Happy Walentine’s Day!

The morning of Thursday, February 14th my fellow teachers and I rolled up to school ready to start the day like any other. We had a little extra love in our hearts because, after all, it was Valentine’s Day (or as our students mispronounce it, Walentine’s Day). We hadn’t, however, prepared anything special for the morning assembly. But that didn’t stop the Thai teachers from forcing us to all stand in front of the entire school while dancing to some contemporary English love song. Twice. 

Then they told us to call students up on stage and ask them questions about the history of Valentine’s Day, which had just been read to them...in Thai. Sadly none of us knew the history of V-Day (Although one of my classes asked me and I made up something I vaguely remembered about Saint Valentine helping people in jail write love letters. Teacher fail.) Instead we asked them the most general questions even semi-related to Valentine’s Day in the simplest English possible. It was torture attempting to get the first student to volunteer to come answer an English question in front of all their peers, but after the first student answered the question correctly, didn’t die, and received candy, then the rest of their little hands shot up eagerly. 

We struggled to come up with questions easy enough for all these kids because there’s this secret agreement going on between the students and ourselves. The agreement: the foreign English teachers will pretend to teach English if the students will pretend to learn it, but really we’re all just playing games all the time. The other teachers and administrators don’t know this secret and have much more faith in the students and our teaching abilities than is accurate. So our impromptu, semi-relevant, simple English questions were as follows: 

• What holiday is today? (the word holiday tripped that student up) 
• On Valentine’s Day, what is your favorite color? (that question was used multiple times and one time a student said purple, we were going for red & pink, but whatever, candy for everyone)
• Valentine’s Day is a day about...? (I asked this question to my 4th grader whom I’d taught that to the day prior, but as he looked at me confused I held up my hands in a heart shape to which he yelled “HEARTS!” I was hoping for love but close enough) 

It was a morning of ridiculousness, and pictures of course, but the rest of the day only got better. We all received Valentine’s and roses throughout the day as well as dozens of stickers smacked onto our chests by tiny children. All in all it was an a-okay V-Day.