Last impressions...

Below you can see an image from my last day in Sanambin school... Aren't the students lovely? I'm surely miss them a lot...

 

Teaching in Khon Kaen is Over

This week I finished my teaching in Khon Kaen. It was a great and very interesting time. I had a great luck with the school, the teachers, the classes and mostly with the host teacher in Khon Kaen. All of them were very kind to me and supported me as much as possible.

Sanambin school, where I was teaching, is a huge school with about 3200 students. They have students of all levels, from kindergarten to high school. I was teaching Pratom 3-6, which is 3rd - 6th class of elementary school English. My favorite class was the 4th class, since they were very active and interested kids.

Teaching English is a very difficult subject, from different point of views. On one side it was very hard, since I speak only very basic Thai and some English teacher don't speak English at all and couldn't translate to Thai. So it was very hard to explain basic sentence structures and grammar. One aspect is the fact, that many students don't like English as a language, because they have been only taught in grammar and this isn't fun at all. An other point is the fact, that classes are not divided by student performance which is very bad. In one class you can get all kind of students - good students and students who even can't read a simple sentence although they had English for six years! This makes it very difficult to teach.

The school has two weeks off and I'm developing open source

As many of you might know, I like open source a lot and I support it as good as I can.

I believe very much in the idea of open source and I use my free time to develop open source myself.

This week I just finished a new Eclipse help plugin for eclipse-tutorial.dev.java.net. I posted something in my software blog: http://tomionsoftware.blogspot.com/

Enjoy :)