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?! 

 

The shoes, the clothes, the outfit

The Princess Diary (Friday 27th January 2012): Part One

So, lots to tell you about. But first (and obviously most importantly) it’s got to be my brush with fame, celebrity and the Thai Royal Family last week. And this alone will take so much telling I’m going to have to split it into instalments.

Some of you may have already seen the TV news clip on Facebook and YouTube. I make no apologies for posting it here too; being mildly obsessed, having watched it umpteen times, and downloading it for posterity. There is actually a much better one from another channel somewhere on my boss’s hard drive – you get to see my legs in that one!!! Be assured too, gentle reader, there will be plenty of photos to come as soon as I’ve cadged them off my boss! I will bore you rigid with it!

Princess Day TV News 

Though I have to admit there are several photos, which have entirely skewed my recollection of the day, and may not be deemed suitable for publication!

I’ve been posted to a brand new BC teaching centre in the north of the city which is a quite an exciting opportunity in itself. We pretty much get to build the school from scratch. At the moment there’s just the three of us full-time – Russell, my boss; me and Duncan, another new teacher – although that’s already set to grow in the next couple of months.

Long before we even moved into the premises, Friday 27^th January had been fixed as our Official Opening with HRH Princess Sirindhorn, King Bhumibol’s eldest daughter, agreeing to come and open the centre. As well as being a university teacher herself, she does have a personal connection with the BC, which made her agreement to open Chaengwattana teaching centre extra special. It felt like an old friend or your favourite aunt was coming to visit.

Dress Code Red

In the long build up, the only real issue for me was ‘what to wear?’ Way back in November, the Head of HR visiting from London had whispered ‘Sounds like a good excuse for a new frock!’ in my ear when it was mentioned at a staff meeting. Nic came over from Vietnam at Christmas fully expecting to spend at least part of her trip acting as wardrobe adviser and personal shopper. But despite several futile wanders round shopping centres, I couldn’t seem to muster the enthusiasm at the time.

Eventually, just after term started in January I kicked myself into action and dedicated an entire day-off to the search. Nothing too elaborate, just a touch dressier than usual work clothes. I ummed and erred over a few things in ‘British India’ (lots of lovely embroidered cotton – but as the name might suggest, basically tunics which either made me look shapeless or six-months pregnant) - and I found a gorgeous blue dress which was literally millimetres too small (this is Asia, there’s no point asking for a bigger size, you’ve already got it). Eventually I found a lovely slinky, silky, red wrap-round effect top that fitted perfectly and could be combined with a skirt I’d had made in Vietnam. After that the rest of the day was easy. Tights from Top Shop, check; vest top from Zara to prevent any embarrassing royal flashes, check; earrings and necklace from Accessorize, check; collapse in a heap in an empty cinema for ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, check.

Continuing niggles about finishing touches later that week did see me find myself a little black jacket in the G2000 sale. Hair and nails were also attended to on my next day off (top taken along to ensure colour match).

But then, oh horror! On Wednesday 25^th – just two days before the ceremony - we get an email from head office detailing the dress code for the day. ‘Jacket and skirt must match’ was bad enough, but ‘shoes must cover the whole foot’? What the…? (I’d been planning to wear the sling-backs I’d had made in HCMC).

Close textual analysis and in-depth discussion with Nuainee, the office manager, saw us (along with Gen and Gift, her assistants) playing a panicked game of ‘Run and buy’ – like ‘run and touch’ but with money and goods changing hands. I must say, Russell and Duncan were very good, and displayed an impressive level of apparently genuine interest in the results!

And I could hardly believe my luck. Thank god for Marks and Spencer!!! As a western woman in Asia I am generally pessimistic about finding shoes to fit, even in branches of western stores. But M&S Chaengwattana came up trumps! The very first pair I tried on – size 6¹/₂, wide fitting – were a perfect fit. Okay, so patent leather, 2-inch heels, with velvet crossovers on the toes, wouldn’t ordinarily be my first choice for teaching but this was a special occasion; and the unexpectedness of finding anything so quickly was too great to put me off, even when it turned out I’d mis-read the price label and they were getting on for eighty quid!

Sighs of relief on the shoe front were still off-set by nervousness on the ‘matching’ side, despite emails to the event organiser at head office. So much so, I actually took the entire ensemble to work with me on Thursday to show Nuainee and check the skirt and jacket were a close enough match. Finally, the addition of another pair of tights (tum, bum and thigh firming ones from M&S) – the Top Shop ones being perhaps a touch too thick for this climate – completed the shopping spree.

Now all I had to worry about was the demo lesson I was expected to teach. Twenty-two eight-year olds I’d never met before, four YLA’s (young learner assistants) ditto, royalty, VIP's, BC management and the massed ranks of the Thai media. What could possibly go wrong?!!

But that, gentle reader, must be a tale for another post…

Sawadee Ka!

Hi!

