Teaching English is Both Fun and a Challenge!

At the second site, Bob's Thai co-teacher is Toy. Toy teaches at a school that is in a much poorer area than the other site. Bob and Toy have fun, but are exhausted at the end of the day. Getting Thai students to try to speak English is very difficult because the sounds in the English language are quite different from Thai. They do not hear the difference between "L" and "R" (see you tomollow). When we ask them to say "favorite", they say "friend". And consonant blends are nearly impossible: "Sister" is "sitter", "fish is "fit","world" is "wern", "much" is "mutt", "spend" is "sa-pend", "drive" is "die", "large" is "lard", "stomach ache" is "sata-mat aitch", etc. So it's no wonder that they are extremely shy about speaking English. In these pictures, we are saying, "Give the ball to her." Then we ask them, "Who has the ball?" --- to which the correct answer might be, "She has the ball". We get hilarious results, but the whole idea is to get them to speak, which in this case was quite successful.