Megaphone Teaching

Thai students are notoriously poor listeners. Sometimes it's easy to put that down to the fact that they just don't understand what it is that their foreign teacher is saying; but it's more than that, Thai teachers have to work just as hard to make themselves heard.

A case in point occurred on Friday whilst I was teaching one of my better classes. The academic director, one of the most senior teachers in the school and a somewhat scary figure, wanted the students to rearrange the desks in my small classroom in readiness for use over the weekend. The task was simple; it required some of the desks to be put into single-file and the rest pushed to the back of the room. That should have required the work of a few students for little more than five minutes.




However, what followed was an amazing session of shouting, confusion and anger. Rather than give simple, clear instructions of what was required (and to be fair the students probably wouldn't have listened to that) the director took out her megaphone and proceeded to issue a series of apparently contradictory orders. Full blast!

And the students scurried, this way and that, falling over themselves, their desks and for one hapless student over the director herself! It was an extraordinary sight watching such an easy job cause so much grief and take so long to complete.

And, again, it's not really the students fault that they can't listen effectively; no one has taught them how.