Teaching Email

I was looking through a resource cd that Peace Corps had given us and I came across this email. I don’t know who wrote it, but it looks like it was originally a newspaper article. It gives a perfect description of what it is like teaching in Thailand and what the education system is like here…


From: M…., Douglas J.
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 5:21 PM
To: F…., Sam A.; E…., Matt A; R…. Tony; K…, Mike
T.
Subject: Background Info

Team:

Though not so much applicable to business here it does give further insight to the educational system and some attitudes and behaviors that may be engrained early on in a person's life.........


THAILAND'S SCHOOL DAZE

ERIKA FRY finds that getting a teaching job in Thailand is easy, but that teaching Thai students who were never trained to learn is tough business

At 9:18 in the morning - only 18 minutes into the day's second of five periods, and only the second day into my (blessedly) four-day week - it was a bit demoralising to look around the room. The boys in the back had circled their chairs and were playing cards. Girls in the far row were sending text messages. A cluster at the front watched on as a boy, standing on desktop, batted at the imperfectly oscillating wall-mounted fan. A paper airplane, folded from the paper I had just passed out, whizzed by. And the one girl who had done the assignment she was supposed to do, was now doing the assignment the rest of the class was supposed to do - for them, writing out the same 5-sentence paragraph, claiming "I am 15 years old. I like to shop at Big C," while they cued up at her side.

The 30 or so other students looked bored and listless, compelled neither to work nor to cheat nor even to watch their new teacher self-destruct at the front of the classroom.

Having already exhausted a number of more reasonable, though completely ineffective techniques (the even-keeled "Please be quiet," the slightly more agitated, thus alarming "Quiet please!"; the silent treatment; the individualised shushing, the kindergartenish hand-cupping of the mouth; the desperate scrawling of "Please stop talking" on the board) I was now on the brink of childish foot-stomping and school-marmish sermonising, of unleashing all sorts of embarrassing lines that I never thought I'd think. How old are you? This is SO disrespectful. What do you come to school for??

I stopped myself, knowing (from the day before) that this loss of cool would at best bring a two-second pause in conversation, a few blank expressions and would more likely be lost altogether on an audience that was struggling with an assignment to write their age in English. And so I just watched the chaos, consoling myself with the knowledge that there were only 2.5 more days of this; that this was not my real job; that it was ridiculous to be anything but dispassionate and uncaring in this position.

I was teaching English to 14- and 15-year-olds in Thon Buri's Bang Mod school, a position I had taken only to see how easily I could get a teaching job, not how easily the teaching job could unseat me. By the end of four days, I had been schooled in both.

HOW TO BECOME A TEACHER WITHOUT EVEN TRYING

In October 2005, Perspective reported on a Bangkok teaching agency that was hiring English teachers indiscriminately. Among the many unqualified teachers employed by the agency were a handful of visa-seeking Nigerians that did not actually speak English and a number of lazy farang that did speak English, but that did not actually teach it and instead had students play football during classtime.

On a street, just around the corner from Khao San, the agency is ideally situated to attract backpackers that are strapped for cash or that want a brief stopover on their trek around Southeast Asia. Credentials were of no matter. The agency was looking for bodies, not for teachers.

While I could never pass as a non-English speaker, I could pass as unqualified, and went off to the Khao San area agency to see, a year and an investigative report later, if it was still so easy to get a teaching job.

Of course it was.

My first visit to the agency was a weekday afternoon and brought a scene every bit as seedy as the place's reputation would let one imagine.

The office, which was being renovated was dimly lit and unfurnished except for a metal folding table and a couple chairs. There was also a tired-looking loveseat in the corner with a woman, only somewhat dressed and looking strung-out, splayed out on top of it. She didn't move when I entered, but the jangle of the door behind me brought out an energetic woman from the back.

She was excited I wanted to teach and said I could start tomorrow. She asked for my passport (which I didn't have) and handed me a sheet of paper, titled "RESUME," which consisted of blanks for my name, age, educational background, and work experience. I filled it in hastily, giving an age that didn't match that on my ID card. I said I had a Bachelor's degree, but no teaching experience and besides babysitting jobs, no experience with children.

When I told her I didn't have my passport, she told me it didn't matter and that I could bring it another day. She informed me that with the job, I'd receive 300 baht/per hour, free housing, and assistance in getting my work permit and business visa. I could move into the place, which she then told me was several provinces away, later that afternoon.

I told her, that because of rent circumstances, I couldn't move and that I was only available for teaching positions in Bangkok. This logic puzzled her, saying that I could live in the provinces during the week and the city on weekends or that I could negotiate with my landlord to get out of the lease.

