Corporal Punishment and Interesting Interactions

Because I hadn't posted in a while and because one of my classes got cancelled today, I'll do back-to-back posts.  This topic actually occurred to me on the bus on the way to work this morning, but there are two separate and completely unrelated prongs to it.

First, the more serious angle on how Thais handle discipline in school.  When I first got here I was a bit shocked by it, but now I'm kind of used to it.  These kids are trained to be hard from the get-go.  When my three year-olds are talking or not sitting in the right spot or rolling around on the floor, the teachers (sometimes) snap to.  Sometimes I have to raise my voice or gently move them myself, but when the Thai teacher gets involved, things stop being polite and start getting real.  They use corporal punishment here, in a BIG way.  Any time a student is even slightly out of line, the Thai teacher will come over and smack them, hard enough to make a loud “thump” sound and usually jolt the student forward or backward a bit.  They usually hit them on the back, shoulder, or legs.  Sometimes the teachers will walk around carrying a ruler and smacking it on their palm menacingly.  If a student gets out of line or isn’t sitting nicely, they slap their shins HARD with the flat side of the ruler.  From the sound it makes, even I can feel the sting.  The thing is, it gets the kids in line, and sometimes it's hard to argue with results.  I've never seen it make the kids cry or seen any of the children get very upset by it.  I think it's sort of the norm here, so no one really rocks the boat about it and kids are so accustomed to it that they aren't bothered.  At first it was hard to watch, but now I've gotten pretty used to it, and can always tell when it's coming.  I still haven't hit any kids (obviously, I don't think I could), but I have been more physical in moving them around.  When they get out of line and try to cut to the front to get their work checked, they don't understand "Go to the back of the line, please" or even "back!" so they just stand there and keep staring at me.  I usually end up pushing them back away from me a bit and saying "Go. To. The. Back." very slowly so hopefully they will start to understand what that means soon.  With 24 kids in the class and me having to put a check mark at the top of every page (and usually have them identify the thing they were coloring or tracing for that day), it takes a while to check work and the kids all swarming, clumping, and cutting pisses me off after about the first 10 seconds.

On a lighter note, there have been a few funny and borderline ridiculous interactions and occurrences since I've been here.

All of my students confuse Molly with me, and think that she is me whenever they see her, in spite of the five inch height difference and difference in hair and eye color.  She teaches all the fifth and sixth graders, so they don’t know her at all, but still can’t tell her apart from me.

Most of my students can't really say my name properly (they're getting better) but a lot of the time I end up being "Teacher Cow" or just "Cow," which is sweet of them.  Although they don't know what "cow" means so it's not really an insult.

One of my girls pointed at my stomach and said “Baby?”  So I shook my head and said, “No.”  And then, like an idiot, decided to joke, “Just fat.”  So now a small group of my girls calls me Teacher Fat.

There is a monk who lives somewhere near where we catch a taxi in the morning.  He is very old, maybe in his late 70s or 80s.  He gets around in an electric wheelchair.  Which he doesn't drive on the sidewalk, but in the street, going the wrong direction.  So there are all these cars headed east up the road, going about 50 mph, and then in one lane there is a monk, doing 5 mph in a wheelchair headed west.  That is the best illustration I've ever seen of a complete lack of fucks to give.  It's easy to tell without ever having had an exchange with him that he is just stubborn and curmudgeonly.

Exchanges:


Me: (ordering food) A cheeseburger and fries please.
Waiter: Okay, in fifteen years. (turns out he just meant minutes)

(ordering meat skewers, I just pointed at one.  The woman looked concerned)
Woman: Leder.
Me: Leader?
Woman: Lemer
Me: Lemur?!?
Woman: LI-BER.
(I figured out she was saying Liver, which was honestly my bad as that was clearly far more likely than the idea that I was eating lemur or, god forbid, the leader of something)


Molly's student: Teacher Molly, do you speak Thai?
Molly: Yes, I speak it perfectly.
Molly's student: (goes off in Thai then looks at her expectantly)
Molly: English only.

Molly assigned homework of reading a mystery story and figuring out who stole the candy (in the story).
Molly: Who stole the candy?
(a bunch of wrong answers)
Student: Marie! (the right answer)
Molly: (excited) Why do you think that?
Student: Because she's a woman!

