The perks of teaching and a brand new airport.

I'm am now enjoying one of the perks of teaching - vacation! I've officially finished the first semester and am now on semester break for 3 weeks before going back to start the second semester. The end of the semester was very anti-climatic teaching wise - I created tests, they took them, I graded them and that was the end of it. Besides having to navigate the Thai grading system (which involved conversions, transformations and grades for responsibility, diligence, honesty and disciple), they past two weeks were easy ( a stark contrast to the last two weeks of school as a student and, I'm assuming, a teacher in the US). My students did well on the finals and I was pleasantly surprised by several students performance on the test. As the semester wound to an end, I did begin to look ahead to next semester and am excited to teach and am looking forward to many of the topics as well as being able to experiment more with teaching as I have a semester of "practice" under my belt. I'm sure it'll be just as challenging, but I hope the challenges will be less of a reaction to not knowing what I'm doing and more of an ongoing effort to create a more stimulating and interesting learning environment. Nevertheless, despite having been here for three months, there are moments when I still don't know what the world is going on (and I don't think that'll change). But that's why it's exciting.

On a related note, this past week I've started to work with Project Citizen Thailand. Project Citizen is a program that I worked with at DU helping local schools develop public policy proposals and educate students about policy issues and the ways to change those policies. And as it turns out there is a Project Citizen Thailand. Bunyawat actually won first place in the northern region Project Citizen Showcase and are now going to compete in Bangkok in November. That's were I come in. Previously, all of the competition was in Thai, now they must present in Thai and English so I was drafted as an English coach a few days ago. I spent Monday and Tuesday working with them and will continue once I get back and it looks like I may come back to Bangkok with them for the competition (which would be awesome). Their policy is really neat and deals with the issue of deforestation in Thailand and it's impact, particularly on flooding since that has been a huge issue in the north (Lampang was flooded several times last year, one inundating a large part of town under several meters of water).

I'm currently in Bangkok and am planning on spending the next several weeks traveling with Peter Reding who arrived last night. I took the train from Lampang to BKK overnight on Tuesday and arrived early Monday morning and spent the day resting and relaxing before making the trek out to the brand new airport 50 km from town! The opening of this airport has been huge (it opened 1 week ago today) and long awaited. It was one of the central publicity pieces of the ousted prime minister, but now is the subject of much criticism in design flaws and corruption, but despite all that it is a source of national pride. Over the past week about 200,00 people have gone through the airport and only 90,000 were arriving or departing by plane - the rest were tourists simply coming to see the new airport. It's insane. I made it out there at 11:00 pm and met Peter in the brand new airport. I do have to admit it was neat to know that I was one of the first million of so people to come through that airport and be there within a week of it's opening. But I did come with a purpose. Peter and I will be in Bangkok until Sunday when we'll take of for the English Camp in Pattaya.

Take care.

RM