We try to practice at home, and we try to practice at school, too. We have to discuss this with our teachers at school. Because it is very important to practice peace at school.

We need peace at school so that we can study. Peace is indispensable for teachers and for us. So we must have a strategy.

I think teachers and students should come together to discuss peace at school, peace and happiness at school. It is really essential. And I would like to see practice sessions at school. I know a math teacher who teaches at a college in Toronto. He is Vietnamese. He came to Plum Village several times to learn walking meditation and also to learn conscious breathing.

After having stayed at Plum Village for three weeks, he went back to Canada. It was the start of the school year. His students saw him walking, entering the classroom in the style of walking meditation, very slowly. They were very surprised to see their math teacher walking like that. Usually, he does not walk like that.

He has a lot of anger in him. And every time a student appears a little too ignorant, he is seized by anger. If he has something in his hand, like a piece of chalk, he throws the piece of chalk directly at the student's head. He was like that.

But everything changed after he spent three weeks at Plum Village. When he entered the classroom, he practiced walking meditation. And then he took the cloth to erase the blackboard. With a lot of mindfulness, that is to say, a little slowly, even a little too slowly, compared to the way he did it a few months ago.

His students were afraid of him. But they loved him very much. Because although he had anger in him, he also had a lot of kindness, a lot of love for his students. And many boys in his class called him Papa.

And that day, as he was erasing the blackboard, a student asked him this question: "Papa, are you sick?" That was because he walked a little too slowly, and he erased the blackboard a little too slowly. He turned around, smiled at the students, and said, "No, I am not sick, my children. I am practicing mindfulness meditation. I am breathing in mindfulness."

"What is mindful breathing?" So he began to explain. And that morning, he applied the practice of mindfulness in the classroom. He did not have a bell of mindfulness in the class, but he asked the students to take turns. Every fifteen minutes, a boy had to make two sounds with his hands like this.

[Thay claps his hands twice.]

And everyone stopped to practice mindful breathing. Breathing in, I calm myself; breathing out, I smile. Three times like that. And then we went back to work. He applied this, the bell of mindfulness, the hand-clapping of mindfulness, for months and months. And the quality of the work in the class improved.

There was a lot of happiness between teacher and students. And soon that practice was adopted by the other teachers and classes in the same school. He told us many things when he came back to Plum Village.

He said, "Thay, in the past, when I looked at a student's homework, and if he made mistakes in the homework, I had the intention to write something like: 'You are stupid. You are too ignorant. You do not understand anything at all. You are dumb.'" He wrote things like that. There was violence in him. He insulted his students.