Question Time #4

Here we are again... just a few questions to be answered on this one...

How have you found the Thai culture generally? Are there any dos and donts? 
The best advice I can think of is to just keep smiling. They call it the land of smiles, and you may feel like a mental case walking around with a big grin, but it'll make people trust you more/respond to you more. And basically, just don't be a knob. You're in someone else's country so be respectful, if in doubt, wait to see how other people act in a certain situation/place etc. and monkey-see-monkey-do it. You're going to make little cultural mistakes, but the Thais (generally speaking, of course) are laid back, and you seem to get away with it for being a silly foreigner. If you mean well, you'll be fine. Just some main ones - don't touch people's heads or touch things with your feet, try not to show the soles of your feet, DON'T INSULT THE KING (in fact, just don't bring him up unless someone else does first), if you can, ensure your head is lower than a monk's if you see one (because they're socially higher than you), and it's always appreciated if you know how to say 'hello' and 'thank you' in Thai. If you're doing the internship, you'll get a rundown during orientation week of all the major do's and don't's, and you get a practice run in Bangkok that week anyway, which is a place more accustomed to 'silly falang', so you won't get into trouble with cultural faux-pas there.

Did you guys find out before you left to Thailand what age group/ area you were going to be with and be? I would like to prepare a bit for lessons but will be difficult not knowing what age were teaching. 
Ok, the thing is, things change all the time. Before the internship, I'd been told that I was teaching primary kids, which was true. However, other people were told that they were teaching primary and ended up teaching secondary. So even if you do find out, it's not guaranteed to be true. There are 7 of us interns at the one school, each with a different year group and we were told to decide amongst ourselves which group we wanted (not every school did this though). Some interns at other schools teach various year groups. I know how helpful it'd be to come to Thailand ready to teach with a pile of lesson plans, and I hate to say it, but you might be better off planning nothing. You just don't know what you're going to be doing until you get here, and even then, you might still be confused. I still have no idea what I'm meant to be doing and I've been here over 2 months. Plus your school might give you a textbook they want you to teach from, or they may want you to do specific language things. Mine are obsessed with me getting the kids reading irrelevant passages. Maybe have 1 or 2 lesson plans ready for the first day in case you get thrown in blindly like I did, but make them vague, appropriate for any level/age, and game-based (so you can win their love! And Thai students are obsessed with games). I find it best just to plan as I go, because once you start planning too far ahead, something changes and you're perfectly sculpted lesson plans are utterly redundant (yes, this has happened to me several times). 
I did find out I'd be in Lop Buri before I came out to Thailand, but again, I stress that everything you're told is subject to change. Some people were told Lop Buri and ended up somewhere else. Some went to one place and 2 weeks later were moved to another place. Don't take anything as Bible truth, and be prepared for the rug to be pulled out from underneath you a lot. I don't want this to sound negative, I just want to prepare future interns for the frustrating truth so it saves a lot of tears and tantrums early on in the game, so you can focus on making new friends and settling into a fun new life! 

Right, they were the only ones for this week. And just a little self-plug... if you're on tumblr I've got a blog on there that is basically what I post on here, but with more photos and smaller things. So if you want to follow that, go right ahead! 
http://bridgetovertravelledwaters.tumblr.com/

Alright so that's that then! Off for another weekend away, this time in Bangkok, mostly for a crazy night out. Maybe not of Hangover 2 standards, but up there.