The Cow Said "Pig"?

The Cow Said “Pig”?

And Other Mysteries of Old MacDonald ‘s Farm

In January, it was decided that our school’s “English on Mondays” program was too limited for its goal of encouraging more students and teachers to speak English. So now, I’m to teach a few words of English to the students assembled at the flagpole every morning, after the daily rituals – the principal’s announcements, a story from the Jataka Tales, flag-raising and national anthem, prayers, and other business – are finished.

You may ask what it’s like to teach English to 600+ students from grades 1 through 12 who’ve been restless for about 30 minutes already and are hoping to be dismissed with time to play before classes start at 9am. Not exactly a cakewalk. Even 15 minutes is a lot of time to fill while trying to hold students’ attention in this situation. Thankfully, the time allotted has now been reduced from 15 minutes to five. Whew.

My teaching strategies so far consist of singing and TPR (=Total Physical Response). TPR is based on having learners associate actions with words, starting with simple action verbs such as stand up, sit down, run, dance, walk, skip, clap your hands, stomp your feet, turn around, etc.  Students listen, watch the teacher, and demonstrate that they understand the words by performing the actions. They learn to say the words before long, after listening and doing the actions many times. To keep it a bit more interesting while constantly recycling the same vocabulary, the students can be asked to do the actions fast or slow, or from right to left, backward or forward, or ask the boys to do one thing and the girls another. This last ploy always gets laughs from the students who were paying attention, at the expense of those who weren’t – inevitably there are boys who clap when I say “Girls, please clap your hands” and girls who dance when I say “Boys, please dance.” 

Since attention spans are not greater in Thailand than in the US, it’s best to change the activity or sing a different song about once a minute. Thai students like to sing, especially songs with actions to accompany the words, and they like to sing the same songs again and again. Walking to or from school, I usually hear neighborhood children singing lines from songs they learned at flagpole. The pictures below show me teaching the song “Good Morning,” which I got from a web site called dreamenglish.com – you can visit it if you want to learn the song yourself.

Raising arms for "Good Morning"

Holding arms out to spin around

A few brave students singing with me and a colleague

To teach a song that doesn’t have actions, I make some up, a strategy that can backfire if the actions aren’t familiar to the learners. I thought it would be fun to teach “Zip a dee doo dah,” snapping my fingers each time you sing “Zip,” and skipping to and fro on “my oh my what a wonderful day.” Trouble was, many or maybe most of the children couldn’t snap their fingers, which slowed us down a bit while they concentrated on trying to do it, ignoring the words. Now, about four weeks later, quite a few can snap their fingers very, er, snappily, even if they still haven’t got the words to the song down pat. But hey, progress is progress.

So, what about the topic of this post, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” I thought this song would be easy for our students to learn – and sure enough, they all caught on to “e-i-e-i-o” almost instantly. However, they didn’t sing along with “on this farm he had a cow” or “moo, moo here” etc. as I had expected, and gave me blank looks when I repeated the lines. The reason is simple enough, and I should have anticipated it. Thai people say that the cow (wua) says “maw maw,” not “moo moo” – which sounds to them like the Thai word for “pig” (muu).  So when they heard “with a moo moo here, moo moo there” the students no doubt thought I was saying “pig pig.”  What sense does that make? No wonder they didn’t sing along.

Just to keep things interesting, the pig doesn’t say “oink oink” in Thai, but “oot oot,” and the duck doesn’t say “quack quack,” but “gop gop.”  At least “oink” and “quack” don’t sound like Thai names of other farm animals, so that’s some consolation. The duck is difficult for another reason, however – Thai people have a hard time hearing the difference between “duck” and “dog,” and tend to pronounce the two words more or less the same. Also, dogs don’t say “bow wow” in Thai, but “hong hong.” What a zoo, uh, barnyard.

Note to self: Next time, start with the sheep, the chickens, and the cat, whose vocalizations in Thai are very similar to the ones in English.

Teaching “Old MacDonald” to Thai students made me think of our much-loved professor in the Indiana University Germanic Studies Department, Dr. Frank Banta, who died in January at the age of 95. I remembered his taking about a half hour of class one day to ask us what the various animal sounds were in the languages we knew – English, French, German, Russian, Latvian, and maybe some others. It was a fun activity – but I can’t recall what point he wanted to make.  Was it to disprove the onomatopoeia theory of the origins of human language? Was it just for our amusement?  Or what?  Maybe someone on this list who was in the same class (it was either Comparative Linguistics or History of the German Language) will remember.  – I would so like to be able to tell Frank about teaching “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to Thai students. It would probably amuse him, and maybe he’d remember what his point was in that class all those years ago.  R.I.P. Frank, you were totally the best, and we miss you acutely.

