Teaching across borders - Thailand

Join us on the ACT podcast as Grant Wootton shares his decade-long experience teaching in rural Thailand. Explore his motivations, challenges faced in the classroom, and the unique opportunities to impact young lives for the sake of the gospel. This episode will be a fascinating listen for those curious about state funded education overseas and anyone interested in cross-cultural education!  

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Transcript

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Welcome to the ACT podcast. I'm Lizzie Harewood, and today we're going to be thinking about what it means to teach across borders. We're gonna be thinking about how state schools operate in different countries around the world, and perhaps what lessons we as Christian teachers in the UK may be able to learn. So it's great to have Grant Witton with us. Now Grant, I was doing a little bit of research on you. You obviously as your accent will betray in a few moments, you do not come from the UK. You are from the US originally, but you've spent quite a number of years working in Thailand in particular in just rural state schools. This is quite a unique educational context. What on earth drew you from the US to Thailand and what kept you there for about a decade? Thanks for having me, Lizzie. Very glad to be here. And yes, originally from the US. If I went into the full story of how I got to Thailand, it we'd be here the rest of the day just on that. But I went to Thailand essentially because I learned of the need. So I was being trained to work with a Christian nonprofit and Christian efforts social efforts throughout the world. That's where I got my background. My initial training was in Bible and theology and intercultural studies. So I was on that track already, and then I did my internship in Thailand, which was part of our program, and I learned while I was there that the Thai government of the Buddhist government, sorry, of Thailand was looking for more Christian English language teachers specifically. Okay. And they were asking for that. Now, it wasn't an open call. They hadn't posted online saying, "Please, more Christians come," but it was something that was going on behind the scenes. A little bit of background, Thailand i- is a Buddhist nation. I would say it's the purest Buddhist nation in the world in the sense that it's very much- Interwoven into the state there and it's very i- assumed as part of the culture that if you are Thai, you are Buddhist. And I would say it's 90, 95% of the population, maybe higher whereas Christianity represents less than 1% of the total population of Thailand today, those who would claim to be Christian, especially those who are ethnically Thai. Even that 1% would be mostly the hill tribe populations in the north. So those who would say that they are ethnically mainstream Thai because of course the hill tribes have a right to call themselves Thai in a sense that population is pretty much unreached today. Wow. Despite, I would say, over a century plus of of missionary efforts- in the land. So this ask of the Thai government behind the scenes of the Thai church leaders, to please use their connections to the West which are clear and established to help them find more qualified English language teachers and specifically Christians when I heard about that I immediately perked up and go, I think I can be part of a response to that ask." And so that's how I ended up in the middle of nowhere teaching in the state schools in a province called Sukhothai, and we moved there in 2015. Yeah. Okay. So you moved from... Where in the US are you from? Sorry. I come from a military background family, so we moved quite a bit. Okay. But most of my childhood was spent in either South Carolina or North Carolina. Yeah. Okay. So you moved from the US. You went over to Thailand. I presume you did some training. You were teaching English language, but I... But you also then ended up teaching English literature. Is that correct? I did. But first of all, you must have had to learn Thai Yes. So- Wow my s- my first year in Thailand I was still a student, right? I was on my internship in the city that if anybody's been to Chiang Mai, they know this one, it's Chiang Mai. Or sorry, into Thailand, Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai's up in the north. Bangkok's the one, the other one that everybody knows, and then maybe you know some of the names of the islands down south. Yeah. The coast ones. Yeah. I spent the first year in Chiang Mai as a student, and we didn't yet have children, my wife and I, so I had a little more time than I do these days. And I spent seven to eight hours a day in language study independent language study or or going out and practicing in the markets and talking with people. So within the first six months of living in Thailand I achieved a pretty high level of fluency in the language. So that served me very well. There's no way we could have moved to the countryside without it, yeah. Okay. Wow. Because when many teachers, or many Christian teachers move abroad, they often go to work in international schools- and may learn some of the language, but generally are teaching and working in the medium of English, and yet so you went, you learnt the native language, but then you started delivering English language and literature lessons in the medium of