Only One Week Left

As the semester comes to a close at the end of this month, the students are required to write final exams. Similar to most colleges, the exams are administered during/after the final week of school. Thai teachers test each student on their acquired knowledge from the entire year, obviously requiring a great amount of studying. For this reason, English teachers refrain from testing during that week to avoid overwhelming the students. So we test two weeks before instead, putting us currently handing out our final exams each day to each seperate class, a monotonous task. But another factor has come into play, the bi-annual speech contest. This includes different categories of memorization, comprehension, pronunciation and summarization. For the last month, I have been working with the comprehension contestants every Tues-Fri from 2-4. During this process, my four students are given ten minutes to read a speech and prepare to speak it. Then they say a memorized introduction before reading the speech with proper pronunciation and body language. After corrections, they summarize what they've read before I ask them questions about it. So overall, this process actually includes every category with mine being the most difficult. As you can imagine, understanding a speech written in another language can be tough if you don't know the meaning of every word. As helpful as a native English speaker is over a Thai, volunteering has caused me to miss my classes during that time. It wasn't so bad when the students missed small lessons, but it's quite the inconvenience when testing. Luckily the contest is tomorrow, so next week will be free to finish collecting my final grades for each class. Then come the weekend, Wes and I are packing up and starting our travels. We haven't been living large in Hat Yai simply to save as much money as possible before backpacking for six weeks. However, we have been spending a lot more time downtown since the weather has taken a turn. We haven't had a drop of rain in weeks, perfect for taking in the best (or worst) of this city while we're still here.

Fabric vendors and pigs' heads in Gim Yong Market

Consistent with the typical pattern year after year, February is the end of the wet season and the start of the hot. It's been gorgeous until now, but it'll be perfect to get out of town when it gets unbearably hot. Hopefully the weather deities will have mercy on us during the final week!