Competitions

Last week Chelsea, Mel, and I got to leave school for two days and go to Chiang Mai for part of English Competition Week. ECW isn’t really an official thing, it just so happened that a bunch of competitions for our students took place last week. These competitions are for speeches, spelling, math, science, dance, and potentially more. Mel and Chelsea have been coaching a 6th grade boy and a 3rd grade girl in speech competitions since about week two of their time in Thailand. I just started coaching a 6th grade girl in spelling about three weeks ago. For no necessary reason, our “coaching” skills allowed the three of us to accompany our students, other students, a handful of Thai teachers, and the school’s sub-director to the competitions in Chiang Mai. 

So Tuesday morning the three of us (plus Chelsea’s visiting friend Elise) packed our bags, did some last minute coaching, got to wear jeans to school, prayed for about 30 minutes to different Buddha statues around school, and then hopped in a van to drive four hours to the competitions. The actual competitions didn’t start until Wednesday morning, but we arrived the day before and got to spend the night. 

Side note: I like to play this game called “How Would This Go Down in America?” where I think about crazy Thai situations that are completely normal here and then picture them occurring in an American school. Most of the time, if the situations happened in America the result would be jail time. 

The spending the night situation was so different from what it would have been had this been in America. In America, if you took elementary-aged students on an overnight outing, I would imagine the children would be accompanied by their parents or there would be one adult of the appropriate gender in every hotel room. In Thailand, during this overnight excursion, there were no parents, but there was at least one adult in every room, however, gender did not matter. First of all, our accommodations were not really a hotel. It was a room of four beds and two shoilets (shower + toilet = shoilet). In our room, one of the toilets was completely backed up with whatever had happened in it from the guest before, so we were down to one shoilet. There were dead bugs on the walls and potentially in our beds too. None of us ended up using the “comforters” at the foot of the bed because some were stained and most looked filthy. I slept with a towel for a blanket that night. And not to be super first world-y, but there also wasn’t air conditioning. Now this is not something I would complain about in the states, but when the low of the day is about 82 with ridiculous levels of humidity, no AC is a game changer for comfort. Anywho, back to the student/teacher ratios. In the room next to us was our 3rd grade speech girl, two middle-aged female Thai teachers, and the 6th grade boy. When our 6th grade boy told us his room accommodations, he said it with pure nonchalance in his tone and didn’t even look up from his game of Angry Birds. Apparently mixed genders of students and teachers in a room is a-okay in Thailand. Just one example of when “How would this go down in America?” ends in jail time. 

The next day at the competitions, I split off from the other English teachers and went with my spelling girl, Um (I didn’t have a random mid-sentence language lapse, her name is really Um), and the Thai teacher Nongnoot. My purpose during competition day was to quiz Um beforehand on spelling words she often misspells. This lasted about five minutes and then it was competition time. The competition took place in a room of 44 students from all over Northern Thailand. The room was just a regular classroom with an entire front wall of windows. Plastered against the window wall was about three dozen parents and teachers snapping pics and recording videos of the room of spelling students (quality video that they’ll totally care about in the future). I stood back and looked at my poor little Um, the shiest girl I’ve ever met, who looked sick to her stomach sitting in the middle of the classroom. Round one consisted of a British woman reading 20 spelling words aloud and the students writing them down. They provide a sample sentence, but in all honesty it probably didn’t help whatsoever since these kids are memorizing machines, not English proficient pros. After each round, Um would emerge for a brief break and Nongnoot would immediately go into hounding her with more words to practice spelling out loud. Noot would turn to me and tell me to say words to Um from the spelling lists. It was ridiculous. Um was already nervous and knew as much as she was going to know at that point. I felt so bad for her. In the end, Um made it through seven rounds of spelling out loud and beat out a good portion of the competition by coming in 7th place overall. I was proud, but no one seemed to care because everyone was too distracted by our 6th grade speech boy who got 2nd place and will now be moving onto the nationwide competition in Bangkok (woot!). 

Overall it was a really weird experience and very unnecessary for us whiteys to be there, but I think the school gained some cool point for our presence and we all had a really good time.