Friday, January 29, 2010

The Darunsikkhalai School of Innovative Learning: Part One

I’ve been teaching at DSIL for nearly a month now, and so I feel qualified to expound on the nature of my job and the efficacy of this school. Offering a few snap judgments, though, won’t be easy: DSIL operates under a complex and opaque educational doctrine, a set of uniquely Thai cultural mores, and –

I’m sorry. I’m less than a paragraph into this post and already I’m spouting misinformation: namely, I had the audacity to call what I do here “teaching.” I won’t make that mistake again.

What I am, according to my contract’s verbiage, is a Facilitator. No doubt you suspect, as I did before I began here, that the distinction between Teacher and Facilitator is primarily a semantic, and not functional, one. But the two positions actually confer very different roles/responsibilities, and to refer to myself as a teacher is grossly inaccurate*. To understand why that is, it’s necessary to know something about Constructionism – DSIL’s organizing philosophy and its raison d’etre.

*All the students do, in fact, call me Teacher Ben, though maybe that's just because Facilitator Ben would be kind of a mouthful. They've also taken to calling me Ben Ten, which delights 'em endlessly.


Students (and Teacher Steve) get psyched up at Sports Day, the entire point of which is to inflict migraine headaches via the incessant enthusiastic thumping of an unholy arsenal of bongos.

How the school is supposed to work

Constructionism, in a nutshell, means that the students teach themselves. That’s an oversimplification, but if you take away any salient point from this dissertation, let it be that. More precisely, Constructionism refers to project-based learning: children in constructionist settings design and create their own projects, and the process of creation often provides greater educational value than the project’s content – in other words, the doctrine is more concerned with how children learn than with what they learn.

According to constructionist thinkers*, each child has his own diverse interests, aptitudes, and learning style, and it’s the role of the school to develop those interests/aptitudes by catering to that unique learning style. In that sense, say constructionists (and I tend to agree), traditional, lecture-based education is ineffective: by treating every student as an identically vapid receptacle for facts, Classic Ed. is stifling their natural love of learning, inhibiting creativity, and not actually teaching them anything of lasting value.

*The leading such scholar is MIT’s Seymour Papert, revered by DSIL’s administration for his sagacity and by me for his epic beard.


When he's not raiding dumpsters, this crackpot is DSIL's patron saint. Just kidding, Seymour: you're an inspiration.


In place of traditional fact-deposit-and-regurgitation systems, Constructionism offers a model called “learning-by-doing,” or “learning-by-making.” The idea is that creating the aforementioned projects helps students foster their aptitudes and learn skills applicable beyond the classroom; and, because they’re ostensibly completing a project of their own choosing, the whole experience is much more positive and engaging to them. (I’m convinced that if all of Phil Goldfarb’s classes dealt with basketball and girls, he would be Hastings High School’s most enthusiastic attendant.) The constructionist framework does not cram academic trivia down students’ throats; instead, kids gain all knowledge organically, and that knowledge has practical application within the project, making learning natural, relevant, and, hopefully, fun.

***

Before every trimester at DSIL, the students congregate to propose project concepts*.

*For some reason the tone of this article resembles a National Geographic documentary voice-over… I imagine “The students congregate…” being read in much the same voice as “Every spring the elephant seals gather on the rocky shoals of the Valdez Peninsula to partake in a mating ritual as old as time.”

The projects range from the quotidian (Psychology) to the whimsical (The Beginning and End of the World) to the demanding (Chemical Engineering) to the completely incomprehensible (Funtrolegology – try finding that course offering in even the most liberal artsy New England college)*. Oftentimes, when students can’t agree on a single project, multiple proposals are shoehorned together: one class is currently attempting to combine Biology and Military History. Funtrolegology is also a portmanteau: as its facilitator, Ram, describes the class’ inception and naming, “Tro because they wanted to do astronomy, Lego because they wanted to play with Legos, fun for obvious reasons, and 'ology' because clearly it’s a legitimate science.”

*One interesting phenomenon is that the projects grow less bizarre and adventurous as the students get older. The kids tend to choose more fanciful ideas in their youth – classes have names like “Miracle World” – but, as they approach teenagedom, they tighten up, and their newly conservative proposals – eg., Economic History – would look right at home in any college curriculum. This, I suspect, is due to increased pressure both from parents and selves to gear up for the looming threat of University; more inventive projects are regarded as too facetious to serve as adequate preparation. I think this concern is pretty specious, for what it's worth.


Students immersed in Thailand's national sport.

