The majority of them believe they have made a big difference in the lives of their students.  Even if the teaching period is as short as a few weeks.

How is this possible?  Two things:  confidence and competence.

Our teachers build confidence.  In Bangkok schools which typically have an enrolment of 1,000 to 4,000 foreign teachers are common.  However, students in most rural schools with  enrolments of less than 500, never get to see a foreign teacher.  So for them, volunteers like you are a gift which makes them feel better about their own value as students.  This in turn builds confidence in their own ability to learn what has been up until now a very difficult subject.

So for them, volunteers like you are a gift which makes them feel better about their own value as students.  This in turn builds confidence in their own ability to learn what has been up until now a very difficult subject.

Confidence, as well, grows rapidly in an environment which is encouraging rather than corrective.  In there other English classes, rote memorization and repetition are the order of the day.  In this environment mistakes are constantly corrected, thereby suppressing participation.  If you choose, instead, to create a no-fault zone in your classroom students will lose their self-consciousness and real language learning can proceed at a rapid pace. 

Secondly, our teachers build competence.  You could never teach enough content in just a few weeks to see big results in a student’s ability.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  However, as we’ve seen, Thai students have a pretty extensive vocabulary and a submerged, latent ability to use English.  If you see yourself as a key to unlock this ability you can witness amazing progress.  From the students’ perspective, this progress can be very rapid.  The confidence from rapid improvement leads to further improvement and so on.