the joys of being a teacher

Besides the obvious huge responsibility of teaching students who really want to learn, teaching is pretty great. One of my students who I teach from 10pm to 12am has yet to fail to bring me food. Awesome. My other student brings stuff for my house to make it homier. Of all of their generosity, I feel undeserving. But on the other hand, my work has begun. As was to be expected questions beyond my ability have surfaced (in less than a week, but in my defense against the dark art of mocking me, I was a language teacher for the past 3 years, not a grammar teacher.) Today for example, I worked with one student from 10:30 through to 2:30. Then I took a nap, woke up and headed to my coffeeshop (let me pause the story here)
So this coffeeshop I determined today is my spot. It’s nothing really special but the lady who works there is so nice. When I went there today for the 3rd time since arriving in Pattaya she told me I had to try the Thai tea. So of course I agreed. She automatically cleans off my table outside and hands me the password for some free wifi. The Thai Tea was great!! Oh man! This will be my new ritual. Plus it’s only a $1 for a huge cup of tea and she lets me sit there as long as I want. They have my loyalty.
But back to my story, so I went to my coffeeshop where I sat for two hours researching the answers to the questions from my student today and the student last night. I am back to trying to learn the difference of present perfect simplified and divided by two. So not only do I have to learn it for myself but then translate it to being a bearable piece of information. All this without the internet in my apartment makes life a wee bit hard. But also makes me work harder. The other part of my research was figuring out how to teach a student to download movies…wait, that’s illegal…I probably shouldn’t be doing that but on a brighter note I also am learning about how the Green Card system in the USA works. Again tough without internet in my apartment but I just copy and paste a lot of things.
Ah yes, so I returned home around 7pm to get ready to teach two more ladies but then I found out that they had to cancel because they were still stuck at work. No worries. So I sat down to start transcribing my new lesson on grammar and around 8pm W stops by to ask me to join her for a movie and cards. Beautiful! So we watched some movie with Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins as it was the only one we could get to play in English and really neither of us speaks Thai well enough to enjoy a Thai movie. And we pretended to play cards. Then at 10pm my last student for the night called and we met to discuss grammar and pronunciation, until around 12.
Tomorrow start again when W will come by at 10am. The nice thing is that siestas are built into the culture. I like that.  Keeps me alive. So I’m busy.