yellow butterfly academy

tell me about my Lao motorcycle culture

125cc engines growling past orange monks

barefoot in their silence

give us the raw emotional direct experience

among a tribe of kids, their play is work.

they laughed and played all day long

poor ones collected cardboard and plastic bottle

along a dirt road.

kids with money went to school

students are engaged in self-study, pair work, and group work. They accept responsibility and develop teamwork and sharing skills. They draw. They listen to music.

some accept the reality they are responsible for their learning. some learn to take risks.

help students develop courage.

some try. some can’t, won’t, don’t.

classes are mixed abilities and ages. strong student teachers help the weak.

attendance is sporadic because of school, family responsibilities and motivation.

focus on speaking and writing. reading comprehension.

listening retention skills. get the MAIN POINT.

1. Smile, engage, and have fun.

See #1.

Imagination is more important than knowledge - Einstein.

Practice patience like water

 

silent bliss

describe laughter 

in the hour of bliss

sensation is all

languages ignore tongues

dialects and shadows whistle

in the darkness 

of sound

no feeding please

Give this to the new volunteer teachers.

LBF is a Foundation. It is not a school.

It is an English Development Center.

It offers H'mong students the opportunity to improve their English communication skills.

The majority of schools in Asia are exam-based. Teachers lecture on grammar and vocabulary. Students learn by rote. Their objective is to pass exams. Teachers push them through.

Teacher talking time is 80-20 or more. Students are dumbed down and passive. It’s all listening. They RETAIN very little.

They are never asked, “What do you think?”

They are told what to think.

Independent learning is a foreign language.

My approach has developed a healthy, easy going, stress free relaxed, student centered environment. It is communication-based, not grammar based. Teamwork. Learn by doing.

Get out of their way. Help where and when needed. Practice support, kindness and love, not feeding.

Ask students about The Spoon.

Thank you for your attention.

downstream

Here's the pitch.

She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.

She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle sniffle.

Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.

Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.

after ice

One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.

NO.

You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.

Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower. 

He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.

It is a gateway toward isolated animist villages up river. Up The River Of Darkness. Up the Tonle Srepok River. The Apocalypse Now river.

The river overflowed with extended tedious boring years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, sacrifice and rice wine, hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering burning mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Her frozen bright future dream evaporated.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience.

They love hunting and killing. She saw a whirling bird, a helicopter. She wove it along with our traditional motifs; weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story.

I weave after ice.