I’m definitely an embodiment of the individualistic attitude of the US. My mother tells me stories of how at 2, I refused help with putting on my shoes by adamantly shouting, “I DO IT MYSELF, MAMA! I DO IT MYSELF!” Probably not hard for most people who know me to imagine me at two saying such things. But now I’m living in a place that my 2-year-old self would have been at great odds with (and my adult self is still at odds with, but slightly less so.) Thai culture is one that is decidedly collectivist, not individualist.
Some examples of collectivism I see on a daily basis occurs in my classroom or when I work with students. In the States, in my classroom if I asked for a volunteer for something, I would have students jumping out of their seats with their eagerness to show off that they knew how to do something and that they could do it by themselves.
Here, I played Pictionary with students as a review of classroom objects, which my co-teacher taught while I was at the Reconnect conference last month. After I drew a couple of objects, I turned around and held out the marker and imitated the students coming to the board to draw the pictures as well. It took several minutes before a student felt comfortable enough to volunteer to draw on the board. You may say, “Well, maybe they just are embarrassed about their drawing skills.” Nope, the vast majority of Thai students love to draw and jump at the chance to draw anything. But this was like pulling teeth. Additionally, they all drew the objects exactly as I had drawn them. There was no real creative deviation from my examples.
So asking individuals to do a task in the classroom is a difficult concept for the students to grasp. Which makes my assessments sometimes difficult to gauge.
Most days, before students are allowed to leave the classroom, I have them line up and I ask them to perform a task related to what we learned that day, such as answering a question or identifying a color or number or to correctly pluralize classroom objects. Having worked with elementary and preschool students in the States, I am very comfortable with allowing “wait and think” time, especially since I’m asking these students for information in a new language so that they cannot use circumlocution for an answer.
However, I certainly have students that don’t pay attention in class. When it gets to be their turn, the other students in the class will get really close behind them and rest their chin on their shoulder so they can whisper the answer in their ear. Or students further back in line will whisper the answer to them all the way along the line. They don’t want any single person in the class to not do well or to be stuck in the classroom, so they will work together so that the student who is struggling will give the correct answer.
I greatly appreciate the desire to help each other, but in an assessment setting, I really want to gauge each student’s ability so that I know if I need to review the topic again, or if there are enough students that grasp the concept for me to move on to the next lesson.
That’s not to say that students in the States did not blurt out answers when they were not the one being asked, but the different methods belie the difference in motives: the whispering of the answer to the student being asked shows that they really think they are doing it to help the student in that moment, whereas the students that blurt out the answer are trying to show that they know the answer and want the positive attention for them being such a good student. It is inconceivable that a current student of mine would turn around to the others and say, “I do it myself!”