my scissors up off the desk, instead of my phone. Now that would have been embarrassing, wouldn’t it?!