First, I’m excited that we received our first picture of Anne Marie and Brad’s new daughter, Harper Kathleen.  The picture has older sister Sydney Claire holding her baby sister. 

Anne Marie’s explanation for her early delivery (about a month) is that Sydney just kept pleading with the baby, “Please come out baby!” and she finally obliged.

Tawn and I are excited to be going to the Bay Area in March and have a chance to visit the newest addition to their family.

Yesterday was a special “integrated learning” day at Bangkhonthiinai.  Which means that the children spent most of the day working on a project where they helped prepare the lunch, learned about food, nutrition, math and science along the way, and then ate the lunch and had a follow-up lesson around the things they learned.  Somewhere in all that, English was supposed to be integrated but that didn’t end up happening.

Left: Ajarn Yai, the director, and Tod watching the mayhem… ahem, learning activity.

Right: Khruu Somchai, he of the frequent use of amplified voice, taught the children in the food room.

The menu was giiaw (wontons) with moo daeng (Chinese-style barbeque pork) and vegetables.  The children helped prepare the wontons then helped cook them.  Which means that there were a whole mess of children standing in the kitchen right next to a wok of boiling broth.  Of course there was the usual messing around, shoving and jostling that one expects with young children. 

I had visions of a scene I witnessed at a fresh market near Jatujak Market where a wok of boiling oil had been knocked over from its tripod base and spilled all over a man.  People were racing around pouring water on him to cool off what looked to be second- or third-degree burns over most of his torso.  Someone got a car and they hustled him in with more bottles of water to cool him off, driving to the nearest hospital. 

Thankfully nothing dramatic happened in the kitchen yesterday, but I couldn’t quite relieve myself from thoughts of how this type of learning would never be allowed in the litigation littered United States.  Small children next to boiling woks?  Never!

Left: The dining hall where students sit patiently, hungrily, bored as they wait for their food.

Other students were in charge of cutting the pork (they didn’t barbeque it themselves) and the preparing the vegetables.  Finally, some of the older girls put all the dishes together and the food was finally served. 

The food was tasty; the teachers were provided with a wider range of dishes to choose from as one cannot teach on wontons and red pork alone.

I served a loaf of homemade banana bread to the teachers, who said they enjoyed it although Thais will say that just to be nice so who knows what they really thought.  My opinion is that the center of the bread was just slightly undercooked; another minute or two in the oven would have firmed it up a bit.  But it was tasty, and I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy bananas.

The result of this integrated learning event was that I didn’t really get much teaching done.  Maybe 90 minutes in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, with the young children completely spaced out in the afternoon.  Finally, to induce some sort of activity, we played a game where we reviewed the different names of animals we know and then, when I called out the name of an animal, the students would pretend to be that animal.

What a disaster!  Even with the most benign of animals the young boys brought the Nature Channel’s best footage – fighting and procreation – to life as fish became predatory, lions got the kill, and koalas mated. 

Within just a few minutes, chaos ensued and most of the girls were standing off to the sidelines looking on with dismay at their male classmates.  So much for trying to bring learning to life!

Left: the children pretending to be elephants (note the arms/trunks) 

Two Saturdays from now is Children’s Day in Thailand.  The Friday before (the 12th) there will be some events at the school so next week Tod and I will swap our normal Wednesday teaching for Friday and go to the school to participate.