In my little corner, my final was proctored on Tuesday. I made it through all but two courses on Tuesday, and turned everything in on Wednesday morning.
"Done already? WOW! Good teacher! Now you done for done. Good job this term, you have fun?"
How bizarre to sit in the EP office and listen to the drama and problems that arise therein: the primary printer ran out of ink, and the backup jams. "This is unacceptable."
"We are out of Milo [chocolate milk powder]. Why the F are we ALWAYS out of Milo? Would someone go talk to [Big Boss Lady] about this?"
An argument over how to present the final grades has been going on for weeks. Everyone's using a different program and recording the numbers in different ways, and the farang argue in circles about what would be easiest for the Thai teachers who actually record the grades in permanent records.
There is much complaint about the lady who keeps up the public parts of the building--she doesn't say goodmorning and doesn't do a good job and is lazy and steals things and breaks all the mugs. She can't even keep the toilet paper stocked, and the bathrooms just reek.
Next year, there better not be the same, horrible computers in the new school.
The air conditioners had better have rotating fan heads.
There are only red, blue, and black whiteboard markers. They could at least keep up the stock of the f'ing whiteboard markers.
Sometimes it's hard not to scream.
-THIS OFFICE IS AIRCONDITIONED. You sit on padded rolling chairs instead of backless stackable plastic stools.
-You're not next door to an alcove of 6 pit toilets 300 boys share and are responsible for cleaning.
-Not only do you have your own little trash baskets with liners, you have someone who empties them twice per day.
-Not only do you have a water cooler and hotpot, you have coffee, creamer, sugar, herb tea, black tea, snacks, spoons, forks, napkins, a refrigerator stocked with milk and a few dozen coffee mugs that are cleaned daily.
-You have three working "dinosaur" computers, each of which has a working operating system, a full suite of programs, internet access, and access to two printers stocked with A4, F4, and colored paper. Upstairs, you have two copiers to use. And nowhere do you have to provide your own ink, paper, or compensation.
The running joke/complaint is about bringing the shitty old equipment to the new school. And it would not be surprising if they did. To be replaced by nothing.
I still can't figure out who my boss will be next term. Rumor has it that there will be two farang and two sections of 4th, 5th, and 6th grade.
Typically, the upcoming dead week would be filled with planning, textbook review, drawing up the new semester and guidelines for the entire year.
Which is a big part of the reason I have no compunctions about running away to Nepal.
It's taken quite a while to solidify, but the big lessons of my time here are beginning to distill. It'll be a while before that happens, but there are certain scenes that have stuck and are starting to make sense.
Classroom Scene:
For some reason, one of the mattayom classes was meeting in the library--construction in the classroom or something--and I spent a couple of days watching how the class worked.
It had the EP's typical dozen students, and of the seven periods in any given day, two or three would be taught by farangs. The farang would stand in the front of the class and lecture and call out for answers and draw all over the board, and the students would nod and answer as best as they could and scribble notes if they were motivated. Then the farang would wrap up and leave, and the Thai teacher would step to the board. She would talk through the lesson in Thai and the students would bend over new notebooks and scribble furiously. After about twenty minutes, there would be some sort of game with callouts or running to the board to write answers, in English. Then they would break to the next subject.
Farang never teach two periods in a row.
In the EP, all farang teachers must submit course plans and maps and general instructional directions well before the semester starts. Same thing with tests--the test goes in sometimes two weeks early. All the material is reviewed up a ladder from farang supervisor to Thai teacher to Thai supervisor to Thai boss. Records of lesson plans are kept and distributed to the appropriate Thai teacher. Well in advance.
I had no such requirements in the RP. My lovely colleagues had extensive piles of planning and grading, but my actual requirements were to write a midterm and final and grade the same.
