A sad story

After a fairly good aikido session at Thai-Ippun in Din Daeng, I had dinner at one of my usual restaurants. I was quite hungry but I didn’t want too eat too much as it was already late, so I ordered just one plate of fried rice. The owners of the restaurant seem pretty nice people, so I always chit-chat with them in Thai.

They have a son who is about 5-6 years old. He has to stay in the restaurant with his parents until they close it at about 9 – 9:30 pm. As you can imagine, there’s nothing much for him to do there. He has a reclining chair in which he vegetates while watching TV or playing with his few toys.

Today I saw his father give him some medicine. He’s got the flu. There must be something in the air because many of my students have running noses too. So, the boy takes his medicine and goes back to his chair. While I was eating he shouts at his parents to be quiet because he was trying to sleep. None of the parents reply, but I try to put an end to the conversation I was having with the father.

As soon as I finished my meal, the boy told his parents that he couldn’t breathe properly. At first the parents ignored him. The boy started whining and shouted out that he couldn’t breathe. In the meantime, the mother and the father started closing the restaurant. His mother, annoyed that she was interrupted by her own son, told him that he could die if he wanted. Seeing that nobody gave a s*** about him, he started crying. At this point the mother got really angry, picked up a stick and started smacking the kid on his legs. The louder the kid cried, the angrier the mother got and the harder the blows came down on the boy’s legs. After about 5-6 blows, the poor boy was able to control his sobs and the mother stoped beating him.

I rode my motorbike home and thought about the huge difference between the life my rich students have at home and this poor boy’s boring life in his parents’ restaurant.

(Pictures taken in July 2007)

Thai education issues

- The secretary-general of the Basic Education Commission made public last year’s Prathom 2 National Test results. It was thus disclosed that 12% of the tested students could not read or write in Thai (half of the students from the southernmost provinces). Reasons given for the poor results are: poverty (which triggers class absence), learning disabilities, shortage of teachers, and no practice of the Thai language at home.

In 2002, the adult illiteracy rate in Thailand was 4.17% of people ages 15 and above. The figures are pretty good, compare to its Southeast Asian neighbours: Indonesia – 12.13%, Malaysia – 11.64%, Singapore – 7.16%, Vietnam – 7.15%, and the Philippines – 4.64%.

- “Proficient [Thai] teachers” will receive an addition of 3,500 baht on top of their monthly salary. At the end of this 13-month scheme aimed at improving teachers’ quality of life, the ministry may not have enough funds to make the final three monthly payments. So, how do we solve the problem? Oh, that’s easy. Let’s drop the whole scheme! Anyway, there are concerns that the extra money will only benefit the teachers and not their students in terms of academic quality! How can anybody say that? They should know that when teachers are happy they perform better in front of the class? To pay or not to pay? That is the question.

- A recent study showed that public libraries fail to meet administration standards. Why? Lack of MONEY! You can’t do proper education without money!!!! There also seems to be a problem with people (or better, the lack of people) visiting public libraries.

- 292 public schools volunteered to be put under the control of local authorities in the hope of getting adequate funding. But, the Education Ministry approved the transfer of only 10. Why? The government wants to maintain the academic standards. What? The government should rather try to improve the academic standards. How can you do that? More money! (It seems that I repeat myself a lot today!)

Information taken from Leraning Post (July 17, 2007).

Student-teacher dating

This week’s edition of the Learning Post (published every Tuesday by Bangkok Post) opens with a well-written article about a controversial issue, as the title clearly announces: The open secret: Student-teacher dating. Weena Noppakunthong, the author of the article, states from the very beginning that the article/essay “is concerned with college-age students in their very late teens or twenties who might find themselves in a personal interaction with a teacher in their twenties.” By limiting the article to this age level, the writer puts herself in a comfortable position and avoids the even more controversial issue of student-teacher relationships with a big age gap between the two parties (usually young female high-school or university students and a male teacher in his 40s).

Nevertheless, the article is well-structured and well-balanced, with only one naïve argument pro student-teacher dating (coming from a 48-year old ajarn), that advices the parties to remember “the Thai traditional values of not having pre-martial sex.” Well, if Thai students have become so “affected by encroaching Western values and mores” (as the article concludes), can anyone imagine that people involved in such a morally and socially unacceptable relationship would really abide to the Thai traditional customs?

I would like to take article even further and raise the problem of high school student-teacher dating. I do not possess any first hand information about Thai high school students dating their teachers, but just recently, in an EU country, a high school student committed suicide by jumping from his teacher’s balcony. The married female teacher had been involved with one of her own male students, and when the student became too insistent, the teacher tried to distance herself, but could not avoid the tragedy that followed.

I also know of a high school student-teacher dating case (from the same EU country) that, after a few drawbacks, ended in marriage, two years after the student had graduated high school. This time the teacher was a female in her mid-20s.

Coming back to Asia, and college student-teacher dating, two years ago, I worked with a Canadian who openly admitted that, while teaching in China, he was involved with his university students.

And last, while I did my masters at a large university in Thailand, one of my Chinese classmates had a relationship with one of our professors, an Italian whose wife (from Singapore) taught in the same department. The Chinese student and the Italian professor were more than open about their relationship, and as a consequence the Singaporean wife left her husband and moved to a different university in England. Although no longer together, the two lovebirds keep in touch and even visit each other. In April, I ran into both of them at the Bangkok International Book Fair! The Italian was on a holiday in Asia. At the moment he is teaching in England, and is involved with one of his students (she’s from Poland), and even considers marrying her. Italians have always had a bad reputation!

Food for thought

The poem Theme for English B by Langston Hughes made me think of my own job as a teacher of English. As I tried to understand what the colored student might have felt like in a classroom where the rest of the students were white, I failed to really identify with him/her. The reason is that I have never been into such a situation as a young student.

But at the end of the day we have to realize that all children, no matter of color, religion, sex or mental/physical abilities “like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love / … like to work, read, learn, and understand life” as Langston Hughes puts it so beautifully in the poem Theme for English B.

I would like to conclude, quoting again the same author: “I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like / the same things other folks like who are other races.” The wisdom of this poem should never leave our minds!