She pressed on with invasive questions about my living situation, asking the kinds of questions that because of privacy protections, are illegal to ask of hires in many countries (maybe even this one), while of course avoiding all of those that one might think in hiring a teacher, she should legally be obligated to ask.

She then said, as if it were a completely plausible, that I could continue to live in Bangkok; I would just need to allow 3 hours in the morning for the commute.

I told her I didn't think so, but to let me know when a position opened up in Bangkok.

Over the course of the next three months, she called four or five times, offering me similar jobs and conditions in the northern provinces. Everytime, I told her I could not leave Bangkok, but to give me a call when a job in the city came up.

And then one Monday morning (a holiday), a phone call came about the position at Bang Mod, a "good" secondary school just across the river.

She asked if I could come in that afternoon to get things sorted and to show me how to get to the school.

While the agency appeared considerably less seedy that afternoon - the office having been renovated and the loveseat removed - operations were no better organised than when I had first visited. I was told very little information other than I would be teaching English, that Bang Mod was a "good" school and that I would be replacing an Egyptian teacher that had left to pursue a medical degree in Canada.

She was ready to go see the school, when I asked what time school started, what I had to wear, whether there were any teaching resources, and other things that seemed somewhat critical for me to teach the next day.

At that point, she dug out a slim, but apparently all-encompassing guide to teaching 20 weeks of Mathayom 1-6 (a schoolyear for each is covered in 3 pages of rubric). The guide provided a lesson theme for each week and then suggested teaching methods, sample dialogue, vocabulary words and an in-class activity (which invariably and excitingly is for "students to read homework in class"). For example, in weeks 8 and 9 of Mathayom 1, the guide suggests a "Favourite Things" theme and a 12-word vocabularly list that includes "KFC," "Pizza Hut," and "Burger King." (Film and Sport also make the list.)

With any luck, at lesson's end students will be masters of dialogues, which in many cases are imperfect and dubiously useful: I'm from Korea and I love Harrods because I can buy all I want there and lots to choose from.

She didn't provide any materials on school conduct, grading policy, contact information, or guidance of any other form.

THE TEST BEGINS

Tuesday morning I left my home 2.5 hours before school started, and arrived 20 minutes before class.

A math teacher found me looking lost in the courtyard and led me upstairs to the English department office. The room had a couple computers, a coffee machine and the desks for five Thai teachers and one for Mr John, my counterpart from the agency, a jolly man from Ghana who had taught at Bang Mod for a couple years.

Mr John had taught in Singapore and Hong Kong before coming to Thailand, and also at a couple of schools in Thailand, before settling at Bang Mod. He considered the school the best he'd been at, and enjoyed the suburban neighbourhood surrounds. He rented an apartment nicely situated above a canal, where he lived with his wife, just a 10-minute busride down the road.

He seemed a good teacher, with experience, enthusiasm and English-speaking ability. He had a crisp accent and a guitar which he brought to school on occasion to teach the students songs like Rod Stewart's "Sailing." (the lesson left the whole department singing and was his most wildly successful lesson, yet).

Mr John taught Mathayom 1, 4, 5 and 6, while I was assigned the 20 sections of Mathayom 2 and 3 (10 sections for each). I would meet with each section for one hour per week.

While this schedule would seem to present various difficulties - for students to remember homework and lessons, and for teachers to remember 800+ students week to week - Mr John saw the bright side of things, and gleefully explained that this meant that I had just two lesson plans - one for Mathayom 2, one for Mathayom 3 - to prepare each week. The students had English classes the other 4 days per week with a Thai instructor, though what the students learned in these classes or where these classes took place was never made clear to me.

Each Mathayom was levelled and split into 50-person sections which were ranked from 1-10. Top students were placed in Mathayom 2-1, whereas students that probably wouldn't have passed the previous year (if not passing were possible in Thai schools) were placed in Mathayom 2-10, Mr John explained.

He pointed at my schedule, the first hour of which was a 2-7 class. "That will be a fun one," he said, meaning that it would not be. Yet while classes are levelled, lessons are not differentiated for the different levels. So, if class 2-10 is learning to use KFC and Burger King in sentences, so is the considerably more advanced section 2-1. Not only did this policy seem silly and unfair to students at either extreme of the spectrum, it also openly stratifies students (making potentially messy esteem and exclusivity issues for students) for no apparent reason.

