Wide-Open World by John Marshall

Author:John Marshall [Marshall, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-54965-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

35

ENGLISH TEACHERS

YOU MAY BE ASKING YOURSELF AT THIS POINT, HOW AND WHY DOES somebody get to teach English in Thailand without any formal training or an ounce of experience? For that matter: How do a fourteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy get to tag-team their own classes when they haven’t even graduated from high school?

The simple answer is: We were better than nothing.

With all due respect to Por and the other Thai English teachers at the Nong Kha School … their English was not so hot. Yes, it was better than everyone else’s English in the village, but being able to play “Chopsticks” on the piano only qualifies you to teach “Chopsticks” to others, so to speak. We loved them, we could understand them (most of the time), but like one generation passing down broken dishes to the next, their pronunciation alone was more than enough reason to have us there.

I sound like an English snob, I know, and who am I to judge? After all, I’m the guy who breaks into a sweat when ordering agua in a Costa Rican restaurant. The same guy who asked a local Thai farmer in a jungle plot one day, “Tam ling nee?” I was curious to know if there were monkeys in the surrounding trees, so I pressed the point. “Tam ling nee?” Nothing. I pointed, pantomimed, spoke slower, louder.“TAM. LING. NEE?”

The man stared blankly at me and never said a word. It was only later that I realized what I’d actually been saying.

“Do monkey this?” I’d been shouting. Then slower, louder: “Do. Monkey. This?”

But speaking English is something I, and the whole family, can do effortlessly. At the Nong Kha School, even without any proper teaching techniques, we could speak correctly throughout every class. We knew when to add pronouns, how to articulate the letter r and the letter d. Without even trying, we could serve up full, slow sentences on a silver platter for our students to sample, and this continued outside the classroom as well. Simply by being in the village, we were a rolling English lesson all day long. As we walked and stopped to chat, we were ambassadors for the language in a place that saw virtually no tourist traffic at all … which really brings us back to the heart of the original question: Why and how were we there?

The real answer is: Michael Anderson.

When Michael graduated from the University of Texas in 1999, he was sick of school, bored, wanting a little adventure. So he went to Thailand. After bumming around for a few months, he happened upon a rural village where a few eager students encouraged him to come speak at their school. Like us, he was a huge and instant sensation, one of the first falongs the area had ever hosted. Following his brief school appearance, the principal humbly asked if Michael would stay on and teach English for the semester. They couldn’t offer him money, but they could give him food and shelter.

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