Teaching - Monk Edition

As promised, here is an entry about teaching the monks.

Monday through Thursday evenings, all the volunteers head to a local temple to teach some monks Englis for an hour and a half. For the younger monks, this is on top of their full day of school (which includes some English as well as all the other subjects). The monks that come for English range in age from 13-22. The younger ones are pretty beginner, while the advanced ones can have a conversation in English fairly easily.

Teaching monks is completely fascinating. First of all, there are a million rules for monks (although the ones here seem to be a bit lax about them..like listening to music). For example, monks cannot touch girls. This sounds like an easy thing to avoid until you find yourself tiptoeing around trying not to accidentally bump into anyone or anything. Handing a pen to someone counts as "touching" because you are touching the same object at the same time. This becomes a bit challenging when you are trying to teach and pass out papers or hand someone a whiteboard marker.

We've been doing various games, speaking practice, writing activities and more. Yesterday we had them create their own superhero. Tonight they will present them. Hopefully there are some good ones.

The monks are all incredibly nice and love to laugh. They are teenage boys after all. They seem to really like having us there, probably because we speak English properly, which they do not get to hear most of the time, we are foreigners, which is always fun, and we give them something entertaining to do in the evening.

Overall, I am pretty excited that on top of teaching primary aged kids, I also have the added bonus of the monks. Not something everyone can boast.