A Funeral

A Funeral

December 2013

This post is a lightly edited version of what I wrote immediately after the funeral of a boy from our school. I hesitated before deciding to publish it in order to gain a little distance from the emotions of the event.  As always, I want to emphasize that my intent is only to describe what I see and experience, not to judge it.

The funeral was on a Monday afternoon.  A 9^th grade boy had died in a motorcycle accident the Friday before. Someone told me that he ran into a cow or bull. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. I didn’t have him as a student, but recognized him when I saw his picture at the funeral.

It was a chilly rainy day, the roads were muddy. A fellow-teacher drove us out to the home of the boy’s family, a mile or two from the school.  A coffin-like box, only taller than coffins we are used to in the US, was inside the house, with paper flower wreaths and also real flowers around it and on top.  We took off our shoes and knee-walked toward the coffin where there were incense sticks for us to light. There were pictures of the boy on easels nearby, and there was a “tree” for people to hang money on.  Doing a little research later, I learned that it is customary in Buddhist funeral practices to have the body of the deceased person on display for three, five, or seven days before cremation. This would have been the third day.

Soon after we arrived, the coffin was loaded onto a pickup truck to be taken to the site where the cremations take place. Someone holding a green string attached to the coffin walked ahead of the pickup truck – when I asked why, my colleague said that the string would lead the boy’s spirit to where it needed to go. The mourners followed the pickup truck to a site about a half-mile down the road, just past the entrance to a nearby wat.  Quite a few people were already there, gathered under the shelter you see below or standing around it with umbrellas. 

 The coffin was under a canopy in a clearing, facing the shelter. There was cloth festooned over the coffin, and a frame of very light wood or bamboo. Flowers were piled over the coffin and around the funeral pyre made of logs. Several men were chopping coconuts open and pouring the water off into plastic bottles. Students walked through the crowd carrying trays with glasses of water and soft drinks, but not many people wanted any.

After a while there were some speeches – I couldn’t see who was speaking and didn’t understand everything that was said, but could hear the words for teachers, students, school, and so on – of course, most everyone from our school was there, especially students and teachers from the grades that were closest to the boy in age. The school band played a piece I didn’t recognize. After the speeches were finished, a monk chanted for what must have been about 20 minutes, followed by a round of chanting interspersed with responses from the mourners, a sequence that was repeated a couple of times. After that, all attention turned to the coffin, which was on a structure of logs in the clearing pictured below.

Someone carried the flower wreaths away from the coffin, the canopy was carried off to one side, and the decorated part of the coffin itself was taken away – presumably to be used again by someone else. A table was set up near the coffin with little homemade paper flowers for everyone to take and put next to the body. When I took one, I saw that the flowers were made of paper that documents had been printed on, or that someone had written and drawn pictures on. I thought about the boy’s family and friends making the flowers with whatever paper they happened to have, so as to be ready in time for the ritual.

Everyone lined up to walk to the coffin, lay one of the flowers beside it, and pour a little coconut water over the boy.  So that’s what the coconuts were for. He lay there looking very natural, as if he were asleep. I didn’t ask what his fatal injuries were. One of our students just ahead of me, carrying his saxophone, was crying – I felt so sorry for him to have lost his friend.  After we walked back through the mud, my two colleagues poured water over each other’s hands, and mine, the water blessing.

Then the structure the boy was lying in was dismantled (made of cloth and light wood), and logs were piled all around and over him, like a little house. The light wood pieces were tossed on top.  Men poured something on the logs (probably gasoline, I was too far away to smell it) and the fire was started.  I stood there crying, wondering how his parents could possibly stand it. Then I remembered hearing Thai people who had recently had a death in their family say something like: “Yesterday I sent my dear [name of relative] to heaven” – that is, the cremation is a positive event, because it carries the deceased person’s spirit up to heaven.

When we walked back out to the car, the boy’s mother and sister were standing in the driveway holding his picture and thanking people for coming.  I was introduced to them and, of course, someone took our picture. 

Except for the monks (five of them) and the person who picked up the flower wreaths and the decorative part of the coffin, the funeral seemed to be a community effort. The men loading the coffin onto the pickup truck and off again, the students carrying trays of soft drinks, the men opening the coconuts, carrying the logs and lighting them – these were not funeral parlor professionals, but ordinary people helping their bereaved friends. Later, they would also collect the ashes and clear the site to make it ready for the next cremation. Another example of the collectivist aspect of Thai culture.

From reading about Thai funeral practices, I learned that wats in cities and towns often have crematoria, and the rituals may be more elaborate. However, the practices described above are quite typical of funerals in rural communities in northeastern Thailand.