Crazy Cat Children

So today was day 2 at the temple school. Our first class was with the 0.1 and 0.2 kids, which is the equivalent to pre-K and K classes in the states. Let me just say, I respect preschool teachers more than I can possibly express in words after today. I think they should have shrines built in their honor. We walked into this classroom, and it was unlike the other ones in that it had no desks, no chairs, and no chalkboards of any kind. The kids sit on the floor and I guess the teacher just tells them the lessons or something, which we hadn't planned for (up til today we had been writing the alphabet on the board and having the kids follow along and draw pictures to go with the letters).

So we walk in, and there are 10 really tiny kids sitting in a circle, and we're like, "oh. Man, this might be easy. That's like, 3 kids each? We so have this." Um. No. Literally, five seconds after we said this, the door opens and 20 more screaming kids run into the room--smaller, if possible, than the ones we already have in there. fml. FML. The teacher speaks no English. Lovely. We had planned to teach them the alphabet song, and it turns out they already know it. They might not know what it means, but without anything to write on, how are we to do something with that? So we sing the good morning song, introduce ourselves and have them say their names.

It's 9:07am, and we still have 53 minutes left. Shit. We are out of ideas.

That's when I thought it would be totally stellar to act out different kinds of animals and tell the kids their names. So I got into the middle of the circle, knelt down, pawed my face, and said "meow." I guess in Thai, "meow" must be code for "start mewling and hissing and jump the white girl," because next thing I knew I had 30 or so tiny Thai children crawling all over me, pretending to be cats, and where were my fellow volunteers--my cavalry? They were laughing their asses off, that's where they were.

We finally hunted down some crayons and paper for the kids to draw on, and they did that for as long as we could get them to, then we tried in vain to get a game of red-light, green-light going that failed miserably. Finally, I just looked at the teacher and was like "ok, that's all. We'll see you tomorrow." I think she understood that, because she just laughed. Ha.