| Volunteer Stories! Jim Brown's Perspective on Temple Teaching |
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| Written by Thaweesilp L. | |
| Tuesday, 25 March 2008 | |
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Jim worked for weeks with the novices and monks at the temple in NongKhai. Below you will find his interpretation of his stay and volunteer experiences. When I came across the name of a school at a Buddhist temple in the list of teaching opportunities from OpenMindProjects, I was fascinated. As a Westerner, I had preconceptions about temples and monks and novices that made them very exotic and maybe even mysterious. This was a chance to get inside to learn about Buddhism in ways not usually open to outsiders. I was delighted when my request was approved and I spent the next few months imagining what lay in store for me. 
When we pulled into Wat Pratatwitthaya School I got my first hint that things weren't exactly as I had pictured them. Rather than a tranquil peace hidden away from the world, I found teenagers (all in the orange robes typical for Thai monks and novices) running around all over the place and a very loud roar coming from the school! Calm? Tranquility? Refuge? Hmmmmm.
What I found over the next eight weeks was that people are people, no matter what they're wearing or where they're living. The lives of the novices certainly involve Buddhist spirituality, but they still run around and laugh and play just like the teenagers I'm familiar with. The experience turned out to be even more amazing than I anticipated, though not always in ways I expected!
From my first interactions with the teachers and students, the usual Thai warmth and joy welcomed me in and made me an immediate member of their community. Though most of the teachers have limited English language skills, their smiles and greetings communicated in ways that words can't. Nik, the English teacher for grades M.2 to M.6, and Therabon, the computer teacher and English teacher for M.1, have a sense of humor that often surprised me, and we spent lots of time laughing!
With 200 students, there's only one class for each level, so I got to work with all the students. Classes vary from about seven to twenty five students, depending on who shows up; one thing I learned quickly is that my idea of discipline and order is different from theirs! Novices showed up for class and wandered in and out of the classrooms and up and down the halls, seemingly as they pleased. Like any school the levels of motivation vary, but most are very interested to learn, and some constantly come up to you outside of class because they want to make use of every opportunity to improve their English. Our conversations were delightful and very amusing! Having a Thai teacher in the classroom made teaching so much easier as he could explain concepts in Thai, enabling the students to understand much better than if I had tried to explain. And, maybe since he's not much older than them (he's 23), he has a great relationship with the students.
Teaching is not without its challenges at the school. All the classrooms (one for each of the six levels) opens onto a central hall, which is concrete and tile, so the noise levels can make classroom communication difficult at times. But by far the major problem is the lack of books: only M.1 (which I didn't teach regularly) had textbooks. This raises considerable problems. Lesson planning doesn't have the structure provided by a book, so putting together a systematic program of study was very difficult and we probably didn't always succeed very well. Also, a great deal of class time is absorbed by our writing on the board and students copying down vocabulary, structure and whatever else we thought necessary, leaving much less time than we wanted for practise and general conversation.
Another drawback of teaching at the school is that, since I stay in Nong Khai, I missed the experience of living in the small villages and towns with a host family. I know that this would have been a very different experience from the one I had. So it's a difficult choice to make.
Nonetheless, my experiences have led me to a determination to come back in the future to teach at the temple again. When I had opportunities to travel to other parts of Thailand for sightseeing, I decided that what I really wanted to do was to stay at the school with my friends. I know that's not what everyone would choose to do, especially since there's so much to see (I'm told!), it's easy to get around and taking some time off isn't a problem. But I like to spend time in one place, getting to know the people and daily life. From this point of view, my time at Wat Pratatwitthaya succeeded spectacularly.
There's so much more I could say, so if you want to know more or have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch:
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 02 June 2008 ) |
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