Thai Government Project School

Today was my first day teaching at the special government project school. The students are from Lisu, Hmong, Shan, Karen, and other hill tribes in the north. Some of them have physical or mental disabilities. Most are learning English as their third language. (Their first being the language of their hill tribe, and the second being Thai.) Since their families live in remote areas of northern Thailand and cannot transport them to and from school, the students, as well as teachers and administrators who tend to take on the role of caretakers, live at the school. Students wash their own clothes and dishes and are also responsible for cleaning the bathrooms and classrooms (which they may need some coaching in as the bathrooms were especially nasty today). Students are provided with three meals a day- generally white rice and a cooked vegetable.
This morning I taught three sections of English. Had I not asked their ages, I would have guessed them to be 14 or 15, but, as often happens in Asia, people tend to be older than Westerners think they are. My students were 17 and 18 and in their junior and senior years of high school. Some of them had been living at the school for 5 or 6 years and others had just come in the last few months. Students were well behaved, respectful, and of course, smiley. (Thailand is rightly referred to as the 'land of smiles'. The first two classes had about 20 students each, but the third class had only 8. When I asked why there were so few, their regular classroom teacher, Pi James, told me that sometimes "they just take off". Some of them never came back from visiting family over the weekend. Others "maybe are somewhere on campus". Pi James really didn't seem to know for certain. I would have liked to have been able to meet all of them on the first day, but it was actually nice to have the smaller group as I got to know them quite well in just an hour. We got rid of the desks and moved the chairs into a circle and I asked them simple questions about their families and where they were from. James told me they were the worst group in term of their English level, but they were my favorite group as they seemed especially eager to learn. Today I taught them future simple tense and they told me their plans for tomorrow using "I will _____" or "I am going to____". The boys really like to play a game that sounds very similar to soccer. Both girls and boys play volleyball. One of the girls likes to dance. They definitely have a sense of humor as when I asked what they were going to do tomorrow, one of the boys replied, "Tomorrow I am going to go to America!" I could tell that some of them were more advanced or simply trying hard to impress as they were using more advanced vocabulary and more complex structures than the rest of the class. One of the boys in the last group repeated everything I said. He was incredibly focused the entire time- watching everything I typed on the screen and listening to every word. When I see that kind of motivation in a student, it makes me want to give them the world. And with these kids especially, seeing what many of them have gone through in terms of growing up in poverty, not speaking the language of the country in which they live, (some of them) having been forced to leave their home country, facing discrimination as ethnic minorities, and not being familiar with the norms and customs of dominant Thai culture. Add to that the fact that some of them have physical and/ or mental disabilities and/or have been abused or abandoned by their families and it makes their discipline and motivation to learn even more amazing.