English Camp at Watpranonnongpheung School

Math camps. Computer camps. Physics camps. Outdoors camps. Why not English camp? Hard for a farang (westerner speaking English) to get your head around. Think again. There are six billion of us on the earth. A minority of that group speaks English, fast becoming the language of choice for commerce, travel, many forms of prosperity.

Dr. Pearl's undergraduate ESL methods class for its third time traveled to a rural elementary school to spend the morning at English Camp. This wonderful invention is meant to teach children, this time fourth and sixth graders, simple English words and sentences. In the three hours I was there, I witnessed about 50 children broken down into four groups to rotate through four games.


Among the games were charades, bingo, and find the letter in the pile of strach and make a word out of the found letters. From the laughter and smiles of the children, I'd say the venture was a success.

One of my TESOL colleagues commented at lunch when I returned from Camp that the lack of teacher training for and the paucity of the actual English instruction destines most of these children to the most minimal fluency in English. This might be different in some suburban and urban schools.


I was wondering how large the English Camp idea is and googled it. Not too surprisingly, there are many all over the world suited for many different economic levels and with various personalities. One that caught my eye is called Dragonfly English Camp. Its web literature reads:

A Dragonfly English Camp package provides your students with the trip of a lifetime to one of our partner resorts and hotels. We have carefully selected Thailand’s best English Camp locations where we know that out students will be happy and well taken care of.
We have locations by the sea, in the hills and in other popular tourist destinations to choose from depending on the style of camp that you plan on running. We also cater for many levels of budget starting with the large dormitory style accommodation which anybody can enjoy ranging up to the 5* hotel style accommodation which provides your students with exceptional luxury.

LizLydiaAngelaDavidErikaMichaelChinaChicagoBurmaEnglandMinnScotland

TE 812, Language in Literature, three hours a week for five weeks, six students, Fridays from 1 til 4, my first time teaching in Thailand. Buddhism is infectious in this country, wats are everywhere, and I must admit that as I prepared for this course, I was reading two paperbacks, Karma for Today's Traveler, by Phra Bhasakorn Bhavilai, with David Freyer, and The Heart of the Buddha, by Chogyam Trungpa. Both affected me deeply as I thought about teaching.

Karma is written by a Buddhist monk from Thailand who was a physics major in college, then a professional photographer, and then someone who attempted, successfully I think, to bring his own inner world together with the outer world, both based on order, cause and effect. By not starting with a belief in a God who shapes the universe, Buddhism asks us to use reason to work out an orderly system of belief and behavior. Along with The Heart of the Buddha, a more scholarly introduction to Buddhism, Karma got me thinking about how Buddhism and successful teaching / learning are connected. Here's the course purpose as I gave it to my students five weeks ago:

"Imaginative literature is language made into art and experience. We write and read literary art for delight and utility. The delight of literature is the joy of a good story, in whatever form the literature, seen as story, takes. Literature’s utility is the way it instructs us about life and enlarges our linguistic and personal fluency,our imagination and our reason. When literature works for us, it invites us to be compassionate beings open to our world.

The course will introduce us to the powers of imaginative literature (poems, stories and essays) as we apply those powers in a TESOL setting. There is no reason students learning a language cannot partake in the joys and wonders of literature, and every reason they should. I’ve seen students focus solely on ESL instruction in grammar, phonetics and vocabulary building, losing the larger picture of communication that language opens to us.

Since your instructor has never taught this course in this particular form before, it will be a growth and learning experience for all of us. Throughout the course, we will be open to self-reflection and course readjustment. The course, while very short, will succeed when it asks us to stretch our imaginations and reason, and when it reaches the highest goals of delight and enlightenment. With an equal emphasis on theory and practice, the course will empower us to be better ESL and English teachers.

Since I just mentioned enlightenment, permit me to borrow and adapt a few thoughts from the great Buddhist scholar Chogyam Trungpa. Enlightenment is the goal not only of Buddhism, but of most forms of human growth and education. Good teachers and students remove our own psychological and emotional barriers, and our obsessional attachment to habits and the things of the culture, so that we can ask the great questions of life and literature, questions that are already inside us and struggling to get out. Good teachers permit us to be open to our essential being, and to see with our fullest attention directed at the subject of study.

At its best, literature, intense feeling and thought shaped into art, invites us to combine the intellectual and rational with the intuitive and imaginative to see and experience the world clearly. When we can respond with our whole being to literature, as well as when we can create literature ourselves, we begin to open ourselves with curiosity, confidence, strength, vulnerability and a will to grow. We learn to take a chance, a risk. We learn that life is chance and risk.

