Only in Laos

It’s the last night and my neighbours want a memorable meal. There are just three of us. Another student has gone to stay with his monk friend and another has a wife somewhere. Their concession to not use MSG has also dampened what should be a festive moment. “Would be great if we had music,” he says, but we don’t have any. I like the sound of the crickets, but they must wonder why such a common sound pleases me.

Somehow the conversation turns to dragon monsters, spirits and animism. I’m not sure why this one student who can’t speak any English seems to be an anthropological specialist in village belief. He explains that every village has a shaman and that’s where they seek explanations. Someone’s headache goes away after it’s understood that a man must release the lizard he’s captured. There are rules about clearing forests and other violations of the spirits.

I told them I had heard from a Khamu man that they had lost their forest spirits because of Chinese logging and that he no native cosmology to pass on to his children. The two students I was talking to nodded their heads as if this was 9-11.

Devastation of a native cosmology is a form of terrorism, but in the name of modernity, it is executed by one’s own hand. There are no particular government policies against animism, but in the same way that driving a pick-up is more fashionable than riding a tractor, spirit worship gains few followers these days.

The student says these things will not survive because they are not true. Saying that truth is relative only puts them in a post-modern confusion. I’ve never heard of a Lao anthropologist and even if there were I’d be afraid that the research techniques used would undermine the terrain under study. “Modern” education is the Trojan horse that promises development and instead spreads viruses to conquer.

Forcing a bolt as if it were a screw is a good way to bewilder young people. I’ve determined that 80% have given up on trying to understand their teaching methodology courses. Full of rational and logical formulas, they appear clean and modern, but if you use these techniques in a Lao classroom, you might as well ask for the spirits for help.

I don’t know anything about Lao spirits, but there’s a spirit in the students that I recognize. I recognize when they’re dispirited and I recognize when they feel whole. Sign language helps them get back into their bodies. Could there be a way to attach foreign language learning onto their native spirit cosmologies?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made another movie recognized at Cannes. At the award ceremony he said that he hopes his achievements will inspire young people to try something new. "We have become too much of a monoculture, with the same logic of narrative," he said. "Minority cultures have been prevented from discovering their own ways of doing things.” Now, as if coming out, he admits that his inspiration comes from the fading spirit world of the Lao-Isan region of Thailand. He doesn’t dare to say exactly what his belief system is, but his movies are infused with this world to the very last drop.

Following a convoluted road, I feel like I’m seeing a light. Why is the most institutional of schools my battlefield? It’s because this is where the most destruction happens. What could possibly happen if these students reclaim their worlds? What kind of super-teachers would they become?

I told my neighbors, ‘I know of no other place in the world as special as Laos.”

How good does it get?

It’s the end of the term. It’s finals time. I’ve taken the students on my own path for the past six weeks, but now if they’re mainstreamed into the standard finals, they’re all doomed to fail. To save them, I’ve successfully negotiated the right to give them a final of my own design.

And then I wonder why I’ve negotiated so vigorously for something so risky. What if the students fail? What if they feel disenfranchised, having been derailed from the status quo?  What if their conclusion is something like, “Is this what we get for being honest?”

But the reason why I’m so confident is because the verdict is already in. The students have changed. They don’t use their phones in class. They don’t use class for chatting with their friends. The absent glaze in their eyes is gone. They’re determined to learn and they’re not letting anything get in their way anymore, including themselves.

I negotiated so that the final was an oral test. The message had to be clear, “There is no way you can cheat on this final.” They had to translate phrases we had studied from Lao to English / from English to Lao. They would have to respond in seconds and had to be very prepared.

80% passed with astonishing confidence. I had the privilege to look every student in the eye and confirm that they owned their own knowledge. Confidence makes the eyes shine. Like winners in a game show, they slam their palm on the button and win the pot. 

The other 20% need more time. I discovered that the 5 boys who sat in the back row couldn’t differentiate key sounds like ch/sh/th/s/z. When all these sounds sound the same, they can't get past the starting block. I offered to help them that night, but they didn’t show up. Like turtles in a protective shell, they weren’t ready yet.

