I’m really annoyed.  I need to do a border hop every 3 months, leave the country and come back in in order to keep my visa valid.  Pat told me the school won’t take me to Mae Sot to do my border hop, that I had to do it on my own time on a weekend.  Then when Noi found out what I was doing this weekend she asked why I didn’t ask to have the school driver take me.  I told her that I was told I had to do it on my own time.  She didn’t believe me and insisted that the school driver could take me.  Then she said I should have told her.  She’s going to Mae Sot on Thursday to take students for a field trip and I could have gone with her.  How was I supposed to know that?  I already booked and paid for a hotel.  Then I find out Robin has to do his border hop next week and the school is only taking him because he has a different visa than me and has paperwork the School Director has to sign at the immigration office.  Why couldn’t I have gone with them?  I’m trying to tell myself it will be fun to get to a bigger city for a weekend, but it’s not working.  I’m just annoyed.  Pat said she’d call and order my bus ticket, but every time I ask her about it, she acts like I’m asking her to drive the bus herself.  She’s so busy and this is such an imposition.  She offered and I’m paying for all of this myself so that I may stay in the country three more months to work for them.  How am I the bad guy in all this?

I’m almost caught up on lesson plans for next week and Pat comes to me with a task to write the curriculum for the MEP (Mini English Program).  This will be submitted to Bangkok and will determine if they get to have the MEP program next semester.  What?  How am I qualified for creating a document for school policy and programming?  This is a job for school administration or the head of the language department.  She gave me an example another school wrote.  I pretty much rewrote a couple sections and reformatted it since it was so badly formatted it didn’t fit on the pages.  But, it took up all of my free time the rest of the week.  Next I have to create a class syllabus, but I have no idea what that entails or what it should look like.  It’s half way through the semester and now I have to create the syllabus for what I’m going to teach?  I guess half of it will be easy since I’ve already taught it.  I’m pretty sure “I’m going to wing it and hope that what I decide to teach is new and useful information since I have no idea what they already know or what the country would like for me to teach them” is not a good syllabus description.  So, I’ll have to come up with something for the second half.

My monk class is so much work to prepare for and by the time school is done, I’m exhausted and I don’t want to do it.  But, it always ends up being fun and the looks on everyone’s faces makes it more fun.  They are really enjoying learning English.  Ging has decided to join the class.  She made me dinner tonight and brought it to me at class.  That was so nice and so much better than what I was going to try to scrounge up at home since my refrigerator is almost empty.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore