School Work

School Work

Do you remember American one-room country schools, or know someone who does?  I attended such a school in central Wisconsin for grades K – 8 in the 1940s and early 50s.  More than 50 years later, as a Peace Corps volunteer currently teaching at a rural school in northeastern Thailand, I was surprised to find several points of similarity – and also colossal differences, of course – that prompted me to write this piece.

In my one-room school, students helped the teacher with the work of keeping the school clean, orderly, and warm in the winter (coal stove in the earlier years, later replaced by an “oil burner,” if memory serves).  We all had “duties,” such as sweeping the floors of the school building and outhouses (one for girls, one for boys), bringing in water (the school had no running water), cleaning blackboards, clapping erasers, and so on.  Our school was very small – sometimes there were fewer than ten students, other times twenty or so.

At my rural school in Thailand, one of the first things I learned was how much “housekeeping” or janitorial work the students do. On the first day of the term, first-period classes were not taught; instead, the students went to their homerooms to be assigned duties. For example, in each homeroom, a student is assigned to sweep the floor twice a day – the windows have grates but no screens, so there are multiple entry points for dirt and also birds, who tend to drop their, um, calling cards at random. Students also sweep the walkways in front of buildings, empty trash bins, clean the toilets, deliver the day’s free milk to homerooms, and bring fresh bottles of drinking water to the teachers’ rooms.  One thing they don’t seem to do is clap the erasers – at least, the erasers in the rooms I teach in are always saturated with chalk dust (yes, we use blackboards).

Student mopping in front of our building.

The village is small (pop. 3,000) but the school is relatively large – it’s a comprehensive school (K-12), with about 630 students and 40 teachers.  There is no administrative staff except for the principal, vice-principal, ICT manager, and the principal’s administrative assistant. One janitor is responsible for five classroom buildings, an assembly hall, a small library, a store that sells school supplies and snacks, and some storage sheds.  There is no money to hire workers to do these jobs, even though Thailand spends some 20% of its annual budget to provide free education for students K-12, with attendance mandated through grade 9. Where does the money go?  Schools pay for the students’ meals, textbooks and other learning resources (laboratory materials, band instruments, etc.), recreational activities and uniforms. Each student has several different uniforms that are worn on specific days, including a Scout uniform, worn every Wednesday – all students are expected to join Scouts.  Of course, teachers must be paid too, as well as utility bills and related costs.

So, having janitorial and some administrative work done by students rather than paid staff helps keep the school running – as in my one-room school days, on a much smaller scale. Besides duties that must be done every day, students do other tasks as needed. They pick up trash on the school grounds, help move furniture, deliver textbooks to classrooms, deliver messages from the principal’s office, help with set-up and tear-down for special events, serve glasses of water to visitors before they ask, and more. Students even sweep out the teachers’ room twice a day and wash the dishes that we leave piled up from lunch and snacks.

This picture reminds me of what we called “Arbor Day” in my one-room school, a day in the spring when we raked and cleaned up the entire school yard.

When I started to do the dishes myself one day, other teachers told me not to:  “That’s the students’ work.”  As I thought about it, I could see that if teachers started doing the work the students are expected to do, it could begin to tear a hole in the fabric of the school culture.

The rural Thai school where I teach seems to have a sense of camaraderie between teachers and students – I haven’t seen any students balk or stall when reminded to do an assigned task.  I believe this has much to do with the fact that teachers and students share the work of keeping the school running.  Students know that the work they do is valued and needed; teachers appreciate the work the students do. In another post, I will write about the many duties the teachers have besides teaching their classes.