Field note · 12 November 2025
Four subjects is enough for a staff-room wall
A staff room in a Bangkok secondary school has one wall that is not already a timetable, a duty roster, or a photograph of last year’s camp. That wall can hold four large sheets. A fifth sheet moves the set around a corner, and people stop reading at the corner.
Choose the four subjects the committee actually argued about. In many Matthayom meetings that is mathematics, science, Thai, and English. Social studies may be the paper that needs the work, and then it replaces one of the four. The point is the argument you are still having, not a portrait of the whole curriculum.
Size, pin, and glare
We draw wall sheets on paper that can take a pin without tearing at the corner, larger than the book page and with the same breaks in the band. The caption sits at the top in letters big enough to read from the tea table. If the wall faces a window on Chaeng Watthana Road, the glare will wipe a pale ink by April. We use a heavier band for those rooms.
Leave a finger’s width between sheets. Sheets that touch look like one poster, and a year head cannot tell where mathematics ends.
When they should come down
A mid-year wall chart should come down when the end-of-year book is bound. Two sittings on the same wall make every visitor invent a story about progress that the papers may not support. Date each sheet in the corner, in the school’s hand if you prefer, and agree the day it leaves.
We do not draw a chart that ranks teachers by class average for a public wall. That sheet changes how people walk into the room. If a director wants it, it stays inside the book, and only in the director’s copy.