Thai. I cannot- Yeah begin, I'm an English language and literature teacher, and I cannot begin to imagine how difficult that must have been. Tell us a little bit about how about the challenges and delights of that. I went on to, to get further training. So I got my my master's in in teaching English as a foreign language or teaching English to speakers of other languages through Biola University. I did that via distance program because most of the people taking this program actually are already on at- overseas teaching. I- it's really a speci- a special program for people in my situa- in my situation. So I ended up getting a master's degree in that, which came in handy, as you might- might imagine. And and yet the challenges that I faced- Were extreme, I think y-y-you could say when I came into the school. So the first school I taught in, the name of the school is Anuban Sukhothai, right? So Sukhothai is the province, and there were 2,000 children. There's only about 30,000, 40,000 people in this town, and there's 2,000 children in this one school, right? And this is due to the demographic realities of Thailand. Most of the children and elderly will live in the countryside, and those of working age will move to the big city to find work. Okay. And so you'll live... You'll grow up with your grandparents. Your grandparents will look after you, and they'll have money coming in from mom and dad in the city. So the demographics are a bit strange. You'll have children and older people, and then everybody of working age is not around, right? Yeah, so it was a extremely big school, 2,000 children, and they didn't have any established English language curriculum. They didn't have anything to t- to give me as far as, like, where to start. And because I was, like, the most qualified English language teacher they'd ever had, and they were quite delighted to have me come from so far away to teach they gave me all the classes that they possibly could. Wow. So I ended up teaching from ages w- what we would say first grade, so six to seven all the way up to 12. And I... And I was doing that, and I was building the curriculum at the same time that I was teaching, right? So I had an out-of-doors desk in the tropical heat. It regularly got up to 40 degrees, right? Oof. And a lot of our rooms weren't air-conditioned I had classes of at times 50-plus second graders, so we're talking eight-year-olds, right? In, in a concrete box with sweating so bad the chalkboard doesn't work, right? Because your- Oh your hand is so wet. And yet it was also delightful because it was so clear that that the kids were just so eager to learn. And I learned so much so quickly about how teaching is... it goes beyond the presentation of information, right? And even the transfer of information, but really building an atmosphere of trust, of enjoyment- with the children. And I would say that especially when I was teaching the younger kids, and I think any teacher can relate to this, the job was as much a performance as it was a, a plan that you were carrying out, right? Sure. Yeah. Because if you could keep yourself engaged and get responses coming back on a regular basis, then the children would stay engaged with you as well. Yeah. Yeah but yeah, so there was a lot of Thai. I would say 80% of my instruction for the younger years was in Thai, and the other 20% was in English, right? To build those bridges. And then as the years would progress, then we would establish routines in English that then they would know the responses to. But it was extremely challenging, yeah. So can you tell me then a little bit more about your motivation to want to go into perhaps these rural government schools, these places where as you say, they're not gonna be necessarily the slightly more comfortable international schools- yeah where you live in a compound and... what was that about? Why did you feel led there? Mostly because all the other ground was saturated, right? Sure. In Thailand you have an over-concentration of both charitable work and Christian work happening in Chiang Mai specifically, and in Bangkok a little bit. And outside of that, almost nothing. Yeah. Now, to say nothing would be an insult to the people that are doing things. Sure. There, there's lots of things happening. But if you were to look at it proportionally, the vast- majority- of all the work happening in the country, and all the work that has happened in these two population centers, where most of the country and even the culture is flowing from, right? The countryside, where- where the population resides. So I wanted to go where the ground wasn't already saturated. I wanted to go where I could meet needs that if I didn't go, those needs probably weren't going to be met. So that was a big part of why I went. And, in, in Christian parlance we would say these were the more unreached places, right? These are the places that there really wasn't a Christian presence much at all. There was one established church that had a regular attendance of about 60 people in this town of 40,000, right? And so we did establish... or I established a connection with them when we first arrived and we attended the whole time. And we tried as much as we could to tie myself there to, to them having invited me and hosted me so we could build up the reputation of the church in the town. But it was an opportunity to be a light in many ways- where there, there