10/6/2007 - Visiting teacher brings taste of Thai culture to PHS
by Kevin Mullaney
Banner Correspondent
PROVINCETOWN — Don’t be surprised if one day your child comes home and asks if you can make Pad Thai for dinner or writes his or her name in Thai for you, because the Provincetown School system has a special guest this year — Amornmarn Vipatayothin, a high school teacher visiting from Thailand.
Vipatayothin comes this way as part of the American Field Service Global Educators Program. Perhaps best known for their high school exchange-student program started back in 1947, AFS also offers exchange programs for teachers. This school year there are 52 visiting teachers in the U.S. from China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Turkey and Honduras. Nineteen of them are from Thailand, and Ms. Vipatayothin is the only one teaching in Massachusetts.
Petite and quick to smile, Vipatayothin is a very young looking 46 year old with a master’s degree in English as a foreign language. She has been teaching at Assumption Commercial College, a Catholic high school in Bangkok, for over 20 years. It is the first business school in Thailand to do all the teaching in English. She is single and has one sibling, an older brother who also lives in Bangkok. This is her first time in the United States.
“I believe everyone has his/her own dream,” Vipatayothin wrote in a brief sketch called “Who am I?” “Me, too,” she writes. “I visited Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Singapore and Switzerland many years ago,” she wrote, saying that America she has always dreamed of visiting. “It’s unbelievable that my dream has come true.”
The dream-come-true will last for the entire school year, and there are three objectives: First, to learn the American culture and American methods of teaching. For example, how we teach math. Second, to share Thai culture with American students — meaning Provincetown students — and third, to become fluent in spoken and written English.
Volunteers acting as host families and a mentor teacher are what make the program work, and Vipatayothin right now is staying with her mentor, Language Arts teacher Carol D’Amico. D’Amico will be her mentor teacher all year – helping her to make the best use of her time and experience, helping to obtain materials and being a liaison between Vipatayothin and the other teachers and the administration. D’Amico set up a host family network with her and three other teachers: Angela Caruso, the retired adjustment counselor, French teacher Genevieve Martin and librarian Fran Manion. Vipatayothin will live with each for three months.
During the school year Vipatayothin will be at all levels, elementary through high school, working with the regular classroom teachers as she both observes and introduces Thailand and Thai culture to the kids. She came prepared. She has a DVD she made in Thailand, a Power Point presentation, and each of her various lessons are mapped out meticulously in a three-ring binder. Right now she has three permanent classes, teaching Global Studies to fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders.
Vipatayothin spent her first two weeks in the elementary school and remarked on the amount of independence here. Thai classes are a very structured environment. “Here students have chance to learn by themselves,” she says, doing a lot more reading on their own and coming back to class to express their ideas. In Thailand, she says, the teachers give the knowledge to the kids. “There’s a lot more independence here,” she says.
“The kids are interested. They are eager to know a lot about Thailand,” she says of the Provincetown students. She’s going to a conference in Maine this week, to meet with all the visiting teachers and their liaisons and share their experiences. She’s been to New York City, and D’Amico, of Italian descent, took her to Boston to meet her family during St. Anthony’s feast. She’s been in the dunes, and last weekend went to the Wellfleet Oyster Festival. Vipatayothin loved looking at all the different artists’ work. She, too, is an artist in her free time and made the earrings she was wearing. “Earrings in the United Sates are expensive,” she says.
“Provincetown is small and quiet, a beautiful town — no traffic, no pollution,” she says, compared to the big city of Bangkok. While she’s in the U.S. she said she would especially like to see two things: the Golden Gate Bridge and Harvard University, the former because teaching in Thailand, she shows a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge as a famous place in America; the latter because in Thailand they always praise someone who gets accepted to Harvard.
“As I mentioned above,” her brief sketch concludes, “America is the country of my dream. Now I am in your country. I will gain as many new experiences as I can.”
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