This week my team and I have had the opportunity to get involved at an English learning school during the evenings a few nights this week. Before this week, we have been struggling finding ways to get involved in our community here in Laos, so this was kind of an answer to prayer. We found out that we’d be teaching English to two different sessions of students 3 nights this week. Everyone seemed excited to teach…except me. A few days before we found out we’d be teaching, I had just been saying that if we are ever asked to teach English, I’d be screwed. And then here we are, teaching English. And this isn’t just teaching beginner’s English to a group of 4 year olds. This is legit English class with students ranging from around age 8 to 18.
Thankfully, the director of the school wanted the students to be exposed to English speakers so that they could get an idea of how certain words should sound etc. He also said that he wanted us to teach our classes about Christmas and traditions that we hold back home and just have fun with them. So that was a relief. Originally they wanted us to each take our own classroom, and praise the Lord we convinced them to combine classes so we could teach with a partner.
On our first night, we went in with a plan for both sections: songs, games, crafts; all good things. We got through our first section just fine. They were younger ones and they were willing to be silly with us and try new things. We taught them pin the nose on the snowman…however we had to teach them what a snowman was at first. We also sang Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. We also taught them all about Christmas cards and the meaning behind them and then got them all to make a card of their own. They LOVED this.
Our second session was a different experience. We had 6 older students, 3 of whom were monks and they were really shy about speaking English. So this class we had to scrap all of our planning and go with the flow. We had to actually teach how to say Christmas and snowman and sound things out with them and answer questions like, “how do you speak better English?” One girl surprised us though when she was reading some sentences to us and began talking about eating barbeque chicken.
Last night we finished up our teaching experience, and it was actually really fun. Our students were really engaged this time around and seemed more comfortable speaking around us. Although teaching wasn’t something I wanted to do in the beginning, I actually really enjoyed it. After our last class our monk students came up to us and started asking us questions and talking to us. It was fun to engage in conversation with them and love them for a few hours. Our hope is that although Laos is a closed country, that the students and teachers we interacted with were encouraged and loved while we were there. We hope that they saw something in us that they were attracted to, and that they go looking for Him.