really wasn't much light. Yeah. So you went into this school, and obviously you were saying that that Thailand is... in effect, the state religion is Buddhism. And are the school... would that be the predominant worldview that is presented or the lens through which education is delivered? Or is it something that's much more just grounded in culture? No it's very much enforced- Okay. Okay and in the schools. There's a morning assembly in Thailand where everybody lines up in front of flags and the images of the monarchy. And also, usually there's a statue of the Buddha as well as maybe some local gods, Okay because Thailand is actually quite syncretistic, and Buddhism allows for this, right? There's not really any for... There's not really anything written in Buddhism that would forbid you from also extending your adoration or worship to other spiritual beings. In fact, the worldview, being born out of Hinduism makes room for the entire Hindu pantheon to exist. And you might say the Buddha was indifferent to whether or not that was true or not, but it- but it was still allowed for. And so in Thailand, you have a mix of the old folk religion that existed there even before Buddhism came on the scene. And then you also have Buddhism itself. So they would have, their array of local deities or spirits as well as the as well as the statue of the Buddha. And they would they would spend some time in the morning performing suot mon or incantations and meditation according to the Buddhist teaching and as well as maybe saying a prayer or two to the spirit house that exists at the front of the school gate. And so all of it is very much interwoven. And when I say enforced that literally. If a child wasn't compliant with the practices in the morning, then they would be disciplined. So it is it is not optional to- to, participate. Yeah. That's really interesting, and I think this probably shows sort of my naivety because I think I perhaps was under the false assumption, presupposition that- Buddhism was quite a sort of gentle worldview and wouldn't be enforced in that sense, but would be more just embedded in culture. Yeah. So how, as a Christian then- Yeah how were you received? Were you overtly Christian, or was that, as you say, with the syncretism, was that sort of embraced as just another deity? I was overtly Christian. I think that's very important actually. I was there with a Christian nonprofit with a stated purpose of making it known who it is that we follow- yeah And making his teachings more widely known. And I never wanted to be there under any pretense, right? Or under any kind of mask. I also was really def- really it was very important to me that they understood that the job I was doing I knew that they'd hired me to do that job. They didn't hire me- Sure to come evangelize. They didn't hire me to- yeah to, and I'm there under the trust of parents, right? Yeah. Who, who are not expecting their children to try to be indoctrinated or swayed one way or the other in a classroom. That's not why I'm there. That's not what they've hired me to do. And unfortunately there is a precedent set in this part of the world where some have thought it best to be a bit clandestine. And that has really damaged our reputation, right? So in order to come and not have any of those connotations come with my person, the first thing we would do when we come into a school, and I say we because eventually I was helping bring in other teachers who had the same mindset and qualifications. I would sit down with the Paul A or the director of the school and I would say, "This is who I am. This is where I come from. This is why I'm here. And I'm a follower of Jesus. Luke said, 'Payesu,' right? And what that means, here, I'm gonna tell you exactly what that means for you and what it means for your school. It means I'm gonna be the best teacher I can possibly be. It means that I'm going to show up on time. It means you're not gonna have me coming in drunk." That happened a lot in Thailand, so you had to sp- specify it. Wow. Yeah. Wow I'm not going to, damage the reputation of the school, and I'm going to show love and compassion to, to everyone that I can in line with the teachings of him, he who I follow. What it doesn't mean is, I would actually explicitly say this, it doesn't mean that I'm going to use my classroom as a platform for evangelism. That's not, you can trust me, that's not going to happen. That's not what you've hired me to do. Sure. That's not what I'm here to teach. You've hired me to teach English. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it to the best of my ability. If a child or a parent or a colleague gets curious and wants to know more about me and my beliefs or why I do things the way that I do, and they ask me questions, I want you to know I'm going to answer those questions. I'm going to tell them everything they wanna know. And I'll never shut that conversation down. And so you, Paul Ahl or director of the school, if you are uncomfortable with these realities in any way, you don't have to hire me. But I want us to be on the same page about what it means. And always. They were very gracious. They were delighted even- that someone with strong religious background was coming into the school. See, the Thai feel an affinity with someone who has strong religious background, because they're also quite religious. It's a lot like Paul, on Mars