Once the students have chosen their projects, each newly-formed group has a massive brain-storming session about what topics fall under their project’s umbrella, what activities they’d like to attempt, what field trips they want to go on, etc. At least in theory, the class plans the entirety of the project itself; the facilitator exists not to dictate a syllabus, but to, yes, facilitate their thinking – to propose directions in which the project might veer. Ultimately, however, the students decide which, if any, of our suggestions are worth heeding; usually my ideas don't pass muster for them.

After the brainstorming has spit its last lightning bolt and the class begins in earnest, the facilitator is charged with ‘guiding the students’ learning.’ To wit: in my class, Business Economics*, my kids decided that, among other things, they wanted to learn about accounting**. The fact that I am woefully unqualified to teach anybody about anything pertaining to business, accounting, or, for that matter, numbers, was almost irrelevant – since it’s not my job to teach them anything, I didn’t have to, say, prepare a lecture on profit margin (or experience the sweaty nightmares that surely would have attended such a duty). Instead, I merely drew up a loose activity: I had them research different measurements of corporations’ economic health, then look up the annual financial reports of various companies and decide, using those prior measurements, whether that company was thriving or in deep shit. Being a facilitator, in short, means being a Creative Activity Designer (except, as you’ll see in Part Two, when it means being an Innocent Bystander). The kids, ideally, are almost entirely self-directed and self-motivated – they dictate what they want to learn, and the facilitator creates unobtrusive methods of leading them toward knowledge.

*What you’re undoubtedly wondering right now is: how did an English and Environmental Studies major who spent four years at Amherst railing against the very existence of economics (let alone the unfortunate gravitation of his friends to that vile discipline like investment banks to a government handout) wind up teaching a Business Economics class? (For that matter, how did a fresh-out-of-college shmoe with zero teaching experience even get this job? That’s maybe the deeper mystery.)

The answer is complicated, but in a word, it was politics that landed me Business Econ. As the New Guy, I had no pre-associations with any of the project proposals, whereas many of the other teachers had certain groups of students they had to work with, or certain subjects they’d taught in the past, etc., and thus had dibs on their pet classes. Also, none of the project proposals really lent themselves to my narrow areas of expertise – try as I might, I couldn’t talk any of the kids into a Fishing Project. Also significant was that Teacher Take (she of the impeccable chicken-foot-stew-eating technique) had already signed on to co-teach Econ. Take was reportedly irascible and unfriendly, and many English speakers dreaded the prospect of co-teaching with her. Confident in my ability to coexist with anybody, I accepted the challenge; and sure enough Take and I have been almost entirely harmonious.


**Or, just as likely, their parents decided that the kids wanted to learn business accounting, because what 12-year-old in his or her right mind would give a shit about asset liquidity and debt ratios and balanced budgets and all that jazz?


On paper it sounds like a wonderfully quixotic place. But, as with most of life's wonderful quixotry, this school comes with a catch: nothing at DSIL ever goes smoothly in practice. Ever.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Supposedly Delicious Things I'll Never Eat Again

Part of my motivation in coming to Thailand was to have a sort of epicurean picaresque, and this country has, as advertised, introduced my palette to wonders. I could, I suppose, enumerate all those incredible and commonplace dishes that make each day a small gastronomical adventure - the gang kiaow, the tom yam goon, the pad si-iew (sics all around, I'm sure), the innumerable delicacies I've ordered by walking into nameless hole-in-the-wall noodle shops, pointing at an adjacent table, and saying, "I'll have what that guy's having." The promise of delicious food is one of the temptations that coaxes me out of bed every morning.

Still, there are exceptions, moments of queasiness embedded like knots of gristle within the general scrumptiousness. And, since culinary oddities are bound to be more fun to read (and write) about than ordinary comestibles, I present the aforementioned supposedly delicious things.

***

Thai cuisine isn’t as industrious as Chinese when it comes to making use of every dubious anatomical scrap. I’ve had fish bladder soup and fried pig intestine (both terrific, incidentally), but I’ve actually been a little disappointed by the lack of esoterica on Thai menus.

Last week in Phuket, though, I partially sated my hunger for random body parts with a bowl of chicken feet stew. The stew’s presentation was impressive, in that gleaming and terrible way that weapons can impress: my bowl brimmed with fierce, denticled talons that looked still capable of scratching out the eyes of an incautious farmer. I fully expected a claw to spring to life, clutch me by the wrist, and plea that I spare it the acidic rigors of my digestive tract.


You can barely control your salivary glands right now, I'll bet.

