A little bit about my new job

Heading off to work on Perry, our scooter.

Things are getting better, slowly but surely... This week is good because Fuad is back from London and I have something to look forward to; this weekend I'm making my first trip to Bangkok! Fuad will be going for work on Thursday morning, and I'll meet him there on Friday in the late afternoon, then we'll return together on Sunday evening. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to see where it is he's been going off to every week!

As I quickly approach the end of my third week at Chiang Mai International School, I thought I might share a little bit about my new job, now that I'm finding my feet on the ground.

CMIS has around 460 students in grades K-12 who come from 30 different countries! I'm teaching elementary music, so I have K-6th grades. Every child in these elementary grades, regardless of their background has Thai class twice a week, which makes my situation unique because the children are grouped by their level in Thai class (beginner, intermediate, advanced). So, for instance, while half of 3rd grade is in Thai, the other half is in music. They don't come to me as their homeroom grouping. (I hope that wasn't too confusing) Let's stick with 3rd grade as an example...my first period class has 11 students in it, which is a combination of two homerooms, and my 2nd period class has 15 kids. I see both groups of 3rd graders twice a week.

I've never had a schedule that made this much sense because I've only worked at schools where teachers are on their "prep" while students are at classes like music, PE, art, tech, and library.

In fact, in my previous school my team was referred to as "preps" or "prep teachers" (I don't teach "prep" but some things are so deeply ingrained in the vernacular it would take decades to change.) Usually (in Chicago) classroom teachers are required to meet, for planning purposes, during at least one of their preps which means I would never get two third grade classes back to back, one class would be in music, while the other was in PE. If I did see a group two times in one week (which hasn't happened for about 4 years) I would have them later in the week.

Here, from day one I have only heard my team referred to as specials, which is a lot more like it! This schedule totally works for me - I see both classes of every grade that I teach back to back (with passing time) twice a week. I have breaks built in since all the kids get am, pm and lunch recess. All teachers (not just the specials) take a turn on duty and because there are so many of us, I only have duty twice a week for 10 minutes each (a far cry from Chicago, where I was on duty 5 days a week for 30 minutes each).

Budgets in CPS had gotten whittled down so much that everyone was expected to do more with less. More kids in the classrooms, more classes per day, more duty since each year more folks were getting laid off, more meetings to analyze why the schools are failing and test scores are so low, more PD sessions to create better teachers so the test scores won't be so low...and on & on & on...

CMIS kids are awesome! I haven't encountered any disrespectful students, I haven't left work feeling like I needed to cry, I haven't had to raise my voice....Mostly, I've done a lot of smiling at work. It feels good!

Here is a picture of my classroom...