“You are free time after school today, yes?” is never a good way to start a conversation in Thailand, even if the speaker is cute and smily. Neutrality is the best route until you know what's in store.
“Umm, what? When?” Nurse out an explanation before the chance of commitment.
“To practice the student for the morning talk.”
Sounds fishy and frustrating.
“The what?”
“Is for the morning talk. Next Friday. You practice them today, okay? Are you freetime this afternoon?”
“When? How long?”
“Maybe about 3:30 or four o'clock, and maybe only thirty minutes, okay?”
Gulp. “Okay.”
“Teacher S too, okay? He is bad student, na? I make for you script, maybe one hour, okay?”
“Uhhh, so you need me and Teacher S at 3:30 for a script?”
“Is for students, in the morning, na? Is called The Morning Classroom, for during the flag, na?”
*Dingdingding* “OHHH! You want us to help the students for the morning talk, right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I get it now. See you at 3:30.”
During the morning display of patriotism, prowess, devotion, and flag-raising, given students or departments or some other alchemical determinant get up and address the compiled student body. When the English Department (not to be confused with the English Programme, which is a separate academy entirely) is on, the farangs are naturally volunteered to make the presentation as polished as possible. Usually, we hear about it the day before and it's a matter of sitting through a couple of recitations, making sure the speech isn't too mangled, and mainly smiling and conveying encouraging enthusiasm.
For the presentations, students research something, write a short speech in English, and read it over the God mic. At absolute best, it's a thoroughly robotic progression over syllabic hurdles raised unnaturally high. The other end is absolutely incomprehensible, in Thai or English. Most fall somewhere in between, and are roughly equivalent to:
HELLO MY NAME IS PANG FROM CLASS ONE SLASH TWO TODAY I WOULD LIKE TO TELL YOU ABOUT ICECREAM ICECREAM IS VERY GOOD IT IS COLD AND HAS MANY VITAN FROM DAIRY BUT ALSO MANY SUGAR IT COMES IN MANY FLAVORS SUCH AS BANILLA AND CHOCOLATE AND BANANA AND I THINK IS VERY GOOD.
Except this was a new game. Morning skits. A full-blown skit with a handful of participants, a script, a moral lesson, a grammar point, and a motivational message for the day. I was to be the good student, my coworker the joker, and everybody in the department was so happy we were helping out.
Heh.
The biggest speaking role fell to an M2 girl playing the teacher. She had to explain the moral and grammatical lessons. Otherwise, it was my coworker and I in a back and forth of good and bad student speech and behavior.
My biggest challenge is to remember that this is not my place to comment, interpret, pass judgment, offer criticism, offer advice, or step beyond doing exactly what I'm told, when I'm told, without dipping into how or why. So I smile and nod through the morality lesson—don't be a bad student—and the grammar point—make v do—and the motivational sentence—let's conserve energy to save the world—without saying a damn thing. No comment on the impossibility of the acting that's supposed to happen, the thoroughly mangled grammar of the script, the number of completely unintelligible words, or the chance to create one cohesive message, let alone the relative insignificance of “I make my homework” vs “I do my homework” when half the student body flatlines at “How are you?”
So we get through the script with the Thai Teacher narrating every line and motion and the Thai students utterly bewildered. And after making it through, without pause for comment or request for input, my coworker and I are offered sincere gratitude for our helping with the next three rehearsals plus the show.
Huh?
What?
Uhhh....
“Well, that wasn't half as bad as I thought,” my colleague said.
Okay, we're playing the peachy card—of course it's great. “Yeah, good time, good fun. The students will enjoy it.”
On Friday, we were supposed to be there at 7:15 to practice before the morning show. All lines to be memorized for real, no help from teachers.
At 7:35, Thai Teacher led in a convoy of students—the half dozen usual suspects plus half a dozen more carrying neon-pastel signs; not a good sign. By quarter to 8, when my colleague rolled in, we had figured out who was holding which sign and found the wireless mics. Just before 8, we tried to do a run-through and explain the signage: complex English expressions to convey the moral/grammatical/ecological lessons.
And then we were herded to the flagpole to sing the national anthem and the King's Anthem (a Friday mandate) and listen to a Bible verse and sing the school song and chant the school motto, followed by announcements, an extended certificate distribution—a week ago, there was a music competition—and then we were on.
Kinda.
And then it was time for the last minute instructions and scrabbling for mics and giving up on mics and retrieving the God mic from the flagpole dias so the student playing a teacher could be heard and pass around the mic.
Meanwhile, my colleague had progressed from, “That wasn't as cute as it was last time” to “maybe the mics will fail and we won't have to do this,” to “maybe a branch will fall” to “shit, shit, the sky's not falling, why did I let this happen?”
It happened, with Thai Teacher whispering every motion and line, but not quite loud enough for the mic to pick up. The mic was sort of kinda passed around, or at least pointed at whomever was speaking. And there was great hilarity at my colleague and I being students. Even if the student body was still standing, so only the front score of 4000 could see us.
As we split, my colleague was in a tizzy of relief and fortitude—thank God it's over and will never happen again. There were many congratulations and pictures. A question of having to stay for a nice big happy group photo, but the Administrative Head of the English Department said, “No, no, we do this every week now, okay?”
Sounded fun to me, especially with the chance to get on board early and make something I would stand behind proudly.
It was best to keep my opinion to myself.
Thirty minutes later, we were called back for photos.
We were told we had to do it again.
My turn to get very nearly obnoxiously bitchy.
“Did they get the mics working for us?”
“No, no, not today. Sometime later, after, we do this again, na?”
I was actually a little disappointed.
Still, we got to walk through the whole thing again, this time for cameras, before we could pose for the full group shot.
And this being Thailand, the full group shot is a matter of considerable pageantry. First the sign must be unfurled, and appropriate bearers chosen—the big, manly looking guys who aren't quite big enough to block anyone out. And then all the characters must be arranged and arrayed as aesthetically as possible—the short people stand on risers but can't stand higher than the important-looking tall people, but the important-looking tall people can't stand too far above everyone else because then they'll like like they're actually important, not just important looking, and all of this is debated hotly with furious hand fluttering before the farangs are waved into place and the whole structure topples and has to be rebuilt.
Walking back, I tried not to visibly cringe as we passed a marching band rehearsal.
“I know I should be more supportive, but when every student learns the songs by rote from older students who learned the songs by rote in a long and uneven line of musically illiterate students with vastly different ideas of how the songs should go, I am very glad not to be associated with the music department.”
“Yeah, it's hard in Thailand. Like you see with the scouts, the older ones teaching the younger ones. Or like yesterday I saw an older kid teaching a young girl how to throw a shotput but doing it wrong, and the girl was complaining that her arm hurt.”
There were choice words, followed by, “Why can't we think things through the first time?”
He said something fairly remarkable--”that's why they're a third-world nation.”
Hmm, yeah. I hadn't made that link, but yeah.
“That and the fact that any ideas are not about what would improve workability or livability, but what would look good.”
To whit: we have a new PM, and in January, minimum wage will spike 40%. How? It'll be great! How? Really! 40%... how? Mmmm, tax cuts.
Which is great considering that the only entities without existing cuts of approx 100% are foreigners and multinational businesses.
But then again, for the burgeoning businesses so carefully encouraged and nurtured, the family operations that earned some success and grew beyond a storefront/living room and hired employees to manage some part of the business, it's the death knoll, straight back to a micro-scale operation operated entirely by (wage-free) family.
But once even further, who am I to say anything?
No comments:
Post a Comment