Anecdotal interlude: copies ARE available without paying out of pocket. You write your test/worksheet, format it on F4 (legal) paper, arm the printer with your tub of printer ink and paper purloined from elsewhere, and print not more than two pages. Disassemble the printer, and take the two, white pages to the other side of campus, where a pack of four or five will gather to listen to you say, "copy" with various inflections while waving the test around until one of them says, "Ohh, copy! Okey, okey." Then she disappears for a while and comes back with a preoccupied looking guy who reaches for your test, disappears with it, and comes back a few clicks later to hand you the copy and confer with the nice ladies, one of whom will say, "no, no now, tomorrow/next week/later, later." I think this signifies that they think you want the copy immediately and they're giving the originals back so you can go make your own. So you have to thrust the papers back, reiterating that it doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, sixty copies whenever, sixty copies, doesn't matter, and finally just walk off. Sometime the next week, return to the office to inquire about the copies, and wait for the preoccupied copy guy to be found so he can open the sacred chamber of campus copies.
It's a small, corner classroom with two rows of three copy machines wedged in formation between tables lining the walls. Light is provided by whatever filters through the iron bars on the windows whose shutters have been broken off. Stacks of newspaper-looking papers render the tables into dismally gray cityscapes from a post-apocalyptic Soviet country. These are the tests that will shape the futures of the bright and screaming children running around outside of the gloom.
You get up to 60 copies, one for each kid in your largest class. And then you get 1500 answer sheets. All of the above on the off-gray paper that's the unbleached color of newsprint but not nearly so refined--the sheets are measurably thick, have fibers that would give you splinters if the paper was made straight from pulp, not recycled scrap, and if you rub on it, the ink will wipe off without as much effort as erasing a tentative pencil sketch from standard copy paper.
So now you have 60 copies and 1200 students: at the beginning of class, you assign one person to hand the sheets out individually, and one of the rowdy little guys to shotgun blast the answer sheets. After the test, the students bring you the sheets and have been trained to show you that their tests are in good shape. You stack them up and move on to the next class until every single student has had a go at one of them.
I don't remember the particulars of the midterm, but it was a somewhat more relaxed affair. The final had to be in on Feb 4, with the test on March 2.
Before finishing and submitting the test, I asked a number of times if students would be missing classes or days at all between then and the end of term.
Definitely not.
No class trips? No study tours? No special study sessions? No home-room emergency preps? No activity days, no sport trips, no nothing, just class?
No. Just class.
HA!
The next day, when I went to one of my classes and discovered a locked room, I asked a colleague who pointed at a few sentences of Thai script on the office whiteboard: "Yeah, a few sections of M1 are going on a trip. I guess nobody told you because we all read Thai. Haha!"
Haha.
I had about three regular teaching days in the last month. Talk about frustrating: just at the end of EV 3 get instructions to write a test for EV 4, do the responsible teacher thing and make it reflective of some actual learning and what you hope to actually teach in the intervening weeks, and then slap the students with a final exam, 40% of their grade, based on teaching you didn't get to do.
Welcome to Thailand.
If the kids don't pass the first time (how's 13 out of 60 sound?), they take it again and again and again until, maybe with the help of a cane, they pass.
Sequence
I've just handed my boss the latest grades. She's flipping through, frowning. After the first EV, I learned to give about 50% more questions than points and grade students straight across with a cap at 100%.
Still, every class has a handful or bucketload of people who score around 10-15%.
"Oh, you have to make extra credit so the students can pass, no?"
It is hard not to mention the level of instruction I'm doing--After school, I will play football--vs the notes I find on the board--equations for constructing past progressive sentences--or to simply laugh.
"Okay, for extra credit the students must write a twenty line dialogue and read it to me. It can be simple, from anything we've done, but they have to write their own and read it."
"Ohhh, is very tough. Very tough."
Blink blink.
"Is very tough for them"
I wrote out an example: Hello. Hi. What's your name? My name is Russell. What's yours? And so forth for 20 lines.
"Easy, see?"
"Okay, okay, but is tough."
"What do students usually do?"
"They take the test again."
"Same test?" Mock surprise.
"Yes, same test," mock reservation.
"But how do they learn?"
Forced laughter.
Reciprocated.
Boss: "You give me grades for EV4 on Friday, okay? Have to get all extra credit by then.
"You class, see, I think is for fun, is to help keep the grades up, no? Okay?"
Cut to me at the computer, inventing grades and bolstering test scores until everyone has at least a 50%.
Explaining my 20 line requirement to my lead teacher, veteran of many decades at my school.
She gives me a new mantra: "Oh, you're a mean farang."
"Yes, I'm one mean farang. But what else should they do for extra credit?"
