The Naughty Novice

A story by Tricia, a friend and fellow teacher in Luang Prabang.

This is a little story about a little lesson in life. The moral of the story is all is not as it seems. This is what happened.

I had been teaching English for a couple of weeks to novices in the Monk School in Luang Prabang, Laos. I had already realized that novice monks come in all shapes, sizes and personalities just the same as any class of adolescent boys. There are the quiet, reserved types, the enthusiastic learners, and the ones who couldn’t care less about learning English or were just too tired to care. It was a particularly challenging class at the time. There were seemingly quite a few novices in this class who had a very relaxed attitude about learning English and a few who were getting on each others’ nerves – or that’s how it seemed to me.

In the middle of this English lesson there appeared at the door a young Lao tour guide with his Western tourists at hand who stopped momentarily to observe the Australian teacher struggling with controlling this class of novice monks. Thankfully they didn’t stay long and didn’t witness the next scene. I began to smell smoke and as it was useless to ask where it was coming from as no-one would have understood me I looked for the evidence. A young novice had lit a piece of paper and had placed it in the open compartment of one of the old wooden desks. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this young novice had taken the “find something else to do while the teacher is talking” attitude just a little too far. But I knew better than to take the approach I would have taken if this classroom was back in Australia and this teenage boy was in ordinary clothes rather than the dazzling orange of his robes. So I tried as best I could to mask my first reaction of reproaching him in the usual Teacher way. I thought that I would hand this breach of discipline over to the young Monk who was helping me at the time with translation. His response was to laugh. I hope to take this approach back with me to my classroom in Australia – it would probably prove to often be the best reaction. However, not being that advanced in not taking things personally, I shot the novice a look of Teacher disapproval and a warning tutt-tutt.

Later that evening I came across the young tourist guide who had shown his tourists the Monk School that day. He commented on how hard it must be to teach the novices and so with a righteous attitude I told him the story of the novice who had done the naughty deed of almost setting fire to one of the desks. Again I received a response which was contrary to what I expected. He explained to me that he used to do this himself when he was at school. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear this confession as I had already tagged this cheeky young tourist guide as a bit of a larrikin. But the next part of the explanation did come as a bit of a surprise. The reason for lighting the paper was to smoke out the mosquitoes that breed in the dark places in these old wooden desks and not at all to cause trouble to the teacher. I’m sorry to that novice for thinking the worst and will try to remember in the future that all is not as it seems - particularly when you are in a foreign country teaching English to young novice Buddhist monks.