math and science day and a mangosteen binge

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This Friday was another baffling day at school.. it was Math and Science Day (discovering just this much was a real breakthrough) so all of the math and science classes prepared posters to display downstairs in our open-air auditorium/courtyard. The hard part of the day was figuring out who, what, where and when I was supposed to be teaching and what I was supposed to be doing when not teaching.

The day didn't start smoothly.. My first class (the horribly misbehaved fifth graders) I was told would be canceled so I went off to work on grading tests in my office, only to have one of my grade 5 students come running up to me at my desk... "teacher, teacher! teach! where? english class? free time, ok?" Turns out that the plan (if there had ever really been one) had changed and we all actually did have morning classes but none of us non-Thai speaking teachers had been informed. i grabbed a fistful of paper and markers and followed my student back to the teacherless class which, by then, had erupted into a scene of even greater mayhem than it normally is... boys riding on one another's backs, battling with classroom chairs, dueling with PVC pipe swords. The looks I was receiving from the thai teachers in neighboring classrooms were unmistakably ones of disapproval and were telling me, in case I wasn't aware, you're 15 minutes late to class and you need to get your screaming children under control. I ended up having limited success getting them under control as the courtyard below was filled with laughing, playing, screaming kids and a rock band, yes, a rock band, warming up on stage. The lesson plan I had come up with on the walk over was this: 40 minutes of "draw a picture of what you've learned this year in English." What actually ended up happening was 10 minutes of that, and the rest of the time spent sitting/laying on the floor, the 8 of us, drawing pictures of the most shocking monsters we could come up with, and the students teaching me, then quizzing me on, the names of different animals and objects in Thai.

The rest of the day unfolded in a similar haphazard fashion. In the end it turned out I had no other classes to teach so I milled around, watched the high school students perform dance/lip sync numbers up on the main stage [**side note: this dancing is unlike anything I've ever seen allowed, let alone encouraged, in a school. the members of one of the more provocative dance groups were clad in tight white tank tops, minuscule denim cut-offs and towering red heels and were made up with what probably amounted to a good 3 pounds of eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick between the seven of them. I should also mention that two of these dancers were males - cut-offs, heels, make-up and all. The dance they performed was certainly entertaining - they had obviously practiced and worked hard on their choreography - but I couldn't help feeling like I should be covering the eyes of the primary school children sitting in the audience.] and ate food that the students were preparing and selling at card tables set up by the stage. After lunch I played basketball with a group of the high school boys (i took em to school) and watched the final game of the high school girls' soccer tournament sitting in the ridiculous mid-afternoon heat, drinking from a plastic bag full of coke and cheering with the kiddos. a great day, all in all.

students looking happy
because they don't have to go to class


more celebration about the class-free day

high school students grilling up some meat-on-a-stick in the courtyard

After school I went to the market where a woman had a table piled with what looked like 200 lbs of mangosteens so I bought about 6 of those lbs and took them back to the apartments as an offering to the thai teachers in return for bites of whatever they were making/eating/drinking that night.

mangosteens before they were devoured


innards of a perfectly ripe little mangosteen
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