In Thailand, being a teacher (“ajarn” in Thai) is a position
deserving of respect. On the respect totem pole, only monks and the king are
higher. There is even a national holiday for paying respect to teachers, during
which every student makes a bouquet and must wai (bow), forehead to the floor, and present it to their
teachers. On a regular basis, students are always supposed to be, literally,
lower than teachers, so they duck when we walk past. They also crawl up to Thai
teachers’ desks on their knees. And, although being a foreign teacher will
certainly diminish the amount of respect we receive in actuality, it in no way
lessens the cultural expectations imposed on us. This can be an intimidating
situation to walk into as a foreigner.
Having no official rulebook, we
are just left blindly feeling our way through the cultural differences. And,
from what we can figure out, the rules make no sense. We have been scolded for:
wearing non-collared shirts, wearing flipflops, drinking directly out of a big
water bottle at morning flag raising ceremony, eating while standing, not using
a straw, eating while walking, eating popsicles, not eating food that was
offered to us. The list goes on and includes, primarily, things that we see
Thai teachers doing on a regular basis.
The list of don’ts also extends
to any personal life you may have in public. What you wear, what you do, what
you eat, can all potentially be witnessed by an unseen student, or worse,
parent. My piercings are a disruption in almost every class, and if I wear my
hair up I can be sure that the constellation tattoo on my neck will serve as a
major distraction. Bumping into students on the weekends while wearing my nose
ring and potentially showing bits of my shoulder tattoo pumps fodder into the
gossip mill. And, as it isn’t naturally occurring in Thailand, cleavage is a
big no-no.
We gain a bit of celebrity. Thais
know where we teach. In Ratchaburi, our laundry ladies tracked down where we
lived when they ruined some of our clothes. The director of our current school
called us on the guesthouse phone one morning, without our telling him where we
were staying. Word gets around. We stand out. Drinking beer? Smoking
cigarettes? We do it at home or where there are only adults: bars, not
restaurants.
Luckily, in more-touristy Chiang
Rai, we stand out less than we did last term. And the school seems a bit more lax overall. But, we still are expected to
finish our afternoon popsicles before going back to school, and the students do
freak out a little bit when we crouch down to their level.
