Hey, I hate to break the news to you ol' pal, ol' buddy, but all we TEFL teachers are doing is building a labor force to fill sweatshops and Gordon's wallet.

I work in Thailand, you see. Here, the government supposedly wants Thai citizens to learn English. However, when we white faces with only TESOLs and non-education bachelor's degrees come to Thailand to teach, we are 'forced' to accept teaching at only high school jobs. If we prefer to teach at universities, we have to go get a master's degree in education or TEFL/TESOL.

This doesn't make any sense. If anyone has his head up his ass, it's the Thailand government overall. IF Thailand WERE so bent on Thai citizens learning English, they'd put us white faces front and center of UNIVERSITY classrooms everywhere here. Here we could be teaching the future Thai teachers of English who would then fan out and teach Thai secondary students.

But nope. We instead are relegated to high school classrooms filled to the brim with cheaters, miscreants, and farmers' daughters not even remotely interested in English.

If Thailand would get its act together, we'd be teaching students who WANT to learn, not a bunch of slackers who are never going to learn to speak English fluently and are not interested in learning it one iota. But Thailand knows better.

Our efforts are meant only to build a labor force just fluent enough to communicate with the masters back in the west like Gordon but not fluent enough to demand jobs, and payrates, that are far better than the sweatshops.
Gordon wouldn't like that at all.

THAT is the reality of TEFL teaching.

RT