Another 10% thought they could play the old game. Two begged for the chance to try again. Why did they think ten minutes of review would help? Technically, you can’t cheat on an oral test, but they had a friend mouthing the answers behind my back. I wasn’t going to waste time lecturing. I just asked, “Why didn’t you prepare before?” She said she had a sore throat or something. (cough, cough)

It would have been a challenge to win over every single student, but I was finally just getting to know everyone’s name. To be fair to myself, we had already arrived. The culture in the class had changed and we were on a new bus.

My memory scans over the highlights of the last six weeks. The times I’d yell myself hoarse over the din. The day I slammed the door and kept students hostage until they finished their writing. The day students started learning and the day someone told me, “You taught me how to be honest to myself.”

50 students crowded into a 95-degree room. Who could have imagined it could be done. 

How bad is it?

It’s bad. I shudder at the thought of these students being teachers. Most can’t speak or write English. Worse yet, they’ll teach the way they’ve been taught which means we’re back-pedalling into hell.

I was horrified to see that their “methodology” course covers 4 entire semesters. It’s like teaching the techniques of brain surgery to those who haven’t learned what an internal organ is. Most young people learn from example, but I haven’t seen much evidence of reliable modelling even with 4 semesters of theory.

The current international trend in “student-centered learning” came as a welcome laxative to “overworked” teachers. It meant you could turn on a video and leave the classroom. In Laos where there are usually no videos, every exit from the classroom is justified as “self-study”. I do my rounds to try to scoop up the mess of bewildered students.

When students are left to graze on their own, they find there is no grass. Then, they suspect that what they’ve been told to forage for something that’s not digestible anyway. In order to get points and pass the tests, the most sensible thing to do is to copy and cheat.

I can correct 50 “essays” in five minutes because many students don’t bother to change the font when they copy from the Internet. Those who hand copy don’t bother to change a word, so it’s an easy game of pairing the original with the copy. The copier’s writing is sloppy and there are more misspelled words. Some just pay others to do the work.

In terms of cheating, it’s a lost cause with 50 students crammed into a classroom. I have to make two versions of a quiz and that’s how I get entertaining results like, “Have you ever eaten Vientiane?” or “Have you ever been to a goat?" Now, I do two rounds, one student to a desk. When time is called, students have 10 seconds to run and put their papers in my bag. Otherwise, 15 seconds is enough to copy an entire quiz.

Cheating goes down and scores go up. That’s interesting. The daily average is posted and I’ve seen the bottom-line seep into students’ consciousness one-by-one. It’s pass or fail and it all depends on individual effort.

One student who got zeros on tests could now recite by memory two pages of lessons. He said another student drilled him. I also found out that it only took five minutes or practice.

Like the earth spinning, it would take a tremendous effort to change directions. On the other hand, I’ve confirmed that the solutions and potential are there. When will people understand that if you want to go forward, you don’t pedal backwards?

Buggy snacks

I don’t know what they’re called in English. “Maeng Mao” are like unevolved termites that by some evolutionary twist have wings. On rainy nights they come out in swarms in a frenzied flutter of death. So desperate are they to get to a light bulb that they’ll squeeze through window screens and beat their flimsy wings until they fall off. I think that’s the point because maybe it’s a last flap after mating. They don’t seem the fittest insect to me.

My first experience of them was in Thailand. On a rainy maeng night, I was trying to seal my screens in defense when by chance I took a look at my bathroom where they were pouring in through the slotted concrete. The cloud was so intense that there was a disco flicker effect against the light. What scared me most was the big toad in the corner having such a field day that I was sure I’d witness its stomach explode.

They come like a quiet plague. Street lamps attract so many that the detached wings cover the pavement like parchment snow. They’re hard to sweep up because they’re so airborne. It’s a bit strange that the quiet remains of such an orgy of death are delicate brown wings.

I knew that people ate them, but it seemed too easy a prey to make it even delicious. After all, you just sweep your porch, wash them and fry them in oil. The wings curl like roasted tea or tiny kelp. Some say you don’t eat that part, just the body part.

Now, the twist to this whole story is that they are delicious. They’re crisp and salty like seaweed and nutty like peanuts. They would be outrageously delicious over a bowl of hot rice and I’m sure Japanese would love them. I’d eat them with fermented natto beans with a raw egg. They’d make good “Maeng musubi” or “terminte onigiri.”

I told my Japanese friend who runs a restaurant. Surely a new hit on the menu. She told me I had turned Lao.