Hill where he said, "I identify with you. I see you're a very religious people. I am also very religious," right? Yeah. He found that common ground. Yeah. And so for the Thai, they actually would feel much more uncomfortable with someone who claims not to have any religious affiliation. Okay. Because they go then where's your moral standing?" Yeah. Yeah. Whereas for me they go, "Oh, yes, of course you have religion. You have a very strong moral stance." And that comforts us rather than, dissuades us. And obviously, one of the best ways to build trust is to be very open at the outset. Sure. So doing that also built a lot of trust. And of course, I'm having all this conversation in their native language, which helps as well. Yeah- Yeah that's the first step we would take when we come into any school, and it really just set the, the tone for the rest of the relationship. And then they watched very closely to see if I bore out what I said and I'm proud to say that we did. But one of the things that students would say when they would put their hands together and they'd be in front of the statues in the morning, and every Thai person will tell you this is which is religion, every religion teaches you to be a good person. Okay? That's actually something that's in the state curriculum and is taught across the entire land, and every child says it every day of school for their entire lives, right? As soon as you start any conversation about religion in Thailand, this word, these words will just tumble out of their mouth almost immediately. Yeah. And what it does is it creates this, I would say, in many ways very positive atmosphere of tolerance, right- for different beliefs and backgrounds. And that's where you see that Buddhist gentleness come in, right? Sure. But the next words they say is I forget the exact phrasing, but it's something like, "Those of us who are Thai in this group," which of course was all of them "now prepare to say your Buddhist incantations." So the, immediately after saying every religion teaches you to be a good person, so we're good there, we've checked that box those of us who are Thai, obviously we're Buddhist, and that means that's, th- this is what we're gonna do next. And so all religions are good, they're all equal footing. Then let's reinforce the fact that for you as a Thai that's why you're attached to this particular religious background, and now we're going to reinforce that. So to be Thai is to be Buddhist, and to reject that religion, see, because you're not doing it on religious grounds, you can't be, they all teach you to be a good person, it must then be a rejection of your ethnic heritage. Okay. And that's, obviously very looked down upon. So it creates a lot of tension. Yeah. That... I just find this so fa- fascinating. And what I'm thinking about now is perhaps some of the lessons that we can learn, or some of the lessons you've perhaps learned from that context, because I can see where, obviously not striking similarities, but perhaps where the nuances can be transferred to the British context. Yeah. Now, obviously in the UK, although we do still have, Christianity still has a place in many schools, and indeed should, largely the kind of, I'd say most schools are functionally secular. And that would probably I assume, be the same with public- Yeah schools in, in the US. But what I'm really interested in is the sort of posture you went into the school with, and that openness. Yeah. Anything you could perhaps suggest there that we could learn from that in our Western schools? I think you know, one of the fastest ways to dissolve tension, awkwardness, or even mediate a relationship in any situation is to name the elephant in the room- Sure from the very outset because when things are silent then you allow people to bring their assumptions into the room, and then project those assumptions onto you about your conduct, about your mindset, about how you view them and others. And the longer you let that go on the more divergent someone's thinking about who you are and what you believe and how you operate can become, right? Versus reality. So that's why we would set the tone from the very beginning. In fact, I didn't even use the word Christian in Thailand because the word Christian had come to have so much cultural baggage in Thailand due to the previous work of others and situations, right? That I would not say Christian, I would say, which is a disciple of Jesus or a follower of Jesus, right? And why W- well, those are functionally the same. Yes, in our context they are, and in reality they are. But by using a new term, I was able to then bring my own definition to that term. Sure. Yeah. And so I think that's something that we can learn from, and it's something that I would highly encourage anybody in a cross cultural situation which is What is happening, I wanna be very clear about that. When you are in the room with somebody who has a different worldview, it's cross-cultural. Whether or not you're both from the UK or not, right? You have a different, fundamentally different way of interacting with reality. You have a different internal culture. It is cross-cultural. It's not as extreme as, an American going to Thailand, but it's still, talking across divides. Yeah. And you'll talk past each other unless you can establish some common ground. So I think the biggest lesson is that being open about your faith