The Price Mother's Pay

I’m running into some problems. They don’t take school seriously here. Class is cancelled all the time for one reason or another. This Thursday it is cancelled for Mothers Day (The Queens Birthday) and it is cancelled on Friday because it is the day after Mothers Day. We celebrated mothers day at school today too. A 3 hour long ceremony where the kids did dances, sang songs, and then every mother by grade sat on the stage in a chair while their child crawled on their knees across the stage, presented them with a gift, and bowed once into their mothers laps, and then once laying almost fully on the floor while kneeling in front of their mothers. This alone took over an hour.

Every Friday the elementary students have a morning meeting together with their thai teachers. The Farong (foreign) teachers stay behind and do work stuff. Well apparently Thai’s like to make the children feel very guilty for being born and being such a pain to their mothers. The Thai school gave the students a two hour lecture on how bad they were and how much their mother did for them in order to be here that they should be better people. The English Elementary program had a different idea to show how much pain they put their mothers through. At dinner on Friday night one of the first grade teachers told us that he came into his class after morning meeting and four-five kids were crying inconsolably. He assumed maybe their mothers were not going to be there for the ceremony, but hadn’t a clue why they would not stop crying. He sent them to the back of the room to calm down and started his math lesson. After finding out that his class was not the only one with inconsolable children, he asked one of the Thai teachers what happened to make the kids so hysterical. Some Thai head of something had the brilliant idea to show the dreaded birthing video to grades K-6 to give them a guilt trip. You know, the one they show in Jr. High and High School Health classes, yeah, they showed that to these little kids. No doubt there were some phone calls home.