Songkran, protests, calm.

Songkran, Thai New Year holidays, have been and gone. Traditionally it is celebrated with a lot of water throwing. School was supposed to finish at lunch time on Friday with water throwing until the end of the school day - alas a state of an emergency put a downer (not a dampener) on that and students were under instruction to stay at home. (For some reason teachers were still expected to come to school.... with a caution on wearing either red or yellow shirts....

The protests have died down, and on all accounts were not nearly as dramatic as the media reports suggested. . I have one declared red shirt student who attends protests, a redshirt sympathiser and 4 declared yellow shirts, the overwhelming majority are self declared 'no shirts'. The no-shirts possibly without exception, at least among the Thais, are aghast at the violence, the summit being shut down and the implied insults to the King. One of my most switched on students today was saying that even though in other countries people can criticise royal families, Thailand's culture is that the king is semi-divine and deserves unconditional respect. It was quite a strange thing to hear someone say. It is the kind of statement foreigners make when criticising the situation here, but it is not something that Thai politicians would say to a western audience, I feel sure. I have avoided studying much on the history of royalty here - it is more prudent to have no opinion to express. Finding accurate information is almost as difficult as gauging whether information is accurate....

Before the break we had being doing Gandhi followed by a very quick comparison with the US civil rights movement. During the break I decided Tiananmen square was an interesting contrast to these as well as a contrast with the recent protests here. The students had never heard of it - even the Taiwanese students knew nothing about it. All were surprised that the Thai govt. made no criticism of events in 1989. It's 20 years since Tiananmen square, the original protests started with Hu Yaobang's death in mid April and continued until 4 June. I expect there will be interesting news articles within a few weeks that they can read and feel impressed that they now have the background knowledge to understand.

Next week the 12s have a school trip to Krabi - a beach resort. Fortunately I have year 11 classes and do not need to go. It's an excursion that would never get approval in Australia because no school or teacher would accept the liability.

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-155644
This is a link to a blog attached to CNN. One of my students turned up in a photo there - she is the redshirt on the left.