and being open about who you are and what it means to you is not going to weaken your position. It's allowing you to define your position. And if you don't define it, others will define it for you. Sure. And often that is going to be done in a way that is not favorable to you, especially in the current climate. I think you've gotta find the right moment, right? But i- if you just say hey, in conversation you can ask Maybe the best way is to ask what motivates them in their teaching and where another person, where they find their base, their energy. Because we all must draw from deep reserves to do teaching on a regular basis. And then, usually they're gonna reciprocate. "Where's your where do your deep reserves come from?" Sure. And then you can just very openly share this is where they come from. And you can also define some of the other awkward things that they might be thinking, that you know they might be thinking. Oh, does that mean you're trying to convert all of the children that you come into ac- interaction with? Or are you judging me silently right now for not being in your camp? And if you just speak those things openly and say, this is what it doesn't mean, and this is what it does mean," now it's a lot harder to project those things onto you- Sure because you've actually said them out loud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that, that's really interesting. I think maybe as Brits we're a little bit more reserved- Yes. Yeah about that. Yeah. And maybe that's something within our culture that we need to get over a little in order to break down those misconceptions. But I think it's really important that we do take that, that that initiative. One of the things I'm really interested in as well is some of the nitty-gritty and I... We spoke before, and I was quite shocked at some of the circ- the sort of circumstances and conditions you found yourself teaching in. Not least the idea of teaching in 40 degrees. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about aside from the kind of perhaps the spiritual challenges and the cultural challenges- but just what you had to do. What was a classroom like? How big were the class sizes? What other obstacles were there? Just so that we can have a little bit of that insight into state education in other nations. There's so much we could dig into, but the climate, the literal climate, from one classroom to another classroom might be different. Because in Thailand there is- Class division even within the state schools. Okay. I'm not sure that it's state-sanctioned, but it goes on a lot where parents who have a little bit more money will pay for their children to be in slightly nicer classrooms with better yeah, with better resources. And those who don't will end up in the classrooms that don't have air conditioning, for example, or yeah What? This is in the same school? This is in the same school, yeah. Wow. So I would go from what they would call a special program where I've only got... which was a small class size to me. I've only got 20, 22 students in a class, and I've got air conditioning, and a TV, and a whiteboard. And then in the same school, the next period I would move buildings, and I would go into a classroom where I have 53 children, no air conditioning. And it's the same size classroom but they're much more packed in and yeah, and I've got a chalkboard to work with. Yeah. So that is rampant throughout, I would say Thailand especially. And again, I don't know how state-sanctioned that is, but it certainly was very common. And ethically, I felt quite conflicted because obviously as the highest qualified English language teacher in the school, they would want to put me in the special classrooms more often. What? Yeah. And and yet I was there and had the heart to teach all children. So that's a challenge that I don't think you have here. Yeah obviously you've got, schools that you pay a little bit more to put your children in versus schools that you pay less to put them in, and you've got the whole private-public divide. But in Thailand, you would find that divide even within a school. And that, that was quite unique. Yeah. I also didn't have a classroom of my own. I was a float, right? So I had a bag with all of my materials in it. And I would, I would go from classroom to classroom all day, up and down stairs across campus and teaching in many different environments. Yeah. And then sometimes there would be an assistant teacher. Often when there's a foreign teacher, there would be an assistant Thai teacher in the room as well. But for me, they eventually stopped putting one in my room because I spoke Thai so well that I didn't need translation assistance. And so it was usually just me. Yeah. Wow. A- and again, not to labor this point, but I'd be very interested to know the curriculum, how did that kind of... a- and I know you don't have experience teaching in the UK system. Yeah. But yeah, h- how would you say the curriculum, the nature of it, the progression of it, how does that differ to, say, in the States or in other parts of the West? It really depends on the subject that you're looking at, if you're looking at maths or or religion, 'cause they had religion class these are very established curriculums put out by or sanctioned by the state who then contract with a textbook maker or provider or a s- or a, a series of civil workers that will write the actual