Oh! Behave, Vietnamese students and teachers! Vietnamese elementary school students happily gesture to each other after they finish school in this February 10, 2014 photo. Tuoi Tre Editor’s Note: Stivi Cooke is an Australian expat based in Hoi An Ancient Town in central Vietnam. He is working as an English language and hospitality teacher in the town. We all read about the Vietnamese teacher who slapped the kids and they fought him back. However, did you hear about the teacher who forced her elementary students to eat chilies as a punishment?  Eating chilies? Whacking kids in the face? What is going on? This is not teachers thinking about students, but about themselves and extracting revenge.  These teachers forgot the first rule of teaching – teaching to the present ability of the students. Come on, teachers! If the kids were disruptive, what were you doing wrong? Maybe you were the ones who needed to chill out! (Pun intended). Kids will be kids so what did the teachers expect? Robots? Quiet classes? Ewww… Too creepy! It took me back to my school days and memories of dealing with my own students. My four year olds in a Korean kindergarten used to love tying my shoelaces together or put their sandwiches on my chair. Elementary students in night classes in Australia would chat continuously over my voice and Vietnamese university students were texting, heads down all the way through classes. Or they would be taking a nap then. We are all humans and school is the first big test of our lives. One of the first things you learn is you can’t make the teacher happy all of the time and teachers should not expect model students. Who has not been in trouble? You can’t tell me that you escaped any punishment over the years. You’re telling me you never had a fight in the playground? You never argued with your best friend over pens and who was better at spelling? Didn’t you at least once totally disagree with the teacher? Surely, you were caught scribbling notes to classmates about the teacher’s big nose or big backside! I bet you cheated on an exam at least once or lied about your homework because you were really watching TV late that night. No? Seriously? I was the typical teenage boy too. I got into trouble a lot. I hated some lessons and said they were stupid or didn’t make sense. “Stivi! Principal’s office, now!” I was very cheeky in high school because I read so much I often knew the lessons better than my English teachers so I would argue a lot.  I was struck on the hands with a stick, hit across the back of my head and embarrassed in front of my classmates. It is amazing that I didn’t dress in a helmet, a suit of armor and boxing gloves! The real trouble is when control becomes more important than engaging lessons. It wouldn’t matter if it was a class in an igloo or the best five-star educational institution in Ho Chi Minh City. Something has to give. Someone has to ‘snap’.  Children ‘test’ their teacher every day – how far can we drive him crazy? Wow! He makes me giggle when he shouts ‘STOP THAT!’ How many times can we make him shout at us? It’s funny!  Then there is the ‘smart-alec’ – the kid who thinks he knows more than the teacher does. “Hey, teacher! You spelt that wrong!” Not to mention the ‘showoff’ – he wants to impress his friends by throwing paper airplanes at the teacher. Grrrr… There are too many rules to remember. It is hard to concentrate before the summer break. The teacher is more boring than doing the household chores. Who remembers learning 1066? What was the point of that? I liked drawing aliens in my mathematics book. Oh, look at that beautiful day outside, it’s making me sleepy… The same thing happens to teachers as well. Yuk! I have to teach that horrible class of 35 noisy ten year olds! Oh no, that naughty kid in the back of the class again!  One of the hardest things for teachers is to leave their personal life at home. How can they be patient when the electricity bill arrived that morning, they had an argument with their family and the boss was in a bad mood today?  I can’t remember how many times I was teaching a class and my mind was off somewhere else – at the beach, thinking about fixing the motorbike or buying those cool shoes at Big C. I’m sure it’s worse for Vietnamese teachers who have to supplement their incomes with outside jobs so they are battling fatigue on top of pressure to make their kids do well in exams. In the highly emotional arguments over punishment at school, people tend to forget that human nature and development are going on the whole time. It is a time of challenging authority and learning to define their personality, to establish their identity in a room full of people they see every day. Keeping control of a class is not easy when this is not taken into account. Kids are little adults, they are not stupid, and they know when it’s about power or ego. I asked some of my Vietnamese friends how they were punished in class. Some things were familiar: standing up while everyone else sits, using a cane – a long thin bamboo stick – across the hands or the backside, or writing 50 lines like Bart does at the beginning of the Simpsons. However, some punishments were rather strange and somewhat cruel.  Kids here get to write confessions they have to show their parents to sign, and then mum and dad explode like a bomb! A friend listed crawling around the classroom in elementary school ten or twenty times on a hard floor, cleaning the toilets and the smothering technique of using a pillow to calm down unruly children in kindergarten – all totally banned in places like Australia.  Extreme punishments simply teach kids that school and learning are bad. It discourages kids from looking forward to school and new, amazing things to learn. Are there solutions? Yes, and they are coming in a manner the Vietnamese educational system can manage. Changing the curriculum, reducing the number of students in classes and providing counseling for difficult students will spread across the system.  Teacher training is still the toughest area to reform, so too, an outdated curriculum in the twenty-first century world, yet it is happening. I hope that teachers become equipped with better choices of classroom management.  No one speeds up on a rough road, they slow down, that’s the easier way… so… games, games, games! Projects and presentations work well with older kids. Slower explanations with examples for difficult subjects, particularly maths and science, can take a lot of stress off the teacher and the kids.  In the meantime, kids, put away those rubber bands, paper airplanes and phones! Tell the teacher when you don’t understand, don’t be shy! Or be smart and play quietly. Teachers, go outside and have a smoke! Alternatively, have another lesson plan ready for boring subjects and hot days. Respect the teacher, sure, but hey, teacher, do not teach like a boss. Learning is a partnership no matter what ages and abilities.  Then apologize and be friends again. The way school should be. Stivi Cooke, Tuoitrenews