What I Learned When My Son Was Laughed At For His Myanmar School Presentation
My 10-year-old dropped his backpack by the front door last month and bypassed the cheddar goldfish crackers he always grabs the second he walks in the house. He just climbed onto the couch, pulled his faded gray hoodie over his head, and didn’t say a word. I wiped peanut butter off my knife from cutting my own lunch, washed my hands, and sat down next to him, not pushing. After five minutes of me quietly scrolling through parent teacher emails, he mumbled something into the cushion. I asked him to repeat it. “Everyone laughed at my presentation,” he said. “When I played the Myanmar national anthem.”
Jaden picked Myanmar for his 5th grade country project because his paternal grandma was born in Yangon, and moved to the US when she was 20. He’d spent two weeks working on it, staying up an hour late three nights in a row to cut out paper stupas for his poster board, and asking grandma over FaceTime to tell him stories about taking the river ferry to school every morning. He specifically insisted on including the anthem, because she told him she sang it with her classmates every day growing up, and it still made her cry when she heard it. He was proud of that presentation. I could tell how much it meant before he even gave it.
He told me that when he hit play on his phone to play the first 30 seconds of the anthem, a couple boys in the back row snickered first. Then more kids joined in, and by the time the clip ended half the class was laughing. He clicked it off as fast as he could, rushed through the rest of his slides on Inle Lake and mohinga noodles, and sat down before he even finished talking. He said his face was so hot he thought he’d cry right there at the front of the room.
My first instinct was to say what so many of us say automatically: Those kids are just being jerks, don’t pay any attention to them. Or, It’s just a dumb 5th grade project, it doesn’t even matter. But I caught myself, because I still remember when I brought my poorly painted homemade ukelele to my 7th grade talent show and everyone laughed, and my mom said the same thing. It didn’t make the hurt go away—it just made me not want to talk about it anymore. So instead I said, “That sounds so embarrassing. I’d want to crawl under a table too. That must hurt really bad, especially since it’s something that matters to your grandma and you.” That’s it. No fixing, no scolding other kids, just that sentence. He came out from under his hood, cried a little on my shoulder, ate his goldfish, and that was enough for the night. Later, we sat together and listened to the anthem, and he told me what the lyrics mean: it’s about loving your home, loving the people who came before you, same as any national anthem.
The next day I emailed his teacher just to let her know Jaden was really upset, not to ask for any specific punishment. She wrote back an hour later, saying she’d seen what happened, stopped the laughter after a few seconds, and had been thinking about it too. She had an idea, instead of handing out detentions to the kids who laughed, she wanted to talk to the class about why people laugh at things that are unfamiliar. I told her that sounded fine, and I’d ask Jaden what he wanted to do next.
That’s the part that stuck with me, as a parent. I’d always assumed if kids laughed at someone, they were being intentionally cruel, and you just discipline and move on. But Jaden’s teacher pointed out that almost none of the kids in his class had ever met anyone from Myanmar, or heard any music from Southeast Asia outside of a random K-pop clip on TikTok. They weren’t bad kids. They just didn’t know what to do with something that didn’t sound like anything they’d ever heard before, and laughing is the easiest, most automatic reaction for kids when they feel awkward.
What she did next was so simple, I’ve been telling other parents and teacher friends about it ever since. After Jaden left class that day, she spent five minutes talking to the whole group: “When Jaden played that anthem, a lot of you laughed. Can anyone tell me why you did that?” No one raised a hand at first, then one of the boys who laughed said it sounded weird. She said, “Of course it sounds weird. It’s a song from a place none of you have ever been to. The whole point of these projects is to share things we don’t see every day. If everyone presented on the same three countries you already know, we’d never learn anything new. Laughing at someone’s family because it’s different isn’t okay.” That’s it. No big assembly, no lengthy lesson, just five minutes of honest conversation. That’s something any teacher can do, even with a packed curriculum.
We asked Jaden what he wanted to do after that, and he said he didn’t want to redo the whole presentation—that made his stomach hurt just thinking about it. But he did say he wanted to ask grandma to make her famous mango sticky rice to bring in for snack on Friday. That was his call, we didn’t push him to be “brave” or do more than he was comfortable with. Giving him that choice gave him back the control he’d lost when he was embarrassed, something I never would have thought of if we’d just jumped to fixing the problem for him.
Most of the kids tried the mango sticky rice, and most loved it. A couple asked him to play 10 seconds of the anthem again after snack, just to hear it, and no one laughed. One kid even said it sounded “kind of cool.” But not everyone apologized, not everyone suddenly cared deeply about Myanmar, and that’s okay. It didn’t fix everything overnight.
Last week Jaden brought his graded project home. He got an A, and the teacher wrote “Thank you for sharing your grandma’s home with us” at the top. He taped it to the fridge next to his rec soccer trophies. He still says he doesn’t want to volunteer for any more front-of-the-class presentations this year, and that’s fine. Every once in a while, a kid will make a dumb joke in the hallway about “the funny song,” but it doesn’t happen much anymore. Jaden still listens to the anthem sometimes when he’s drawing at the kitchen table, and when he does, he usually tells me another story grandma shared about growing up in Yangon. It’s not a neat, happy ending, but it’s enough. We’re still learning, one small step at a time.
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