textbooks with with exercises. And it was very much rote memorization, right? Okay. That's still where Thailand falls pretty hard which is very common throughout, throughout Asia. But when it comes to English language, there really wasn't an established curriculum. There are a number of textbook providers, including Pearson and Cambridge, who have- Okay made versions of different curriculums that they sell throughout Southeast Asia. But oftentimes these were really dismal. I don't know how else to put it. It seemed like maybe there was some white labeling going on, or some sort of contract where Pearson or Cambridge would slap their logo on something that wasn't actually written by any staff of theirs. And, Sure the quality was very poor. So when they did buy these books, they weren't useful. And I ended up building the progressions, setting the goals, and building all the materials and lesson plans for every class I taught myself. Yeah. Okay. And then just a final question on your work there. Would you say then, So obviously you're, you've moved away from Thailand now, you're based in the UK. Can you look back and perhaps see the impacts of that Christian presence in that school? Can you look back and perhaps, I don't know, feel, "Yeah, I can see how God was using me there"? Are there any kind of anecdotes you want to share, or anything that's still going on? Yeah. Again, really too many to dig into. It's hard to pick. But there's a couple of things I wanna emphasize. The- the first is that I don't want to draw a clean dividing line between the spiritual impact that I had, or the Christian impact that I had, and the impact that my teaching had, right? Sure. I believe these things are not so cleanly divided. I believe that every moment that I spent in those schools was in service to God, and in, hopefully, to His glory. Sure and that includes all the moments that I was teaching vocabulary words and teaching children phonics, just as much as it means the moments that I was doing something that was more overtly spiritually related. And those two moments they are intertwined, right? The only reason I had some of the opportunities I'll share with you in a moment is because, exactly because I'd established trust, showing that I cared about the students, and my colleagues, and the parents, and the families apart, wholly apart from any interest in their religion that then they took an interest in mine. Sure. Yeah. Because they wanted to know... They wanted to reciprocate. I was showing so much interest in their lives. And- Yeah and you gotta understand one of the powers of being a teacher is that you... I don't know how many teachers realize this, I hope they do, but- You are in one of the most powerful positions- network-wise of anyone in your community. You are connected directly and investing directly into the families, the future generations of hundreds of families, right? Who else Has that position in the society- Yeah especially if they're not attending any kind of r- religious right service on a regular basis. There's probably no one else directly speaking into that family's life on in such a profound way and a- affecting the trajectory of their lives, right? And in this town where there was 30 to 40,000 people and there's 2,000 children that know me and see me every day, there literally wasn't a family in that town who I wasn't teaching their grandchildren or their nephew or their niece or their cousin, right? So every interaction I had throughout the day was then feeding back into- my relationship to the community. And so I see teaching as, one of, one of the most powerful positions that anyone can hold, right? And we should take that responsibility very seriously. So the ripple effects then of every moment that I perform my duties as a teacher being then connected back to who I am and what I believe, they went further than I'll ever really know. But it certainly caused chatter. And there's a couple of anecdotes I'll give. One is directly in the school context. So around Christmas time in Thailand I lear- th- they love their holidays in Thailand. There are holidays multiple holidays every month and they're always celebrated in wonderful fashion. And they've adopted foreign holidays as much as they have their local holidays. And Christmas is a huge deal there. Huge. There's Santa Claus and reindeer- That's amazing just everywhere. There's Christmas carols playing on the mall radios. There's giant Christmas trees probably some of the biggest in the world are in Thailand, right? And yet most Thai people have absolutely no understanding of the origins of Christmas or even what it's celebrating, right? They've inherited this secular version. And so they were telling me we have got a giant Christmas party coming up." And I said, "Excuse me, what?" This is my first year there. I said, "W- you guys celebrate Christmas?" And they said, "Oh yeah, of course we do," and I'm like, "Okay." And it's a whole day event. They take the entire day off and they have all these Christmas programs and all these things. And I said do you have anything about the origin of Christmas? The reason for Christmas?" And they said, "What do you mean?" And so I say this comes from, my, my religious tradition and it's the celebration of the birth of Christ and usually we would put on, programs and things." And immediately the the po- the director goes, "Oh, you put it on." Do