Who says kindergarten is all about coloring and origami?
After a parent posted the homework of a first-year kindergarten student on the Pantip message board, Thai netizens have had a field day showing how the teacher marked it wrong.
Try answering this question to see if you would have escaped the teacher’s red pen.
Instructions, translated: Count the rockets in the shapes and cross (/) over the correct answers.
The answers given by the teacher is 3, 4, and 2. Meanwhile, the child answered 5, 6, 2.
So, is the teacher smarter than the kindergartener?
According to our resultsand many users on Pantip, the teacher should have encountered the idea of “subsets” in middle school.
One anonymous user made an illustration explaining the theory. Hopefully he was being intentionally ridiculous by illustrating how to solve the problem, but who knows.
“I would like to mourn for the kindergarten teacher community,” the user added.
More parents have submitted their children’s homework, where the teachers have given explanations beyond our understanding.
Of course that’s shrimp paste. Doesn’t look like a bowl of rice at all, does it?
“I really didn’t know how to explain this to my daughter,” said user “Beautytax,” who also shared her daughter’s homework which suggests her teacher’s obsession with the zodiac.
And last but not least, did you know “soil” was a basic necessity of human life?
The child answered food, shelter, clothing and medicine. However the teacher pointed out people can’t survive without a backpack and some rock, soil and sand.
“Rock, soil, and sand are necessities for human life,” the unnamed teacher noted dryly.“We use them to build a house.”
The teacher also suggested we must carry a bag everywhere we go:
“A bag is also a necessity. We use it to carry our stuff and tools.”
Many users said they are aware of the low quality of education in Thailand and blame the unqualified teachers on the fact teaching is rarely a first choice for university graduates.
“There is a dumb teacher at my grandson’s school, too. She corrects the children’s homework wrong, and when the guardians talk to her about it, she doesn’t allow the kids to bring their books home,” one user wrote.
Another user was more fatalistic:
“It’s tough to find a good teacher. Not hiring a bad teacher would mean we don’t have anyone to teach our kids at all.”
The post is a great example of the long and extensive issues with Thai education. Shockingly however, as many people seem to be aware of the problem, they also seem unable to do anything more than continue checking their children’s homework and sending them to cram schools on the weekend where overpaid, famous teachers are willing to give insight into how to answer standardized exams.
Sadly, after several decades, grades remain the singular obsession of a child’s education, as they are the main factor in getting into a good school and landing a prestigious job at a nice Thai company.
Forcing children to remember answers rather than to realize and understand what the questions are all about is a problem that every generation educated in Thailand has faced, and those of us adults who remember what it’s like in Thai schools, would know grades given here do not measure how talented a student is, but who studies more.
Photos: Pantip
