Tong and James (Jirayu) at School

This week has been pretty slow for me. Mostly I've just been puttering around my parents' house, but yesterday I was a bit sick, so I spent most of the day in bed with a huge headache. Tuesday was a bit rainy and cold so I think my immune system finally quit on me. One thing I've been doing is going up into my parents' attic and searching through all the boxes I put up there before I moved to Thailand. It's been seven years since I opened those boxes, and so the contents brought back a lot of memories. I found photos from my years in Boston and even some old pictures from my university days. I also found actual LETTERS! Can you believe it? Was it only 15 years ago that people actually sent each other physical pieces of paper with stamps on them? It seems unbelieveably archaic, but yes they did. So I've been reading though old letters from family and friends all week. It's been a trip down memory lane for me.

My parents watch WAY too much TV, but it's been a good way for me to catch up on American culture. My Dad's got some satellite TV system with 5 billion channels on it, but there never seems to be anything good on, :-P. Funny how that works. However I do like watching the DIY (do-it-yourself) Channel and the SyFy (science fiction) Channel. My Dad really likes to watch the TV show "Vegas" and he also likes to watch the high-stakes poker channel. I like watching that TV show too (it's funny), but the poker channel is depressing. Watching those guys throw around thousands (or hundreds of thousands!) of dollars in a card game just makes me think about all the cool things I could do at my Centers with a fraction of that money :-P.

On Tuesday I went into Manitowoc to see how Tong is doing at school. It was his first day and I wanted to make sure he was getting settled in alright. His been a bit homesick lately, and so I'm hoping that now that school has started he won't have so much time to think about it and maybe he'll feel a bit better. My Dad drove me into town and I went to the office first to introduce myself to Mr. Wakeman, the principal at Franklin Elementary (which is just across the street from Bethany Lutheran where Sea, James and Gam go to school). Mr. Wakeman was very friendly and kind. We talked for a bit and then went out onto the playground because the kids had recess. Since it had just rained, the playground lot was covered with earthworms (they come out of the ground when it rains and for some reason they'd crawled all over the pavement). So Mr. Wakeman was busy handling complaints from kids complaining about other kids putting worms on them. Hahah! Kids :-). At first I couldn't find Tong because he was wearing a different jacket (I think Mrs. Pope gave him a raincoat to wear). He was with a group of boys checking out all the worms on the ground.

After break, I followed the kids back into the classroom and took a few pictures of Tong while he was in class. He didn't seem to happy about me taking his picture, but it looked like he was doing OK in the class. The teacher was showing him what to do, and he could understand her instructions, so I think he'll be fine. The school also assigned him two "buddies" to help him out, so he's got some friends his age to talk to already. The interesting thing about Franklin Elementary School is that it already has about 25% non-native speakers attending school there. There are large groups of Hispanic (Mexican) and Hmong (Thai/Laos) people living in Manitowoc and so Franklin has a lot of those students. This means that they are used to dealing with English-as-a-Second-Language students. Mr. Wakeman has also worked with exchange students before, and so he told me he was very happy to have Tong at his school because it will be a valuable learning experience for his students as well. So it looks like Tong is in good hands at that school.

When I returned to Valders, I walked over to Valders Middle School to check on James (Jirayu). It was his second day at the school, and he's also been feeling a bit homesick, so I wanted to make sure he was OK too. First I stopped in the office and talked with Mr. Krey, the middle school principal. He was also very enthusiastic to have James at Valders and told me James seems to be doing pretty well. Since James is staying with Eli Nelson, whose in 6th grade, he's actually attending classes at a lower grade level than he would be in Thailand, but so far it seems to be working out fine. It's been over a decade since I set foot in Valders school and a lot has changed. They just spent a huge amount of money remodeling and expanding the school and so the original middle school is no longer there (and the high school has a big new extension on it). Mr. Krey had to walk me downstairs to the band room or I would have gotten lost :-P.

On the way down to the classroom, I talked with Mr. Krey about the changes that had been made to the school. The 6th grade classroom were now where the cafeteria used to be. Eli had band practice while I was there, so we had to walk over to the music area, which is where the art rooms used to be. I told Mr. Krey, "Well, at least they can't move the gym. That's got to be in the same place". But just as I said that we walked past the old gym area, and it's now a library. Haha! So everything has been moved around! When we got to the band room, James was sitting with Eli while Eli played the sousaphone. The kids were practicing some marching band music and they were excited to have a stranger in the room taking their pictures and videotaping them. I tried not to disrupt the class too much, so I only stayed for a little while, but James seemed to be doing fine.

After that I wandered around the school for a bit see what else has changed. By chance I wandered past Mr. Evans room. Holy cow! He's still there! He was MY social studies teacher when I went to school! So I had to stop in and say, "Hi". He still had one of my paintings I did for him up on his wall, awwww! We chatted for a bit, but he was in the middle of a lesson, so I told him I would stop by later and talk to his class about what it's like to live overseas. I also stopped by the high school office to talk to the high school principal. Even though I don't have any students attending Valders High School, I wanted to introduce myself and talk a bit about plans for the next trip in October! I didn't take any pictures of the outside of the school. I'm going to wait for a sunny day to get some nicer photos.

On the way back home, it started to rain. The temperature was around 40-45'F (4-7'C), so it was just about freezing. However, the kids were still out on the playground, and I noticed that they still had football (soccer) practice going on, so the kids were running around in the cold, wet rain. I can't imagine that happening at a school in Thailand! Hahah! That's one of the biggest differences between Thailand and Wisconsin. In Thailand, people spend a most of their day inside, especially when there's bad weather, but in Wisconsin, people go outdoors regardless of the weather. If they have something to do (like football practice), they'll be outside no matter how miserable it is out there. So maybe now some of my students won't think I'm so crazy for walking around in Nonthaburi too.