one of those for us. Yeah, we'd get the... It'll be great. And so a couple months later, in my first year of teaching in this school, I am, putting on a Christmas pageant with the children in this Thai school all in Thai, and the room is full of all of the children in the school, all of the parents, and we're sharing the gospel. Wow. Oh. In a way that that ha- we'd been invited to. In a way that everybody is loving, right? Yeah. And yet, would I have ever gotten that opportunity if I hadn't gone to such great lengths to establish trust, to learn the language, to, No, I would never. Yeah. And now one of the legacies of our presence in that town is Sukhothai that... everybody got word of how fun it was to have a Christmas pageant, and now all the schools in the town regularly put on yearly Christmas pageants, and use, as far as I'm aware, still use the script I wrote- Fantastic. Oh, praise God for the Christmas pageant. And so even after we've left there's this annual gospel... 'Cause I wrote the gospel story into- of course I did, right? Of course. Into the script- yeah going out and that was amazing. And in fact, at the end of that first Christmas pageant, which I... Of course, I presented the information and we did a thing, but there was no kind of evangelistic call or anything like that. They just spontaneously invited me to pray- Wow in the name of Jesus over everyone that was in, in the room. Yeah. It was crazy. So- Wow that's just one opportunity, but the truth is I had opportunities to share my faith every single day. Every day. I didn't have to go look for them. I had people coming up to me every day, whether it was parents, students, or colleagues, and saying, "Grant, why are you here?" Like- Yeah "Why are you doing this? Why are you killing yourself, trying to build this curriculum? Why do you... Essentially, why do you care so much?" Yeah. "We don't get it. This doesn't make sense. This is like..." "You could go anywhere and teach, and you're here and you're investing in us, and we wanna know why." And, I just, I answered the question the same so many times that I had people who had asked me multiple times actually stop themselves and be like no. Never mind. I know. I know. I know the answer." Wow. Yeah. Yeah. What a privilege, and I think it's something that- We would do well to remember that our motivation for shaping these young lives, for serving these local communities is a God-given honorable vocation. Yeah. And I pray that as teachers in the UK, we can also We can show with our words, but also with our posture and our attitude that, That there is a particular reason we are in this business of educating. As you say, not to manipulate, not to abandon our professional duties, but to see that, that God gives us extraordinary opportunities to serve Him through education, to contribute to the, to young people's development their cognition, their intellect, their, the holistic progress as well. But Grant you're so enthusiastic it seems about teaching, about educating. But yet you moved away from Thailand, and now you're based in the UK. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing here now. Yeah I'll do that. I wanna back up to something you just said because it's so important, and then I'll- Sure I'll jump into that. But I just, I wanna emphasize that, again, because I think nobody hears it enough, but especially teachers don't hear it enough, that your job is ministry. Every moment of your job is ministry, to a greater degree, I think, than just about any other profession. You are direct... we forget what education is, and I think especially policymakers make this mistake- all the time. But sometimes we can inherit this view from our own worries and from all the administrative tasks that we have to do. What is education? What is it actually? It's human formation. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it is we are forming these humans. We are directly contributing to who- they are forming into. And every moment that you do that with care and with love for the individual, regardless of, what aspect you are contributing to, whether that's their cognitive development or the physical development or their spiritual and moral development, you are ministering to them. And that is the model that Jesus gave us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He ministered to people's needs, and He did that without pretense and without judgment, and that is why people came to Him- and asked Him who He was. And then He had an opportunity to sit them down and explain the mysteries of the universe to them, right? Yeah. But we don't get to usurp our own Lord's model- and jump the gun and think that we can overemphasize delivering a message across a bridge that hasn't been built. