Committing to Memory

All About Me Mini-Books: Semester Projects. I asked my students to use the material they've learned this semester and create mini-autobiographies.

It's difficult to even begin to describe my students. Ever since leaving Nakhon Phanom, I feel almost like less of a person walking with a vacancy of purpose. That is a little exaggerated, and dramatic, of course. In actuality, I feel like this urgency of purpose, waiting to be channeled and manifested in my next steps. But I will always carry with me the wonderful memories I have with my students that have shaped and defined my experience in Thailand.

My students from both elementary schools are just like kids from everywhere. Just like any other vivacious students from anywhere, they like their fair share of  amusements. They like to play with bugs (maybe bigger than the ones from the States!), boys like to torment girls, and girls like to flaunt their intellectual superiority in the classroom. They love to sing (they like to request "Hey Jude" all the time), dance, and play. Most of the time, they like to learn too.

My students are not like kids from everywhere. There are certain dimensions to their childhood experiences that are unique to their circumstances. In a lot of ways, they are encouraged to mature a lot faster, because they are allocated adult-like responsibilities on a daily basis. Consider the photo on the bottom of this entry, of a great student of mine. His name is Pbad, and while a US counterpart might begrudge the task  of returning chairs to classrooms and his parents might consider suing the school, Pbad manages and carries the request without complaint. Consider also, the video below of my first-graders being asked by their teacher to multi-task:

Initially, these unconventional practices at school seemed so absurd. Teachers barking instructions while sitting in the shade were a little hard to swallow, and sometimes the requests were a bit, let's say nit-picky. But at the heart of these practices lies the ideal of students making individual contributions to sustain the school, in a community with little to no resources or funding. Everyday, it seems like the students themselves run the school. They arrive early to mop the floors and clean, they are in charge of morning flag ceremonies, prepare lunch every day under the supervision of the teachers, put away dishes, and so forth. Their schools stand because of their hands. The world doesn't lie before their feet; usually they have to get down and polish it first, while counting to a hundred in Thai.

While they are just like any other students every where when it comes to mischief, they bring the attitudes they've inculcated from sustaining the school into my classroom. They are very eager to help, and they will perform pretty much everything that I ask them too. Sometimes, it took a while to seduce their personalities out of their coy shells, but in time, they were more willing to display their playful sides and more willing to exercise more agency in the classroom. 

I will always remember their attentiveness, their eagerness to learn and please, and their incorrigible displays of appreciation (my bags are never lacking in origami hearts). I will always remember the funny moments--most of them to my embarrassment-- but  all of them were comic reliefs, tending to assuage my larger anxieties.  I will never forget the challenges, the stresses, the self-doubt, but I will always remember the heart-affirming advances, such as watching my students develop and display tangible proofs of progress. I will always remember their unrelenting efforts to teach me Thai and their ridicules of my pronunciations. I will always remember their hospitalities and their grace. I will remember their unexpected visits at my home and their frequent recourse to smiles in the events of misunderstanding. I will always remember the laughter, from first-grade peals, to 6th grade pubescent, cracking bellows. I embrace these all, and commit them to memory.