Due to my sick leave last week, my classes were being covered by a combination of substitute teachers and Thai teachers. I’m not sure who was overseeing this class but they obviously haven’t grasped the simple rule of walking around the classroom not only to offer assistance and answer questions but also to spot if any students are copying their fellow classmates.
We had spent the previous week planning a holiday for Mr. Bean and writing an itinerary for his trip. It was a really fun lesson and the students were engaged and got a lot done so I thought it would be nice to round off the mini holiday project by writing postcards home from Mr. Bean. All they had to do was look at their iteneraries and write a little note home, accompanied with a nice picture on the other side. Nice and easy for a sub teacher to get their head around. I’m not sure what went wrong where but a group of students got completely distracted by the fact that it was soon to be Mother’s Day – not mentioned at all in the lesson plan.
The most frustrating thing is that they copied an INCORRECT piece of work. Like they can’t even be bothered to seek out something that actually looks half decent.
Behold; my wonderful MINI ENGLISH PROGRAMME class and their postcards home from Mr. Bean….
Dear Mother, Hello Mother how are you? Mother Day this me hook give Mother happy and health robust very I love mother
I look forward to seeing the rest of the work that was produced in my absence!
cornishkylie 
This to me looks like maybe a non-native English speaker was covering the class! The use of vocabulary like ‘health robust very’ screams of a Thai teacher who has looked up some words in a dictionary and taken a shot on whatever synonyms they’ve found! Plus that grammar of putting the adjective after the noun is what you do in Thai.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a Thai teacher who maybe couldn’t get their head around your lesson plan. God forbid they lose face and admit they don’t know what you mean; much better to forge ahead with a tried-and-tested lesson they already know where they get the kids to write something nice to their Mum. This is something that most Thai kids have probably been having to do every year in English class since they were 4!
Turns out they were handed a print out of my PowerPoint and left to their own devices! I’m surprised to have received anything after hearing that!
Ha ha, very funny! I got a card from my departing Japanese students today. One of the comments was ‘Resistance disappeared to talk with a foreigner on the coattails of you.’ As an elementary student, I’m pretty sure he had some help with that! 🙂 Thanks for following my blog! Linda.
Probably helped by the joys of Google translate!!! Some of the stuff the students come out with makes me chuckle 🙂
Yeah, it definitely keeps the job interesting! 🙂