Aj. Jordan

I am currently on summer vacation and spring break at the same time. How could this be? Being a lecturer (ajarn) at a Thai university and a grad student at an American university forces me to live by two different academic schedules, which is a huge hassle the majority of the year, but this week is the exception.

I know when I got my current job back in October I promised to tell all of you more about it, but the excuse for my tardiness is twofold: 1) How can I fully and accurately explain if I haven’t lived through an entire semester? 2) See paragraph 1.

Note: If you don’t like the longer, more boring posts, you can go ahead and stop reading now.

Anyway, here’s what I do…

I’m contracted to teach 15 to 20 hours a week with the expectation that I’ll help out with other “tasks” that require a native speaker when asked. I’m also salary, which is both good (I get paid for the summer break) and bad (unlike hourly people, I don’t get money for those extra “tasks” and I teach classes that in general require more work outside of class). Almost all of my classes are for English majors, which is much better than the part time/ hourly teachers who mostly teach English for other majors (the university requires 2 semesters of English minimum for every graduate), but I do have a lot more work.

This past semester I taught 6 classes (16 hours), 4 of which were classes for majors. My favorite classes were my 2 classes for third year majors. One was a conversation and discussion class. It was a breeze to teach with almost no work outside class, and I learned a lot about Thai culture through our class discussions. It was also challenging to keep the conversation going since it is not very culturally acceptable to disagree, but I was able to create a space that was non-alienating, and since I’m not a Thai teacher, I think the students felt freer to act outside their cultural norms.

The other class I really enjoyed was Creative Writing. There was an enormous amount of material cover and work to be graded for this class (they wrote 2 3-page stories a week!), but it was all worth it. We spent the first half of the semester writing short stories, and the second half we covered playwriting and poetry. Although a lot of the writing was done in groups of 3 or 4, every student wrote their own 10-15 page short story. That’s a huge achievement in a foreign language! Of course these stories also took an hour to grade each, and I had to do it twice; once for the rough draft and once for the final (18 students in the class). Another class project was writing and producing their own 30 minute play, but at least for this they could work in groups of three. Soon I will post some pictures of their performances (the relationship between my camera and my computer is currently a bit rocky).

My other classes were not nearly as exciting. I taught two sections of a paragraph writing class for second year majors that was the bane of my existence as it was super-boring material and created pounds of boring grading.

I also taught another conversation class for MD students which was not exciting, but certainly interesting at times. My favorite lesson was when I had each of the students (there were only 12) bring in 5 slang words and we created a chart on the board with their definitions, a number on a scale of 1-5 to show how “bad” they were, and an appropriate audience and context for the word. I got a lot of positive feedback on that lesson because the students simply don’t have another source to learn these definitions.

My final class was a standard issue non-majors course that all first year students take. The book is boring, the material was far too easy for these pharmacy majors, and I couldn’t pay my students to participate. Normally I would adjust the class to meet the students at their level, but my thinking was just that it was a mandatory course; I had to cover the specific material I was given because 85% of their grade is determined by their midterm and final, so there was no need to make it any more difficult for them. The class is just a money maker for the department. In reality, most of my students could have passed the midterm and final before the class, so I just kept it easy and tried to be as entertaining as I could.

Other “tasks” have mostly included editing work for other Thai ajarns and doing things where it’s nice to have a native English speaker, like interviewing grad students. Not too much other than teaching.

All in all, I was quite busy for most of the semester, but not terribly busy (aka teachforamerica busy) until the final 2 months. It was a very nice pace. Also, my colleagues are for the most part great to work with and the students are fantastic. I have now literally taught students of all ages (from age 2 to about 35) and the students at KKU are my favorites. I don’t even have to think about discipline, and enough of the material requires creative teaching to keep me interested on a day to day level. Also, as with most teaching jobs, the paid vacation (just taking another opportunity to remind all of you that I’m on summer break) is amazing.