Definitely one way to get students' attention

You really do have to be careful about grabbing a picture off Google Image Search to use for your own purposes. There’s the obvious matter of copyright violation, of course, as the search engine adamantly warns, but it can also get kind of embarrassing.
Muang Thai Book, a textbook publisher headquartered in Nonthaburi, got “caught” this week when it popped a photo of a pretty girl on the cover of a new math text for first-year vocational students. She’s cute, but she’s also wearing glasses, so obviously she’s smart too. And she happens to be gazing with affection at a file folder labelled “Mathematics”. She’s the perfect antidote to boring textbook covers – the kids will love it!
Unfortunately, the young lady turned out to be not just pretty but also a porn star.
A Twitter user who is apparently knowledgeable about these matters spotted the cover someplace and posted a picture online yesterday. He pointed out that the bespectacled model is a Japanese adult-video actress and the picture is a promotional shot for the movie “Costume Play Working Girl”, which most certainly was not entered in the Best Foreign Film category at this year’s Oscars.
Someone had evidently photoshopped the English word “Mathematics” onto the folder, and maybe the folder itself was digitally inserted. God knows what she was really gazing at with affection.
The obvious assumption was that whoever chose the picture for the schoolbook must be a big fan of the actress in question. However Muang Thai Book manager Passakorn Pimarnpom tells our sister newspaper Kom Chad Luek that one of its female staff members simply plucked a promising image from the Internet. And fortunately, Passakorn says, “The textbook hasn’t been distributed yet – it was a mock-up waiting to be approved. So we can change the cover.”
We’re still wondering what Photoshop was up to, though.

Lessons in the ludicrous

Let’s happily stay on the subject of school textbooks, since there’s a separate storm raging over a Matthayom 1 health-education text that offers some odd ideas about the transsexual life. It’s infuriated people like film director Tanwarin “Golf” Sukkhapisit and transsexual singer Gene Kasidit, and Facebook’s “Missladyboysfanpage” is frothing with accusations of hypocrisy and discrimination.
The schoolbook has a photo of cabaret dancers with a caption implying that this is what transsexual people always do by way of self-expression. Then the accompanying text refers to the third gender as lhong pes. Lhong means “lost” or “confused” (or “crazy”, as in crazy in love).
“I intended to be this way – I didn’t lose my way!” Golf would like to point out. “I think the person who wrote this textbook is the one who’s lost! You work at the Education Ministry and you haven’t learned the most basic things about being human?”
No wonder the state of education in Thailand is a shambles, add the folks on Missladyboysfanpage. “How can the ministry let this lousy translation into the book?” someone wonders. “‘Trans-’ is a prefix meaning ‘across, beyond and through’ and the word we use is ‘transsexual’ – not confused or lost!”
Multiple other visitors to the page and netizens across the webboards picked up on Golf’s point about the clear bias shown in suggesting that transsexuals have somehow “lost their way” in life. In fact, if this is supposed to be a guidebook for students with “signposts” pointing out the right path, there’s a lot more people heading in the opposite direction now.