After my conversation with my co-teacher about critical thinking and watching how schools work here in Thailand, I feel comfortable saying that learning, in the Western sense of being curious about a topic and wanting to learn the why and how of it, is not valued here. Learning in the sense of memorizing and reciting is valued. Which brings me to tell you about how I have spent my time after school for the last couple weeks.
English Competitions
On Tuesday, there were competitions for every subject, including English. There are several different events as a part of the English competitions: song singing, storytelling, impromptu speech, a spelling bee, Scrabble and ASEAN trivia.
The song singing competition is basically an English karaoke contest; Thai people really only are exposed to English pop songs so when I tried to suggest a more age-appropriate song for a 10-year-old student to sing, I was met with disappointment.
The storytelling competition reminds me of the forensics competition I took part in when I was in elementary school; the students memorize a story in English to tell for four to five minutes.
The impromptu speech is anything but; there are 5 different topics that are known ahead of time and the students write a speech for each of the different topics and memorize all of them.
For the spelling bee the students are given the words ahead of time and generally don’t really know how they are pronounced or what they mean and this time it was more like a spelling test than a bee.
The Scrabble competition just comes down to the students putting down letter tiles in whatever order they think makes a word.
The ASEAN trivia is two parts, the first in Thai and the second in English, written with information from the ASEAN Web site about the national dishes and currencies of the ASEAN countries.
Accepting Facts of the Thai Education System
After getting frustrated with the fact that these competitions were so important and the student weren’t actually learning anything, just memorizing sounds to make with their mouth and not having any context or understanding for what they are doing, I came to terms with it and agreed to act in a supporting role to prepare for the competition.
So I helped a student learn the story of the Ugly Duckling, I cleaned up grammar in a memorized speech on the topic of “Myself” and I taught some students how to sing One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” and Katy Perry’s “Firework” as they were the most appropriate pop songs I could find. The students who were originally chosen for the singing competition decided that it was too difficult and didn’t want to compete anymore; we found a student who was willing to do the One Direction song the day before the competition.
Student Fortitude
Now as much as I dislike these competitions, I was seriously impressed with my student who participated in the singing competition. There are a set of standards that the Thai people know and the song I chose was definitely not one of them. In addition to that, he only had one day to learn the song and the chorus is pretty fast for a 12-year-old who barely knows English.
For him to get up in front of a room full of people and try to sing a song that he didn’t know took so much courage. He struggled the entire time he was up on stage, and when it at first appeared he forgot the words (rather than just didn’t know them) the judges had me start the song over, which I would have seen as rather embarrassing. But, he was so brave to go up there and sing the parts that he knew and I was so proud.
I also discovered that there was a paper airplane competition. So I felt a little bad about taking away all those paper airplanes for the last couple weeks.