I'm sure there have been other funny things I have seen and/or heard, but this is just off the top of my head, so they'll have to wait for later.

Thai Language

During the orientation with my agency, we were given an hour of Thai lessons.  Since then I've been trying to study a little bit on my own.  Then a few weeks ago Molly, Luke, and I started doing lessons with a Thai teacher at our school named Gung.  She teaches us some Thai and we give her some English practice.  Recently the gym teacher, Arm, started to join us, though he speaks less English than Gung.

The most difficult thing about the Thai language is that it is tonal, like Mandarin and several other languages around the world. What that means is that the same word (for example mai) can be said in five different ways, each of which makes it a completely different word.  There's a high tone, a low tone, a rising tone, a falling tone, and a flat tone.  Every syllable has a tone to it.  EVERY SYLLABLE HAS A DIFFERENT TONE.

With the example of mai...

mai (flat): no, not

mai (low): modern, fresh

mai (rising): when put at the end of a sentence, turns it into a question.  Essentially a spoken question mark.

mai (falling): to burn

So, if I misprounce the word "no" I could essentially be threatening to burn someone or something.  "Do you want this book?" "I set fire to your book!"  "Can I kiss you?"  "I will set you on fire!"  Not the easiest thing in the world to master.

On the other hand, numbers are the easiest thing ever.  To say "thirty" you just say "three ten" or "four ten" for "forty."  So "thirty-three" is "three ten three."  It seems like that would be confusing, but it means I only have to memorize ten numbers and count to 100.

For reference:

one: nung
two: song
three: sam
four: si
five: haa
six: hok
seven: jed
eight: pad
nine: kao
ten: sib

11-19 start with sib, so sib et, sib song, sib sam, sib si, sib haa, etc.

The only difference is that when it's a one they only say nung for one on it's own, otherwise it's "et."  Generally it's really easy, and I can actually understand now when people in restaurants and stores tell me how much something costs.  The funny thing about the number five (haa) is that it sounds just like how we write laughter in the West (hahaha).  So when Thais write out laughter on Facebook (for example) or text, and they just type 555.  Because it’s HaHaHa. Which I find both really useful and really funny. 555

In general, I've been doing a good job learning the key phrases I need to get through day-to-day life.  Like for ordering food (and informing people of my allergy because they add tiny shrimps to a lot of things here), directing taxis, talking about my name, age, and where I’m from, etc.  The basic phrases are easier for me to remember because I use them with my kids a lot, saying both the English and Thai when I ask a questions to help them understand what the questions mean.

Another interesting thing I've learned is that the days of the week here have colors.  Sunday is red, Monday is yellow, Tuesday is purple, Wednesday is green, Thursday is orange, Friday is blue, and Saturday is lavender.  If you wear the color on the day, it's supposed to be good luck.  For some reason you’re also not supposed to cut things on… I think it’s Wednesday but I’m not 100% sure.  So no haircuts, no trimming your nails, etc.  It’s bad luck.

I'm still learning more of the language, but at least the structure is similar.  Actually, the structure is identical to the way Spanish is structured.  In Thai you start with subject, then verb, then object, like in both Spanish and English.  However, unlike in English but as in Spanish, the adjective comes after the noun.  So if I want to say "I eat Thai food," then I say the words in Thai in the structure "I eat food Thai."  The more I learn specific words, the easier it will be for me to make sentences on my own.  For now I'm really only good with numbers and rote phrases.

That's all for now.  I'm hoping to get better with Thai over the coming months, and we'll see if I can actually learn to speak it at all.  Sorry this entry was more technical and boring.  It's hard to breathe life into syntax and vocabulary.

UPDATE:
A few fun/ interesting words that I've learned over the last few weeks...

For "cat," Thais have completely cut out the middle man, and they just say "meow" which is AWESOME.

The word for disgusting is "ruur" but it's a very gutteral sound, which is actually just about the sound I make when disgusted by something, which makes it kind of perfect.

There are a few others, but as usual when these things occur to me I don't write them down and then when I sit down later, I can't recall them all.  Without fail in the next twenty minutes, when I walk into class, I'll remember the other words I learned, but by the end of the lesson they will have once again retreated into their hidey-holes in the cobwebbed back corners of my mind.  Scumbag memory.