On Tuesday morning I was due to be collected by Teacher Det at 7:30 to be taken to school. Chloe - an intern from last semester - told me not to expect students on the first day and that it would more than likely just be a meeting for the teachers. So there I was having a lift to school and trying to have some sort of conversation with Pi-Det (using Pi in front of someone's nickname is like a sign of respect) he doesn't speak much English but he tries, and I notice there are loads of school kids on motorbikes around. Turns out that all the kids started school on Tuesday too… s***!

I was told that for school I had to cover my shoulders, knees and toes, so I had bought knee length skirts as we wouldn't be allowed to wear trousers and proper closed shoes. The Thai schools follow certain colours for certain days of the week. Monday is yellow for the King, Tuesday is pink, Wednesday is green, Thursday is orange (the colour of Surathani Province) and Friday is pale blue for the Queen. Banbangrup School follows the colours for the days of the week and I have to cover my shoulders but apart from that I could wear flip-flops and trousers if I wanted to!

The students wear the same blue and white uniform everyday. The girls wear knee length blue skirts and a loose white blouse with a loose bow around their necks and white socks with grey bottoms (the students have to take their shoes off inside any classrooms and hallways). The boys wear knee length brown shorts with a belt and gold buckle with a tucked in white short-sleeved shirt and brown or white socks. You can always pick on the boys for having their shirt untucked.

When I arrived at school I was introduced to Teacher Ann who was busy talking into a microphone in Thai to all of the students who were on the field. Every morning at 8am the kids do some sort of morning activity, a bit like an assembly but outside on the field.

The school is made up of around 6 buildings and each classroom has two doors and usually bars instead of windows. The students are split into Prathom and Matthayom, Prathom is like primary school and Matthayom is like secondary school, each has a separate building. They are split into P1-3 for ages 6-8, P4-6 for ages 9-11 and M1-3 for ages 12-14 although there are some M3's who are 15 & 16. There is also a kindergarten but I don't teach those.

Once Ann had finished with the morning activity I had to sign in and I was introduced to some other teachers who's names are so hard to remember! I was taken to what Ann calls the English office but really its an office for the Matthayom teachers, there I have a desk and it has air-conditioning. The next few hours of my first day was spent sitting in on Ann's lessons with her form, telling them what they were allowed to wear, how their hair should be and various other things in Thai. Oh and some karaoke! Her classroom is where I will be teaching quite a few of my lessons with M1-3, it is a reasonable size and has huge heavy desks and a few cupboards with resources in them, a few ceiling fans and a projector as well as a microphone and amp set - they LOVE microphones!

Throughout the day Ann kept saying to me something that sounded like murder mystery… I had no idea what she was talking about and managed to just smile and keep talking about something else. It wasn't until later in the day when she said 'if you have no lessons late in the afternoon and you are tired just go to murder mystery and sleep' Then it clicked 'my dormitory', Ann lives an hour and a half from the school so Monday - Friday she lives at the school in a little wooden shack type building with a couple of other teachers. The murder mystery is where we go for lunch as the canteen is 'broken' and it will not be fixed for two weeks (a bit like the internet) so I have to bring lunch or just eat food that the other teachers give to me. The students have food at lunchtime though so I'm not sure how the canteen is broken. On my first day Ann ordered me some fried rice from a local restaurant and I sat and ate that with some of the other teachers in the murder mystery. On my second day (which is when they told me about the canteen still being broken for another 2 weeks) we went out for lunch at said restaurant. There was Ann, Pi-Bao, myself and 3 other male teachers, none of whos names I can remember. As everything was written in Thai Ann ordered for me, some pork and rice as they had no chicken and an iced coffee (ga-fe yen). Unfortunately the pork was deep fried and so greasy and the coffee was gross but I ate and drank them all the same. Everyday since we've eaten in the murder mystery and they give me rice and we all share various different dishes from curries to sushi type stuff. I think only 2 teachers actually live there but there is always between 4 and 6 of us eating lunch. They have adopted a stray mangy black cat with half its tail missing and called it Chicken! There is a toilet (of the squat variety) in the murder mystery so I can use that instead of one that the kids have been using!

After lunch on my first day Ann, I, the director and assistant director had a meeting about what the director wanted me to teach to the students. Essentially fun, games, songs and conversational and situational English. He can't speak much English himself but he tries and is very friendly. We then went back to one of Ann's lessons and just before going home I met with the English teacher for Prathom and the assistant director to get my timetable. I have 15 hours of teaching each week and I teach each class once - this covers every year from P1-M3 and I can teach the same topics just at different levels. My first topic had to be greetings and so I had to plan a lesson that evening for the following day. When Pi-Det was finished for the day he came to collect me from my office and we got home around 5:30 - 10 hours out of the house was exhausting and I still needed to plan a lesson and prepare for the next day - which involved going out to buy a football to use in my lessons - it's already become my favourite tool!

On Wednesday morning Pi-Det collected me and he had put some western music into his car for me. I get to listen to about 3 Metallica songs and then the rest of it seems to be the same female pop group who sing songs with lyrics like 'dear diary I saw him again today, how do I let him know I feel the same way'. After a bit of Wiki research I've discovered that the group is called M2M and they are Swedish but broke up in 2002 - thank god!

I had got my lesson plan sorted and vaguely knew what I was going to teach, my first class was with P4 followed immediately by P5. Their classroom is SO sweaty with open sides and a couple of ceiling fans. I was nervous too which wouldn't have helped. A few of the boys were messing around with marbles so I confiscated them and made them count them out loud in English at the end of the lesson before they could have them back. In my P4 class one of the girls sitting by my feet decided that she would poke my skin on a fairly regular basis - I don't think these kids have seen many Farangs. I was glad when 11:30 came and it was lunch-time, both of my first lessons had been so chaotic but I think the students enjoyed it.

In between my lessons when I have free time I sit in the Matthayom office as it has air-con although I discovered it was set to 30 degrees, so not much point really.

My last lesson of my first day was with M2 and they were brilliant, they understood me and their English was already at a good level. This put my mind a little more at ease at being able to cope with 20 weeks of teaching.

The next two days teaching went pretty smoothly, no amazing classes, I even had a class not turn up at all, which suited me I wasn't looking forward to a double class of P3s. When I teach P1-3 I am in the ICT suite (a large room with air-conditioning and despite its name there is 1 computer in there!) and I have 50-60 students at once rather than 25ish, this is harder work as their level of English is very low but I am supposed to have at least one Thai teacher in the room with me. My lesson with P1s on Friday was brilliant, they are about 5/6 years old and I had two Thai teachers to help out. We sat in a large circle and rolled the ball around saying Hello, Good Morning, Good Afternoon and My name is. We practiced the numbers too and the Thai teachers have a little rhyme for when the kids do well and they sung it in English. It goes, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, VERY GOOD! At the end of the class the teacher picked on the students who either weren't taking part or speaking in Thai and made them stand up and dance in a circle like chickens, it was the funniest thing I had seen in a long time.

As it is starting to hit monsoon season we had a bit of rain through the week but it threw it down on Friday and of course I hadn't taken an umbrella so I sat in my empty classroom and watched the rain for a while.

When it came time to go home on Friday I was so looking forward to the weekend and some SLEEP, teaching in the heat is extremely tiring. The 25 minute journey is quite interesting, everyday we see so many wild dogs running around and a lot of people keep hens and cockrels, there is a man who walks his buffalo 100m down the road in the morning and back again in the evenings! Luckily I could carry on with my greetings lesson plan with each class until next Wednesday so I didn't have to worry about doing too much over the weekend!