"They retake the test."
"Same test?" same, mock surprise.
"Same test."
"But how do they learn?"
"They learn nothing. If they're lucky, they pass the test."
My desk is graced with a copy of some state English test. It's fairly poorly written and I had issues with it the first time I took it, about Halloween. My supervisor, the department head, a lead teacher, and a Thai teacher have all given me at least three times.
My supervisor comes in and sees the test returned to her desk (and there is not a note saying, "Answers the same as they have been the past three times"). She calls me over and start reviewing the test, answer by answer, just like we did the last three times.
One question is along the lines of, "She shan't dally" or "She won't dally." As usual, I checked "won't" but noted, "BAD QUESTION."
This time, I got a lecture about proper English: you can't use X instead of Y in Z situation.
It was where, stateside, I say, "This is why I'm a writer, not an academic."
It was where, in Thailand, I couldn't say "Are we really worried about this?"
A student walked in with a sheet of extra credit for me. She started to read, but with me being the mean teacher, I stopped her by the third line and asked her to read one further down, then up next to the top, then back in the middle, and she couldn't .
"Study and come back on Monday, okay?"
Nod.
"Oh, you mean teacher!" says my boss.
It is not about the teaching. It is not about the learning. It's a matter of having a white person in front of the classroom.
In the EP's concentrated farang atmosphere, it seems like we're here to teach. And in some cases, it's true: grades 1-2-3 learn shapes and colors and jobs, basic math and science, and they learn it pretty well in English. But by the start of high school, especially with our school (which is the least prestigious in the city, while our elementary school is one of the most prestigious in the province), the actual instruction is in Thai. Farangs just make the school look good.
And that's how this culture, or at least culture in this area, works: farangs have a narrow, scripted role, a few places they're supposed to visit and a few things they're supposed to say.
Farangs are not supposed to step off the main tourist drags. Farangs are not supposed to speak Thai. Farangs are not supposed to order food unless it's tom yam gung or khao pad.
Walk into a food service alcove on a touristy street and order fried rice and everyone's happy. Order papaya salad with crab and fish sauce and everyone has a problem.
Stop at the breakfast place enroute to work and order fried chicken with rice and all's well. Order vegetable soup with organ meat and there is mass confusion.
Tell the taxi driver I'm going to the main mall, Ocean (Oh-see-an) and all's well. Tell him I'm going to King's Court across from the stadium and there's great confusion.
If I explain the building where I'm going, it takes half a dozen people before a Thai person says, "Oh, SP Mansion!" and then all is well and understood.
So I'm walking home from a trip downtown and take one of the back alleys. It's off the main shopping bazaar and lined with bags and clothes and hair salons bursting from buildings so close together there is no sky.
This is not where farang go.
I looked up and saw a Cal Trans orange shirt hanging in one of the stalls. Dark blue letters, stark enough to trip out your eyes, read "Lake Tahoe: Outdoor Paradise"
Of course I have to buy it.
So I pull the shirt off the hanger and watch the hovering proprietors disappear. There's a flurry of whispers--"oh no, it's a farang! What do we do? Do you remember how to speak English?" "Just charge 500."
When I finally get the lady cornered behind a stack of "GUCI" bags and hold up the shirt, she holds her hand out like "STOP!"
How much? For THIS?
Oh, 200.
Still substantially high, but better starting point.
A shirt like this is 100 across the way.
No, no, this is from USA, see? The others are no good, copy copy.
Okay, 150.
No, I cannot. 180.
Okay.
Funny how something I would never think to spend money on stateside becomes a must-have item here.
Triptych
Composite scene the first: as I'm walking down the street/through the mall/in a store/anyplace public, a stroller or toddler-age kid points and says, "FARANGFARANGFARANG!"
I try not to frown to vehemently when I look at the parents.
Specifically enlightening instance: I'm walking behind a man who's been burned to significant disfigurement. As stroller or toddler-age kids point, mommies and daddies hush them.
Composite the second: after cranking up my radar to figure out what mommies are saying to "FARANGFARANGFARANG!" kids, I realize that mothers are leaning down to pre-verbal kids and whispering, "FARANGFARANGFARANG!"
I just don't get it.
No comments:
Post a Comment