A high-school chemistry teacher in the Northeast has achieved a measure of fame with a unique way of marking her students’ homework.
Rosnabha Rasu at Petchpittayakom School in Phetchabun, who the kids very respectfully call Kru Gao, wanted to encourage the students to pay more attention to their homework, so she had a rubber stamp specially made that bears a sketch of her face and grades in the Isaan dialect.
The kids get their papers back saying “Beng laew” (checked) and one of the following – “Khag pod” (excellent), “Khag yoo” (good), “Bo pan dai” (average) or “Bo pen ta” (needs improvement). We imagine there’s probably a few non-northeasterners reading this and thinking back to their school days and saying, “Huh, bo pen ta.”
We wouldn’t know about Kru Gao’s innovation had one of her tickled students not tweeted photos of his homework. “My teacher is a funny lady,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the only one who sees this.” And so it came to pass that his pictures were re-tweeted and shared over to Facebook, where they earned more than 10,000 “likes” in less than 24 hours.
A typical reaction from another youngster: “Wow, this is so cool! I wish my teacher would use something like this to grade my work!”
“Using the local dialect is a great idea,” said still another admirer. “We should be proud of our local dialect.”
Kru Gao says she was just trying to show the students something new and creative.
“I wanted to challenge them in a positive way to do better and got the idea when I saw a rubber-stamp service on Facebook. I figured it would be a good way to encourage them to pay more attention to their assignments – and thankfully it worked! They submit their completed homework on time and they’re really eager to see what marks they get. Of course, most of them want to see khag pod!
“The very next day after I started using the stamp, a student told me, ‘Kru Gao is famous now!’ I was really surprised – I had no idea that one of them would post a photo of my rubber stamp online!”
Another of her students, Yanisa Suriwong, explains the appeal of the approach.
“The other teachers just sign their names and write the date in our exercise books, so this rubber stamp is really special. It makes me want to finish my homework and give it to Kru Gao right away.
“People might think it’s ‘just’ a rubber stamp, but for us it’s really special. When teachers just sign and leave a comment that we should be improving, it can be depressing, but the funny way Kru Gao grades the papers with her stamp encourage you to do your best to get khag pod on every assignment.”
This source first appeared on The Nation Life.