Week one done

Having taught the same lesson 14 times I was quite glad to see the end of my first week of school. I decided on a lesson plan asking the students what they did on the holidays as a good start to the school year.
I taught 18 lessons for the week to 14 different classes starting with the secondary one students on their first day of high school and also taught to classes of secondary 6 in their final year of school.
As well as asking the students what they did on the holiday I asked what the students knew about Australia. 'Kangaroos and Koalas' were always the first answers but their wasn't a lot else they knew. Only one student mentioned the Great Barrier Reef and very few could tell me the capital is Canberra.
A couple of big differences from school last semester to this semester is that I am now teaching alone in every lesson. Therefore I have to discipline the students as well as teach. Luckily in my first week this was not an issue as the students were all well behaved.
Another difference is their are only two classrooms in which I teach which have air-conditioning and in many of the classrooms the fans at the front are broken or completely ripped off the ceiling. It's hot in the classrooms luckily the staff office has air-conditioning so I go and cool off at the end of each lesson.

All you hear is Lady Gaga

Every morning for about the last three months while in Thailand I have watched the morning news. In the news service their is very little news from outside Thailand. The show is all in Thai so I have no idea what they are talking about and even watching the pictures many of the stories still make no sense to me.

Today though I was able to decipher one of the stories. Lady Gaga is in Thailand and almost twenty minutes of the breakfast news was dedicated to her with footage of fans screaming and crying while waiting for her at the airport.

The only other non Thai news which I found out through watching the show was the death of Whitney Houston.

Many of the other news items show car accidents and people being arrested. 

New start, new school

Having spent much of time while in Australia worried about where I would be teaching when I returned to Thailand it was a relief to be given a good job at a good school. I returned to Chachoengsao to continue teaching and through an agency got a job at a school only five minutes or so by motorbike from the school where I taught last semester.
I am now teaching at Benchama Rat Rangsarit School. It is a public secondary school of 3000 students and I will be teaching secondary 1, 5 and 6. I am teaching the equivalent of year 7, 11 and 12 in Australia.
On  the second day of school myself along with four other new foreign teachers introduced ourselves in Thai to the whole school at morning assembly. I have lived in Thailand for close to six months and it was probably the most Thai I have spoken since learning the language.

Short time, not a long time in Australia

At the end of my first semester teaching in Thailand I decided I would return to Australia. I was planning to spend time with friends and family and hopefully work for some of the time as money made in Australia is worth a lot in Thailand. The students in Thailand get eight weeks of school holidays from the end of March until the end of May. I also thought I did not want to spend this time in Thailand as I did not have a lot of money to support myself.
Therefore I returned to Australia. Visited some of my friends and family and worked many different jobs in order to make some money. I painted a house, dug a few trenches, mowed some lawns and helped demolish a house.
Then on Mother's Day morning my Mum dropped me at the airport knowing I probably will not see her again this year.
I enjoyed my time in Australia I also enjoyed getting on the plane and returning to Thailand.