Sorry for the long silence. Loads of stuff's been happening in the last few months. And the most important has been my change of location. I've left Vietnam and hopped over to Thailand where I'm now working for the British Council in Bangkok.

New big post to follow but first I just want to say 'Congratulations' to Matt, Debbie and Toad (and their trusty bikes) for finally making it to Cape Town. Well done, guys. I'm proud of you. It even seems a bit poignant that it's all over, and your blog is coming to an end. Good luck for your return to the UK. xx

Teaching the TKT Course

My late evening pre-int students have asked for more ‘energy’ in their lessons (I suspect that means games). On Friday evenings at least, for the next few weeks, I’m afraid they’re going to be disappointed. With a 9am-9.30pm split shift, they’ll be lucky if their teacher is still awake.

It is, however, my choice to do this. After endless postponements, the TKT course is finally up and running, and I’m team-teaching it with another teacher from our centre. Hence the 9am start for the morning session at centre 3, followed by my regular evening shift at centre 1. The break in the middle isn’t really long enough to go home, so lunch in Backpackerville…

So far, it has only been a week but I am loving it. The TKT (Teaching Knowledge Test) is a modular test run by Cambridge aimed mainly (though not exclusively) at non-native speaker teachers of English. There are three main modules, which we are teaching, each consisting of eighty-minute tests containing eighty multiple choice and matching questions, covering everything from grammar and phonology to classroom management, learner motivation, assessment and language acquisition.

It is, as this suggests, all theory and terminology (the glossary provided by Cambridge runs to forty pages), which must represent quite a challenge to the intermediate+ level students we have in the group. In my post-lesson feedback last week the training manager and I both agreed that they are going to need a great deal of review and recycling. Last week’s introductory lesson saw them go quite quiet during what should have been fun quizzes introducing some of the terminology! But they are a lovely, friendly group, and clearly very motivated – two of them travel eight hours overnight to come to the class!

With no previous teacher training experience, it could be quite daunting. But the training manager has said he wants it to be a training experience for us too. So he’s asked us to send him post-lesson evaluations each week, and later in the course he’ll observe us. And teaching a truckload of terminology to non-native speakers isn’t so very far from what we do normally – they just happen to be better at it than my beginners! Road-testing materials on Adrian and Phil in the staffroom has been fun too!

And it finally gives an outlet to all the stuff that’s been washing around in my head for the last 3 years of Masters and Delta. It kind of confirms my thought that in the future I want to be a Delta tutor, and, when I finally go home, a tutor on the Open University’s linguistics courses.

Postscript:

It seems trivial to be writing about anything other than Japan right now. However happy things are here, the situation there is constantly in my thoughts.

Who Let The Sheep In? - Our First Vietnamese Lesson

I couldn’t look at Carolyn and Amy, sitting either side of me. The urge to giggle was becoming unbearable.

The previous hour and a half of ‘Survival Vietnamese’ had been baffling enough, struggling to make sense of address forms and any number other than 3 (333 being the name of a brand of Vietnamese beer, it was the one number we all knew already). But then our teacher, Ms. Khanh, began to introduce the six tones of Vietnamese. One by one they were added to a diagram like the one below, with examples from the vocabulary we’d learnt earlier. Then the drilling started…

Ma… ma… ma-ah… maah… ma-aa-argh… Eighteen English teachers? No. We had been transformed into a flock of mildly embarrassed sheep. And Carolyn was starting to add a touch of vibrato to her ma’s for that extra hint of sheepiness…

(yes, I know the dotted line for the Hanoi ma is missing. It went AWOL somewhere in the process of converting to PDF).


The follow-up activity lost me completely. Momentarily distracted, by the time I zoned back in, the ‘Identify the Tone’ Quiz was moving too quickly for me to keep up. I’ve got a feeling the next fifteen weeks of lessons are going to be a bit of a slog.

To be fair, I had been doing alright earlier in the lesson. The basic forms of address Ms Khanh presented, weren’t too complicated if you’ve already struggled with Japanese politeness forms, and if, like me (and Ms Khanh apparently), you are prone to drawing pictures and diagrams on the board which make sense in your head as you draw them, but which are greeted with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions from your students.

And Carolyn and I won a lolly each in a numbers game. Ms Khanh called out a number and you had to hold hands with that number of people. If you couldn’t find a group to join, Ms Khanh dotted your arm with a red board marker. We escaped with only one dot each (thereby winning the lollies) by standing hand-in-hand in the corner looking nervous, and just reaching out and grabbing the hand of the next nearest person whenever Ms Khanh called out a number greater than two.

If nothing else it’s going to be interesting comparing these lessons with my other language learning experiences, as well as mentally making notes on and stealing ideas from Ms Khanh.

Japan

I know I sometimes give the impression of being rather blasé about earthquakes but I'm not really. It's actually more a mixture of practicality and not letting fear rule your life.

 Tonight my heart is in Japan. It is, and always will be, my second home.