A day in the life of a teacher in Mae Sai.

A day in the life…

A typical school day for me begins with my alarm going off at 6am. I wake up and am ready to go for school by 7am. I have to be there before 7.30 to scan my fingerprint in and is only a ten minute walk, but I like to have the option of stopping at the local café for an iced coffee or iced green tea if I feel like one. The walk to school is very enjoyable, theres many Burmese workers out working on the houses being built. As well as dogs, chickens and cows in the paddocks surrounding the school.

After scanning in my fingerprint on the lower level, I walk up to the top floor where is my office with one other English teacher and two Chinese teachers. I set up my laptop and check what class I have to teach first and whether Im teaching first period.

At 8.00 am the first bell rings for students to get ready for the flag ceremony. The whole school gathers on the courtyard out front and watches while two students raise the Thai flag. One of the school directors then chants in Thai and the students repeat.

This lasts about ten minutes before the students trudge back upstairs ready for their first class.

A typical day I would have about four classes to teach, some days are less and some are more. I see all of Pratom 1-4 (primary) and all of Anuban 2 (kindergarten). Because I have so many students in my classes, up to 40x20 classes, I am not able to print worksheets and activities for all of the students. Therefor I have to be creative in the way that I engage the students.

The best purchase I have made is a small bouncy ball from tesco. Its amazing the way that having the ball makes students more engaged. For example simply getting all the students to stand up and pass the ball around the classroom saying my name is ____, what’s your name? is a fantastic five minute warm up at the beginning of each class. Its important to always have visuals to stick on the blackboard such as flashcards of the vocabulary you are teaching or themes. For example this week I was teaching how old are you? I am _____ years old, so I had images of balloons and a cake. This makes the topics more relevant to the students and also they are more likely to remember the vocabulary you are teaching.

I usually finish teaching by about 2.40 but have to stay at school until 5pm, when I can fingerscan out of the school for the day. Its really long hours but it means you can get everything done at school so no need for planning in the weekend or at evenings. The only thing is that there hasn’t been any wifi at school so I have to be searching for images at night and saving them ready to use at school. Fingers crossed It will be up and running again soon.

After school me and two of the other girls go straight to the gym where we stay for about an hour depending on how tired we are. We then take the scooters out, two of us doubling and get dinner. We usually get street food as it’s the cheapest, and occasionally go to one of the restaurants or cafés.

On some of the days that we don’t go to the gym, we do yoga on our rooftop at sunset, the views are truly magic.

After dinner we come home and chat and relax, sometimes we have a facetime or skype scheduled for back home or emails to catch up on, then we head to bed to do it all again the next day.