On being 10

I thought it would be fun to make mother's day cards, cute to fill in "Mom is ________." I demonstrated with "beautiful" and "happy" and "great."
Give ten answers.
Poll the class:
Mom is.... "Old" "Fat" "Short" "Un-pretty"
....and then I stopped calling for volunteers.

What you never expected yourself to say....

What do I miss about teaching in an American university? Students who know how to learn from my teaching style. Students who care about taking notes. A wired classroom. Climate control. Not being the one authority figure not equipped with a belt or bamboo cane. Small enough classes to give every student who wants to a chance to practice the target language. Electricity, come to mention it.

More on being twelve

It's interesting to see how I react to the negativity and obnoxiousness of the M1 kids. They occupy a disproportionately large place in my mind because the minority that wants simply to be disruptive and derail anything, no matter what topic or how it's being presented, the handful of kids who just need to be noticed no matter what and have honed being obnoxiously disruptive to a lustre I would never have imagined before coming to Thailand, are much better at being assholes than I am at being a teacher. MUCH better. Which really is the bane of my teacherly existence, and the inaccessibility of these students gets into my head and makes them seem much older than 12. Really, who wants to be bested by a kid who was barely alive to experience Y2K? So I give the M1 kids a lot of credit for cognition above and beyond their years. And then I'll stumble into a lesson that reminds me just how young they really are, not to mention how divorced from critical thinking.

This week's target language was, "above, below, next to, across from, in front of, behind." I showed them an animated powerpoint (more on that later) and then asked them to demonstrate.
So the lesson started with demonstrating: hold your notebook above your head. Hold your notebook below your head. &c. But when I asked them to switch and put their head below the notebook, they flatlined. After a few minutes and many pictures, one of the brighter kids might get it--X above Y=Y below X. And in every class, it was an absolute revelation. If it got through.
Then, as someone explained that "X is above means Y is below" the lightbulbs would flash on, and I would marvel at just how young they are. And somewhere, some part of me wonders when such connections are typically made. Shouldn't this be done in elementary school? If not then, if not yet in 7th grade, when?

Morning Anthem

It's been quite a week: most of campus has been in a real bad way after a teacher was killed in a wreck in front of the school.  Worse for me, she was my classroom assistant for the first half of the term, so I have extra obligations to fulfill in terms of services and memorials.  And yesterday, just before wrapping up, I was told that this morning I would be giving a speech that a student would translate.  Could I please sit down and write it out?  

And that is just how things work.

If this works, it's a video of the school anthem portion of the morning assembly.  It's the elementary side, so grades 1-6; most of the grade 1-3 are out of sight, but the panning ends on my kids.

On bathrooms

The drum is a standard part of the "modern" house. In a "traditional" house, there's not even a sink. It's pretty wild-say you're walking into a bathroom in the back right corner of the house. You'd expect there to be a sink with bar soap and maybe a hand pump, or a toothbrush holder and nail brush in a more intimate display, across from the door, a bath/shower in the furthest left corner, a toilet adjacent to it, TP on the wall, a towel rack in between the shower and sink, and a mat or two to keep tootsies warm.
Welcome to Thailand, right?
When you open the door, you face a mirror hung on a tile wall with various soaps around it--dishwashing fluid, dishwashing powder, a bar of handsoap, and maybe a bottle of shampoo. No sink, but a hose dropping from near the ceiling and capped with anything from a rubber band to an actual valve. There will likely be a towel rack, but this no more symbolizes its intended use than breathing indicates a wide conscientious streak. And even if there were a roll of toilet paper hung on the hanger, it would disintegrate in the humidity.
The far left side will be an elevated dais. Depending on the social status, there will be one or two big tubs with anything from faucets to 2" plastic hoses coming from the gutters. A plastic scoop will float in at least one, within easy reach of the squatter pot, also on the dais. This pot is your water pump, essentially: it turns into the toilet-side sprayer hose, shower head, sink faucet, and rinse nozzle. And aside from the piping (presumably) to the septic tank, there is only one drain in the middle of the floor.

There's a halfway step with a pressurized nozzle next to the toilet and a shower head on the other end of a T junction. During the hot season, or at times of need, locals will strip down, take a quick rinse off, and go back about the day.
And if you don't have hangups about "DIRTY" and "Public Restroom," it makes perfect sense--when you have a buzz cut and wear poly clothes that look and feel the same dripping wet or bone dry, why wouldn't you want the chance to cool off at any given place on any given 110 degree day?

That said, one of the most resounding lessons I have learned is an appreciation for public restrooms as accessible and clean as they are in the US. We're a finicky and persnickety bunch, but at least you know where to go in times of gastrointestinal distress. And cleanliness I can't tackle in the here and now.
Let's say that even in the cleanest of facilities over here, I had ample opportunity to observe, in great detail, the physiology and especially antennae motility of cockroaches.
Kinda like seeing an ant on your food: there's some distant memory that revolts, another part that says, "so? It's protein" and an unconscious reaction to brush it off.

Funny how things change: I caught myself commenting on how much they cleaned up the bathroom for us farangs: now there's running water, the door can be jimmied almost all the way shut, and the squatter pot is mainly white. Granted, the sink isn't attached to the wall, and we won't go into the smell or the sprays of stuff all across the upper reaches of the walls, but they did a good job polishing it up.

An interesting parallel

It's an odd deal, something of a joyous revulsion. And it happened twice in a day but under such vastly divergent conditions it seems worth mentioning.

First was a sick satisfaction at grading a retest. It's a requisite and it's required to give the exact same damn test to the exact same --mm-- buffleheads who move past plain stupid, past unlucky, to ardent and willful numbskullery.
Dumb is getting a 10 out of 20 after spending six weeks on six lines of dialogue that are hashed out in 4-option multiple choice questions. I'll post the test later.
Unlucky is anything from 5-10: at that range, the kids are just guessing. But to get 3 or 4 out of 20 when the entire test is a variation on 1) what is your name 2) how old are you 3) where do you live 4) what do you like? takes a special drive toward underachievement.
Enter the odd sort of joyous revulsion when test after test dropped from 5 or 6 to 4. FOUR out of TWENTY on the retest! And of the few dozen that started from a 4, only 3 improved: a 6, 8, and 18. And of the remainder, at least HALF of the people who scored 20% on an ABCD multiple-choice test dropped.
Think about it. Considering the scope of the language, what does it take to get 2 answers right, especially since these kids have been studying-AND PASSING-English for at least seven years?
I laughed and cheered out loud when I graded a paper worth one point.

The other instance of a horrible joy came while playing my recorder. It's a perverse thrill that I can play the hell out of the thing and get a full, rich sound all through the range. Especially in the stratosphere.
But even as I cringe away from the aural icepicks, I love the feelings and emotions upholding the sounds, love that I'm creating such movement, and don't flinch even as I promise myself to buy the first alto or tenor recorder I see.

Sent from Brutus the iPad

So what's it take to turn heads?

As I was leaving campus....