Here’s some information on some of the students I’ve neglected to mention so far:

Most of the kids that live on site go to a different school during the day. A bus comes in every morning and trucks them all out to some government school in town that requires them to wear uniforms. I teach 16 of them at night when they come back for that fast track English course. This night class has been keeping me pretty busy. I'm not sure what I'll do with myself once they take that test. Saturday night I spent the last half hour with them playing Billy Joel’s “Through the long night” on a CD player. I wrote the lyrics on the board and they started singing along to it. It moves slow enough so they can catch almost every word but Billy Joel just sounds really funny when its done Karaoke by a group of kids with thick Thai accents.

I made a mistake last night distributing a Xerox from a workbook. It was intended to test the students’ ability to conjugate “To be” correctly and it forced them to use possessive pronouns and superlatives and other basic things like that. One line from the worksheet reads “_____father____________ years old. _____mother________years old.” I started asking each student to say each of these sentences out loud, and unfortunately many of them would say, “My mother/father is dead.”

It was very awkward...and against my better judgment. I was looking at the grammar exercise and not really the content of the worksheet, but I should have been paying better attention. But I guess it's almost an inevitable subject of conversation at some point when learning another language.

During the day, the site is a school for undocumented refugees, hill tribe and other underprivileged children. It’s called the “Phatak” school or the Half Day school. The first half of the day is academia and the second half of the day is life skills training, skills that they will more likely use in their adult lives(farming, sewing, cooking, etc). Very recently, Fridays have turned into “fundraiser day.” In other words, the entire day, kids are making food and selling it to fundraise the organization. I don’t really understand this. The site’s kindof in the middle of nowhere and the only people that seem to buy anything are volunteers and staff members. This recent change in Fridays means that my lowest level class, the group of kids that don’t understand the phonetics of the English alphabet, now meets once a week. The higher two levels only meet three times, sometimes only twice a week. It just isn’t enough to chart progress. Especially now that it’s in contrast with a class I meet with 6 times a week for sometimes twice as long as the daytime students.

Update on Judy: She was ambulanced over to a hospital in Chiang Mai just a few days ago. Cindy told me they had asked me to ride in the ambulance car (Why? Beats me), but she kindly reminded them that I’m preparing a night class for a big test in a few weeks and she jumped in my place instead. It’s comforting to know that she made it out to a better hospital.