I told Mr John I thought this policy was strange, and he said maybe so, but that he liked it - after all, that is why I had to prepare just two lesson plans per week.

I then met the department head, a friendly Thai woman who explained I'd be responsible for teaching English reading, writing, and speaking skills. She offered me some coffee, gave me a few workbooks and a microphone set and just before the bell rang, sent me on my way down the hall.

For several minutes class went well. The students were quick to assist with things: setting up microphones, erasing boards, passing out papers. As soon as the bell rang, they would all, in great, charming promise of obedience, stand and chant "Good morning teacher!" in unison. They were friendly and inquisitive, and rapt with attention for the two minutes in which I told them my name, age, and nationality.

And then class began.

TRYING TO TEACH

Theoretically, a Thai teacher was also in the classroom to assist me. This was true for about half of my classes, and depended on the assistant. When these assistants were there, their presence was critically helpful for clarifying directions and for disciplinary purposes. This was especially true with my most consistent of assistants, a small but feisty woman who carried a stick which she used to swat the backs of misbehaving students (she recommended I do the same).

Having not looked at the books, and wanting to fill time without completely wasting it, I asked the students to write a paragraph about themselves. I put a bulleted list of details that I wanted them to include in their paragraph on the board. I assumed this would be a familiar starting point to what, at age 14 and years into their English education, would be a tiresome, but easy exercise.

While there were nods of understanding with my instructions, a walk around the room revealed papers that read exactly as the board did:

Write a paragraph about you. Tell me:
Name
Nickname
Age
What you like to do
About your family

In a few cases, the student had written their name, their nickname, and their age.

I tried again, attempting to model a paragraph, using myself. Despite bannering the board with the word EXAMPLE and giving what I thought were explicit instructions, the papers still read, exactly as the board did, this time:

EXAMPLE:
My name is Erika Fry. I am 25 years old. I have one sister and two brothers. They are named Ellen, Jon and Chris. I like to go to the beach.

In a few cases, students had written their own name, their own age, but in almost every case, they had written that they too had three siblings named Ellen, Jon and Chris.

I tried again. Like a bad game of Simon Says: I left blanks, they left blanks. I encouraged them to use their books to find words, and they looked at me blankly.

Over my 20 attempts, my instructions got more precise, and the papers more original. I finally got a few written in paragraph form and which included correct, if simply phrased details like "I like to play computer games."

While almost all students in the top few classes were able to complete the assignment and to do so with good, unique sentences, a greater number of the students - even with the example written obviously on the board - were not able to hand in anything without having another student, or in some cases, the Thai assistant do the work for them. A huge number did not know how to spell their names. Whether out of laziness, carelessness, or just poor training, papers were full of simple mistakes and copying errors ("play" was more often "paly", "brother" was "bother"). Punctuation and capitalisation rules were lost causes.

Cheating - or students doing one another's work - happened in every class, and was done in the blatant, undisguised manner of something routine.

When I scolded against it, students were baffled, and then quickly resumed writing the other person's paper.

Seeing this classroom culture of copying - and void of creativity, critical thinking, or even basic level English skills - makes the students' textbooks seem absurd and incredibly mislevelled. Had I taught the lesson where the students were at in their books, I would have been teaching the same students that struggled to spell "play", vocabulary words like "habitat" and "commercial hunting" for a lesson on species conservation.

Meanwhile, whether driven by disinterest, frustration or habit, half the students didn't even try. It was not long after sitting down from the "Good Morning Teacher!" ritual that students began talking, wandering around, and generally misbehaving.

While some misbehaviour, particularly with a new teacher and a class of 50, is to be expected, the scale of these behaviours and the non-response of Thai students to discipline and of the Thai assistants to attempt to discipline, seem to indicate just how ingrained they are.

Of the students that got around to including in their paragraphs the sentence about what they liked to do most in school, most answered "sleeping".

Yet in a system replete with instructors who are not trained to teach, it is not surprising that the system is replete with students who have not been trained to learn.

This was not the beginning of the year, nor was it a school in a particularly poor or rural region. These are students, mid-year at a "good" school in Bangkok, and products of a system with 50-person classes and untrained teachers put out by agencies.

At no point, by either the agency or the school, was I given orientation or an introduction to school rules, conduct or grading policy. On my fourth day, one of the Thai assistants showed me the computer lab and the cafeteria.

Later that afternoon, I called to tell the energetic woman at the agency that I just couldn't teach any longer. She did not seem surprised or disappointed or even mildly stressed by the fact that I was calling her at 4 o'clock on a Friday and she had a new teacher to find for Monday.