First Day at school

Our first day is done, and with much surprise it went very well, we showed up at the school at 7am to greet our students at the gate, who mostly gave us no response. We waited at the morning assembly and watched the Thai flag rise and the anthem played. We then took a leisurely walk with our head of English department “Pi-Chu” to our teacher’s lounge where she handed us our schedule. I looked at my schedule and was surprised to see that I had a class in one minute. I stumbled into the class with the expectation that my students would barley know vocab, as we were told. However these students were perfectly capable of forming sentences. I quickly restructured my lesson plan, and got back on my feet with some basic, “what’s your favorite sport?” questions.
I have heard it before, and I will see it all semester that Thai children are very competitive. Give them a dialogue, and they may not pay attention, however give them a dialogue and throw a game of tic-tac-toe into it and you will have every kid begging to be called on.