Once I resolved to show the feet no mercy, I was confronted with the conundrum of how to consume them. Chicken feet are essentially skeins of rubber stretched over a lattice of fine, inedible bones – tarsals and metacarpals and phalanxes expressly designed to choke diners. I set about meticulously removing shreds of plasticine skin from the tiny bones, no doubt expending more calories in surgery than I stood to gain in consumption*. It was a task for scalpel and forceps – even knife and fork would have been inadequate – yet I undertook the operation with only plastic ladle and wooden chopsticks, a woefully indelicate arsenal; I might as well have tried to defuse a bomb with hammer and chisel. Five laborious minutes later, I’d picked pebbled skin fragments from about two toes; the cairn of bones perched on my plate seemed an unjustly miniscule monument to my tenacity.

“Come on, guy,” my dining companion, Take (my co-teacher at DSIL) sneered. (“Come on, guy” is Take’s standard expression of reproach whenever I’m particularly obtuse, which, in Thailand, is often.) “Whatchoo doing?” I looked up from my toils and across the table at her: a chicken foot dangled from her mouth, a tableau that conjured images of foxes and henhouses, and two more claws lay on her plate, as clean and intact as skeletons in an anatomy class.

“Like this,” explained my vulpine friend, and she sucked at the talon – apparently ladle and chopsticks didn’t figure in this procedure after all – and tossed the skinned foot aside with a velociraptorish grin.

“Oh,” I said, duly shamed.

Chicken feet, it turns out, aren’t especially delectable even once you’ve solved consumptive difficulties (or had the mystery cracked for you). They’re rubbery, of course, and have an almost neutral flavor; the myriad bones, I learned from accidental experimentation, aren’t big enough to choke you but still feel damn unpleasant when they’re rattling down your esophagus. Intrepid diners might enjoy feet for their novelty, but, speaking strictly gastronomically, you might as well peel the skin off a drumstick and dip it in beef bullion.



One of the few classic Thai foods I'm reluctant to try: dried squid, which typically smell like they were scraped from the cargo hold of a shrimp trawler after about three unrefrigerated weeks at sea.

***

Many Thai soups and curries come packed with lueh: suspicious cubes, the color of charcoal and the texture of tofu, that bob within the matrix of stew like bergs in a floe. The iceberg analogy doesn’t end there, either: lueh is as likely to scuttle the appetite of an unsuspecting consumer as a submerged glacial mass is a tanker. That’s because lueh’s composition is as unsavory as its appearance: the gray blocks are congealed pig’s blood**.

I’ve only tried lueh once, and that one taste test was less leonine chomp than rodentish nibble; but my sole sample was enough to convince me that I never need to try it again. Much as I try, I can’t come up with a more suitable adjective than rancid. Pig blood may be a taste I’m capable of acquiring – its ubiquity suggests that it must appeal to many palettes, and mine is as omnivorous as any – but I’m not willing to subject my taste buds to the pain of acquisition.

Even though lueh tasted, I’ll forever maintain, objectively disgusting, I do wonder how much of my revulsion had psychosomatic origins. There’s something about the phrase “congealed pig blood” – couple it with the word "gelatinous" to maximize nausea! – that gives me the willies. But it’s not like blood is inherently more disgusting than other nasty organs I’ve chowed on w/out compunction – bladder and intestines, brains and thyroid glands; all down the hatch with nary a hint of rising bile. Blood, rationally, is neither more nor less foul than any other part of the animal body; in fact one could argue that eating blood is more natural than consuming the mystery meats found on western buffet lines: any idiot knows what blood looks like, but could anyone besides a meat packer identify the bacon portion of a porcine corpse?

But my rationality loses out to whatever cultural proscription forbids blood from the American diet, and I can’t stomach a single lueh blob; even the sight of it wobbling on a soup spoon like an obscure flavor of Jell-O is enough to dampen my appetite. (Albeit only very temporarily; and my appetite is certifiably un-ruin-able.) Could it be a fear of turning vampiric? A latent respect for certain Kosher laws? A pathological aversion to any food that can be described as gelatinous? All possible. Regardless, I quickly learned two Thai words, words never heard on a Transylvanian moor nor on the set of a Quentin Tarantino movie: Mai lueh. Hold the blood.

***

*I’ve heard that if you kill a chipmunk in the wild and are in desperate need of food, you’re supposed to eat it whole, inc. fur, for that very reason. There: I just saved your life.

**Lueh, which is blood in cubed form, isn’t to be confused with the liquid blood (name unknown) sometimes poured into soup water, actually a not-half-bad addition to broth if lightly applied. The last thing you want is a blood bath in a bowl, though.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

A First Update; or, Thai Toilet Protocol: An Episstemology Gap (w/ endnotes!)

