Yesterday morning, we were told that all classes for the day (except for the Upper Primary M4 and M5 levels) had been cancelled for a Scouts activity. Most of the students had apparently been told previously as they arrived dressed in the brown & green uniforms of Thailand’s Tiger Scouts. The foreign teachers had to remain in the office for eight hours. I spent most of that time marking mid-term exams and finished 135 mid-term exams; only 280+ to go).

What kind of Scouting activities did the students do, you ask? Well, it seems that most of them just ran around playing while select others spent the day cleaning their classrooms — scrubbing floors and varnishing the tops of ancient wooden desks. I saw some of my naughtiest students scrubbing concrete planters around the school grounds.

Walking to my office this morning, I observed that many of the desks are still in the hallways. Those in the photo featured today are just around the corner from the foreign teachers’ office under gaping holes in the ceiling. Rather than spending money to fix the facilities (and I have a number of classes in which the whiteboards are unusable due to the amount of holes in them), the school elected to install closed-circuit TV cameras in all classrooms and many of the hallways as well as some of the toilets. It has not been a deterrent to the many students who just do not care about learning and often try to fight the teachers as well as each other.