respect the earth, or else

Today, the primary grades participated in Environment Day.

Like most other things that happen at this school, I spent half of the time trying to figure out the point, and the other half laughing at how ridiculously executed things were.

Case in point: At one station, students learned how to turn perfectly good garbage bags into worthless bits of trash by cutting them up to make shirts and skirts. Good for the environment? Nope. Good for keeping little monkey children preoccupied for 30 minutes? Yep!

The English department covered the five Rs –- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair, and Reject. Students were meant to file through the station, learning about one R at each stop. At the end, they’d take a 15-question quiz of environment dos and don’ts. Ideally, learning would take place.

The Thai teachers in the English department believe the best and most effective way to convince children to learn is to bribe them with crappy, Chinese-made toys.

When the children stopped at our posters, we were supposed to make them answer a question in return for a plastic quarter, penny, nickel, or dime.

They would proceed to the prize table, where they could exchange their coins to pluck a paper leaf from one of hundreds of strings hanging overhead. Each leaf had a letter. They could find out what their mystery letter was and take a piece of junk from the corresponding prize table.

My station was “Repair.”

It started out OK. I read the definition of repair and gave the students examples of things that could be fixed rather than replaced. After about the second or third time I gave my spiel, I could clearly see that they didn’t understand or care.

Then Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" started blaring from one end of the English station. It was all downhill after that.

I couldn't help but feel like I was in theater of the absurd at times: Kristy at my left, trying to explain "hazardous waste" to first graders, Sukjai at my right, yelling in Thai on a megaphone, and some club song on the mix CD singing the word sexy over and over again. Appropriate for schoolchildren? Nope. Appropriate for Environment Day? Nope. Hilarious? Sure was.

We manned our stations from 9:00 to 11:30 this morning, and then after lunch from 1:00 to 2:50.

In the afternoon, my exchange with younger students generally went something like this:

“Repair.”
*silence, and a blank stare*
“Can you say, ‘Repair’? Re-paaaair.”
…
“Repair. Repair. Repair!”
…
“OK, kid, take your plastic dime and go.”



Or,



"Name two things you can repair."
...
"Two things... any two things."
...
"OK, just say a word."
...
"...Or, conversely, do a dance."
...


By the end, I was asking older kids to name a Michael Jackson song to get their token. And then I zoned out and started mentally rewriting "R-E-S-P-E-C-T."

R-E-C-Y-C-L-E,
Find out what it means to me,
R-E-C-Y-C-L-E,
Go on, save a tree!

Sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me
Sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me...