By reading literature carefully and completely, we identify with what we see in the literature, and soon can become the words and images, the characters and metaphors. Such identification is a form of compassion. We discover soon that the knowledge and vicarious experience we gain from literature becomes wisdom through the compassion that guides our reading and living strategies."

Flower Festival and Carnival

We had for several weeks reveled in the Chinese New Year celebrations of festivals, fireworks and special foods in Chiang Mai when the Flower Festival kicked off yesterday morning at about 8 am with 23 flower-saturated floats parading over Kaew Nawarat Bridge. Tawee Layramen, my Thai friend for Montpelier, Ohio, and his sister Seichan picked me up at seven and left us at the bridge.


There, two sets of stands held dignitaries, one for judging the floats, the other for giving welcoming speeches. Then, for the next three or more hours a parade of sights, sounds and smells moved down the street to our delight.

This Festival is held annually in February here in CM, and by the looks of it, it compares favorably to our July 4th parades. It certainly celebrated the beauties of Thailand (each float featured one or more beautiful Thai women, usually sitting below the Buddha image), with schools, companies and provinces sponsoring the floats. There were bands, dancers, acrobats, the three kings, folk music and cultural performances, and I saw only a small portion of the three day celebration.

The Flower Fest is a national event, with performers coming from all over Thailand. I can conclude only by saying it would have been far more fun if Dianne's return to the US hadn't started two days ago. But I'm pleased to report that she's home safe and sound.

Meeting Rajabhat's English Department

On Wednesday, Jan. 28, Dianne and I were picked up by a Payap U. van and driver, and taken, with Dr. Pearl inside, three hours north to a luxurious four star Chiang Rai resort on the Mekong River. We arrived to breakfast and introductions to Rajabhat's English Department, about eight faculty and their chair. Our purpose was to evaluate their proposed English MA program, which we had seen in draft a week ago. The conference room held a long table around which the faculty were seated; introductions were made and we began discussion, starting with an opening salvo by Dr. Pearl (my Payap supervisor and department chair), and followed with my own two cents worth. Our critique seems to be well received; the discussion became animated at times and continued for almost three hours without break.

All this was just fine, except for one thing: The room was freezing cold. Probably in the mid 50s, and nobody said anything as the air conditioner blasted away full force. I could see that most of the faculty sat with their hands snuggled between their legs or under their thighs. After an hour, the temperature hovered in the low 50s. Nobody said anything. Actually, I was suffering less than most because before the meeting started, I made a quick escape to the hotel lobby and bought, for less that $15., a wonderful jacket made in China. Finally Dianne weied with her hands folded together and brought to her face and made a quiet retreat out of the room to contact a hotel employee. A minute later the temperature problem had been solved and the room became liveable again. I tell this little story because it's symptomatic of much of Thai life: few will speak up when there's a problem. The yellow shirts occupying the country's airports in Decemeber did it without army or police intervention. There was only one death associated with their protest, so one could say that turning the other cheek at times works.

The meeting continued amicably and smoothly even though the substance of the discussion was anything but easy. The curriculum we had seen before arriving was mostly full of linguistics courses; the Dean of Humanities, who was also present at the meeting, was himself a linguist, and most of the faculty were too. Dianne made an impassioned argument for the humanities; I spoke of the US English major at most universities as a tripod of literature, writing and language study. Pearl supported this drift and enhanced it with her own arguments, persuasive especially because she herself has advanced degrees in linguistics. When we finished the morning, the curriculum had two tracks, one in writing and literature, the other in language and linguistics. And, finally, much to Dianne's and my surprise, the English Department chairwoman handed me an envelope with a thank you letter (in Thai), and a very generous stack of Thai baht.

Sunday Walking Market

The Sunday Walking Market at the Tha Phae Gate of the old town is wonderful, with great people watching, good food and hundreds of vendors all trying to sell their colorful wares. For the weary, there are also comfortable chairs and foot or head and shoulder massages. It sure beats T.J. Max or Filene's Basement. Come stroll through with us. We'll probably have to go again tonight since it's my last Sunday in Chiang Mai for awhile. And I forgot to mention, there IS a Starbucks on many, if not every, corner in Chiang Mai--at least where the tourists tend to congregate.

You can also see that selling at the market is a family affair--after, all, sweet babies and cute children could very well mean better sales.



Of course, the market is also a wonderful place for an impromptu picnic--or just the usual way many have Sunday dinner.

The place is always a shoppers' paradise. It's hard to choose just one--of anything or everything! "Madame--would you like two for a good discount?"

But there IS rest for the wicked--or at least, an inexpensive darn good massage! 60 baht for 30 minutes, less than 2 dollars.

On the way home, we could stop by a wat and purge all our capitalistic and materialistic urges for something more pure and cleansing.