It's that time again at my college. No, not THAT time,replacing yet another white face who's flown the Thailand coop. It's EXAM time. Fun time, in other words. Let me tell you about the idiocy called 'exam preparation' here.

For starters, I have no textbooks. What sources do I use? Library books? Books that I've bought with my own money? Who knows. No one ever told me. This doesn't matter, though--my students wouldn't bring texts to class anyway and they certainly won't read them outside of class. Perish that thought.

Then there's the syllabi I have to use for five classes. These were written by a white face who STARTED this class, but bolted by the mid-term. Yeah, I inherited his mess. He leaves it to me, and now I'm supposed to teach according to these syllabi he wrote, but without textbooks and not knowing what HE taught before me (students will lie here about what they were taught before). I just have to 'wing it' and teach them what I think they need to cover in these classes based on vague syllabi. What a crock.

And now here where are. Exam prep time. I'm expected to create exams from this wreckage. But it gets better. Thailand has strict rules about exam questions. For one, if you teach two different sections of the same class, your exams have to be totally different. You can't use the same questions on those classes' exams. WTF?

On top of this, questions one asks here on his or her exams can not have been used the last FIVE years. I can understand the 'education ministry' doesn't want students engaging in their favorite school pasttime (cheating) before exams. What the can't accept is that my own exams would require lots of work if one is to cheat successfully--so much work, in fact, it would defeat the purpose of cheating. If anything I WANT my students to cheat on the exams I make.

But I, along with my white-faced pals here, can't seem to be able to produce exams that are unique AND cover what was covered in our classes according to the syllabi.

When I head back to the US, I won't have any hair. I see that, sure. It's because I will have pulled it out, not because it fell out naturally.

God, I wish I would have never come to this place.