comment on the students

There is a bit of a paradox I’ve noticed with the relationship between teachers and students. On the one hand, there is a clear social standing between a teacher and a student- the teacher is always superior and deserves the highest respect. Students have told me that they would never talk back to a teacher and questioning the teacher aloud is very rare. However, the thai students are always either talking in class, or on their phones. There is very little participation and I have yet to see any thai student really engage themselves with the class, professor or material (except in small discussions, sort of). My neo-marxist American professor is very eccentric and has a lot of criticism for the US and is just all around odd (but very interesting, I really enjoy his class), so I thought it was weird when he asked me to stay after class one day. He told me that he was going to be absent February 21^st and that he couldn’t find any colleagues to sub for him but he really wanted to show a movie. He said that he trusted me and thought I was responsible and was wondering if I would put in the movie and take roll. He acted like he was asking this huge favor from me and was so grateful when I said yes. He asked me how someone so good could come from a state with Jan Brewer as their government haha. I was just very surprised by how he thought he was really putting me out. I think it reflects the relationship the students and teachers have- the students don’t give anything to the classroom, and the teachers don’t trust them. Some of the kids in our class have been in 1+ classes with him before, but there was no relationship built, like there would be in a US college classroom after several semesters (especially when the classes are 15 people). I also wonder why the students act like they do in the classroom. I would imagine to be able to speak English at a college level as your second language, and to get in to Mahidol, would require the kids to be very focused in lower school and high school, so I wonder why that behavior doesn’t transfer and why the students seem to lack critical thinking skills. Malhar suggested that their previous education may have just required memorization and a very structured setting, so by removing the structure and the need to memorize and instead critically think, the students don’t know how to respond.