Judgement Day

Today was Judgement Day for my students. I literally wrote "Judgement Day" in big letters on the board. Many of them missed the reference. What this meant was, I was going to tell them how many points they had accrued thus far in the class, how many more they each needed, and how many more were available for them to get. I wanted them to go into the last few assignments and the final with a sufficient amount of fear. More serious than their current points tally, however, was the number of absences they had. I had to tell ten students in my first class that there was no way they could pass the class, because they had missed more than twelve classes, and for many of them, it was way more than twelve. Of course, the one student who argued with me about it is the one who has twenty-five absences. That's nearly half of the semester. Much of the rest of the day went more smoothly, my last two classes having much better attendance, and better scores overall. What will be interesting to see is if the students who have great attendance and already have the prerequisite points to pass the class just stop coming to class for the final week and a half. There are several in my last two classes who could walk away today, never come back, and still pass the class.
Think the syllabus might be poorly designed? Just a little. But then, the English Department would like us to fail nearly 70% of our Basic English students anyway. Why? There aren't enough teachers to teach them all in the more advanced classes, and students who fail simply re-take the class till they pass. Essentially, my job is to weed out the ones who don't try (which is all you really have to do to pass this course) and only send on the ones who were smart enough (or smart enough to cheat of the smart kids) to pass and not too lazy to show up to most of the classes. I once was of the opinion that this educational system was simply underdeveloped. Now I'm beginning to think that it is just the product of the same kind of lunacy that spawned "No Child Left Behind" in America.

Ballet a la Bangkok

The other night I had the privilege of seeing the Bellarussian National Ballet Company perform with the Bellarussian Symphony Orchestra at the Thai Cultural Arts Center. Ballet is not necessarily a performance art that I usually get excited about, but this was Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and it was done very, very well. What was perhaps most interesting to me was that besides the fact that there Thais in the audience (including, apparently, a member of the Thai Royal Family) and the fact that the pre-show announcement was in Thai and English, you could have thought you were sitting in any large performance venue in America. The style of the theater itself, the lighting and sound technology, and even the ticketing, were all completely similar to the average venue in the United States.
Thailand, like virtually every other Asian country, is currently enjoying a Neo-Renaissance (if I can coin a phrase that is more than a little oxymoronic) of Western theatre arts. I call it a Neo-Renaissance because the concepts and techniques of western theatre were brought to Asia long before now, and were largely ignored either as a result of Xenophobia, nationalist pride, or complete misunderstanding. The exceptions to this are perhaps Hong Kong and Saigon, where western style theatre has been produced for quite some time now. This is perhaps the result of greater western influence in those areas. Now, however, western theatre, including its technology, organizational structure, and concepts, is getting a second chance in Asian cultures. As would be expected of course, a certain amount of assimilation is occurring, as western theatre practices get applied to traditional cultural performance arts. The result, I am sure, is a slight bastardization of both the western concepts and the cultural traditions. I am making plans to see some original Bangkok theatre, and I am looking forward to seeing just how much one has influenced the other, and vice versa.