I just don't get it

Peewee, my Thai assistant, lost it. She's the one who's 4'7" at most and always wears short stiletto pumps that clack like capguns.

It was a good lesson, too: we're converting text language to proper sentences. Peewee isn't familiar and has been enjoying figuring out the symbols and representative abbreviations. But the kids would not shut up. Constant blabber, and none of the usual tricks were working.

With fifteen minutes to go, Pewee blew. She grabbed two metal rulers in her right hand and as she went storming through the classroom--she's actually small enough to fit between the desks--the rulers made explosive pops on proffered hands.

Here's what boggles me, one of the odd bits of the Thai psyche: she walked in the trough between waves of laughter and chatter. The kid under the rulers would shut up, as would the one on deck, but as soon as one of the heels popped a step away, the noise redoubled.

The small cluster of girls in the front, who spend most classes coloring in between answering all the questions and copying all the notes, rolled their eyes when I stopped everything for a game of stand-up, sit-down, simon says. Doing something physical brought the kids in for a while, but within three minutes of turning back to the lesson, Peewee came up from behind the cool guys sitting in the back and started knocking them upside the head with her teacher handbag--a zipper-top jobbie large enough to hold a handful of whiteboard markers, a few pens, pencils, sharpeners, and erasers.

As I do about every other week, I asked what I could do to get the students.

"They are very naughty. Talk talk talk, too many boys in the class. All they want to do is sit and talk. Very difficult even for Thai teachers. They like playing games and funny, but they don't think, they don't speak English, they have a hard time reading Thai so is very, very difficult."

My difficulty, in this class and others, is that even when I was that age, I was not that age. I doubt I was ever that age: welt my hands with metal rulers and I'll stop talking. But I guess when the nascent testosterone levels reach a point, the welts become battle scars and it's much, much cooler to gab away unaffected.

The question, then, is how to reach those who don't want to be using tools ill suited to do so.