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. The, m- what we are doing every day is establishing trust via genuine care and connection to those that we have responsibility over, and that is, it is the work. It is the work, and it is so enormously valuable, and it will pay off, And it will pay off regardless of whether you see the payoff or not. And I think that, you have some strengths in, in, in the UK that, you don't have some of the baggage we do in the US that are so performance-oriented numbers-oriented, so to speak. But there are some Christians who believe that the most important metric in their life is how many salvations they can notch into their belt, right? Sure. Sure. Sure. And I would say that when someone genuinely comes to follow Christ, even if you have had the amazing experience of sharing the gospel message with them and then watching them convert in a moment, I can almost guarantee you that the only reason they were ready at that moment is because someone else tilled the soil- Sure in their hearts. And you know- There isn't a moment in that process that is less valuable than another. And our job is simply to build those bridges by investing deeply- in genuinely caring and loving for the humans in front of us, regardless of where they happen to be today. And when you do that they're gonna wanna know why. And the work of the Holy Spirit will guide them to the reason, whether it's through you or someone else, right? Well- Where that comes from isn't it extraordinary? We, Grant and I were both at a conference last week, where the impact of Christian teachers was quite profound. I know in my life I had a Christian PE teacher who was one of those that tilled the soil. Yeah. And and Rico Tice, the, pretty well-known evangelist, was talking about the impact of his teacher at secondary school and and how he part of his salvation journey was, in fact, a very pr- very prominent part was his Christian teacher leading him again, part of the way down, down that road to Jesus. So yeah I really... And I've heard this so many times, the profound impact of Christian teachers on young people's lives. And then, they have a role to play in that salvation story. But yeah as as we come towards an end, Grant, I'd love to hear more about- Yeah what has led you to the UK, because as I say, it sounds like- You're doing such a wonderful job. God was blessing your work out there in Thailand. Why come to the UK? Is it because you couldn't stand the heat? No. I love Thailand and there's more to this story than we could ever get into, but, Sure. I ended up starting a company and that company serves schools around the world now to solve a fundamental challenge that I encountered in my school setting that then I learned was essentially universal to all schools, and that is- That most of the work that, that teachers do is never captured in any in any way that's actionable, that's transferable, that's accessible to others. We all usually work as islands unto ourselves. We have our own processes for developing our approach to materials and everything. And the problem with that is, of course, it's very hard for us to collaborate. It's very hard for us to benefit from the collective wisdom of our colleagues, and our institutions lose a lot of the value that we've created as soon as we transition to a new place or role. And the impact of this kind of vicious cycle happening again and again across the world means that our entire profession is suffering from this lack of interconnection and knowledge sharing on the individual level, on the institutional level, and then on the global level. And I had a real eureka moment one day on how to solve this problem, and I've been working ever since that moment to build a solution. And so I built a platform called EduSphere spelled E-D-U-S-F-E-R-E, and that platform is meant to help teachers both do their planning and prep work, which is so much of what we do, and do it more effectively and more efficiently, but also in the process of doing that work, do it on a system that helps capture it in a way that can be easily shared, easily accessed and easily preserved and built upon by future teachers within the institutions that we work. So that's essentially what EduSphere is. It's a living workspace for teachers that captures their work and then helps it be something that's accessible and actionable and transferable. And because we're serving schools in so many places now it made sense for me to move to a time zone that was more amenable to working across the world. Sure. Yeah. When I was in Asia I was up till 2:00, 3:00 AM on a regular basis just to take regular calls in the US. And now I can be up only until 2:00 or 3:00 AM when I need to be. Sure. Yeah. So I moved to the UK for that reason, but also because this is a really promising market for what we're doing. We've already got a couple of schools that we're working with in the UK to help build this kind of collective knowledge base for them, and hopefully we hope to grow here. But it was extremely hard for me to leave the classroom. It was extremely hard for me to leave Thailand, and the only reason I've done both of those things is because I can beli- I, I believe that what I'm doing now can be of more service to more people- than me being in, in the classroom directly. But I hope with every fiber of who I am that I can get back to the classroom environment sometime in the future, hopefully in, in, in a context in which- What I've built here actually benefits me in the classroom now too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Great. You sound multi-talented. You can learn Thai in six months, and teach in different nations around the world, and build educational platforms, and develop tech systems. So wow. God has blessed you, Grant, and thank you so much for sharing with us today. I pray that our listeners will be inspired and take away perhaps some lessons that they can apply to the UK context. Really appreciate your time today, Grant. Thank you, Lizzie. It's been a pleasure.