One month in Thailand without an update constitutes criminal blogging negligence, so to the tens of semi-avid readers who have been, if not exactly starved for news, at least amenable to a light news nosh, I proffer this post in hopes that it'll take the edge off your mild hunger. Hopefully this post represents the beginning of a flurry of mental note transcription.

Actually I think my silence thus far has been for the best, since it’s spared you the reader from the idiotic incredulity with which I’ve greeted even my most banal discoveries, eg. “Ew they eat scorpions here that’s so gross!” or “OMG you guys none of the toilets here are outfitted with T.P. but instead they have this kind of powerful hygienic hose that not only cleans and massages your ass but also buffs it to a gleaming waxy shine and isn’t that crazy?!?!!!” (1)

Detailing the many small and mundane ways in which life in Thailand differs from life in those United States isn’t very interesting (endnoted toilet protocol excepted, of course), and I’ll try to avoid the trap of the quotidian.


Facts of daily life in Thailand on display in this picture include: a) occasional elephants; b) Forrest Gumpian haircuts, where the barber makes this sort of swooping gesture in query and you're too cowardly and language-impaired to do anything but fearfully nod consent to The Swoop, and the next thing you know your carefully cultivated sideburns and, indeed, any and all hairs that had once resided below your ears are drifting to the floor and you look like a cross between a Franciscan monk and a 1950's teenager and goddammit.

Such avoidance is made easier by the fact that I’m steadily going native (2), to wit: I hold the lease to a fully furnished apartment; I boast a steadily burgeoning repertoire of Thai phrases, including but by no means limited to my address (3), “How much for a Singha? (4),” and, “Ba mee giaow mu dang! (5)”; and, like most Thais, I do 97% of my shopping at 7-11. In sum, I may still (and always) be a tourist, but I like to think I bear a stronger resemblance to Bill Murray in Lost in Translation – wry, observational, and fitting in as well as stature/caucasianness allow – than, say, Clark Griswold in Europe.

That said, my transformation from stumbling, uncouth ex-marine to sure-footed, assimilated Na’vi tribesman has scarcely begun: my skin has maybe taken on a bluish tinge (6), but I’m a long way from acquiring ponytail genitalia (7). It’s fitting, then, that my first true post (8) deals with a bald-faced bit of touristic cavorting: my first Thai camping trip, to a place called Phu Kradueng National Park.

Coming Soon! (9)

***
Endnotes

1) Although, come to think of it, that may not be the best example, since the bathroom rigmarole here is truly arcane and may well remain so for my entire year in Thailand. The thing is: most public toilet stalls contain not only the bowls so recognizable to Western posteriors, but adjacent to the bowls this sort of large stone basin built into floor/wall and filled with water of dubious, unfit-for-piscine-life hue, and when you’re finished doing your business I think you’re supposed to release some kind of lever or turn a faucet that somehow empties the water level in the toilet bowl (which bowl, by the way, is usually set into the floor at about ankle height, making for a splayed and uncomfy affair for any person long of hypothetical leg) and correspondingly raises the level in the basin, thereby “flushing” the toilet after a fashion; except, upon faucet’s turning, the water levels only fluctuate about 2/3 of the time, making me wonder whether flush-by-faucet is proper procedure at all; and further murking the already (literally & figuratively) murky waters of the situation is the occasional presence of other esoteric paraphernalia in certain bathrooms, like for example plastic buckets floating aimlessly in the cloudy malodorous basin water, making me (yet again) wonder whether I am in fact supposed to fill these buckets from the basin and empty them into the toilet, thereby washing down or at least diluting my emissions; and basically the entire operation is completely opaque and frustrating to the extent that several times I have risked ruptured bladder/colon by holding it in until such time as I can reach a restroom which I knows contains a familiar Western-style toilet instead of attempting, and likely botching, what should be a really fucking routine maneuver.

2) Some of my Thai friends have taken to calling me Jake Sully, after Avatar’s Stranger in a Strange Land protagonist.

3) Pracha Uithd, Soy Sam Sip (sic??)

4) Singha being my favorite ubiquitous Thai beer; other common brews are Leo (tolerable) and Chang, employed to dual use as a paint thinner.

5) My favorite cafeteria dish, a soup of rice noodles (ba mee), wontons (giaow), and BBQed pork (mu dang by default).

6) Possibly due to excessive consumption of suspect mu dang.

7) If you haven’t yet seen Avatar, this analogy admittedly makes no sense and is probably more than a little disturbing.

8) Still pending – this entry is more of an advertisement for future updates than an update in and of itself; though I maintain that the prior description of toilet situation represents a piece of serious and useful information for prospective travelers

9) -ish.