Ah, Thailand. I keep hearing how it's such a great place. Well....It IS. It's a great place to VISIT, I should say. As far as working here, it blows. Let me tell you about MY time working here. Mind you, this post reflects only MY OWN personal experiences. Lots of folks have come here, worked a year or more, and loved it. They may have never seen anything like the problems I'm describing. Actually, I love Thailand too, as long as I'm on the beach somewhere in the south, or riding my mountian bike up in Chiang Mai. In other words, as long as I don't have to struggle against the immovable object called the Thailand education system. Yes, after pulling my one year, after paying my dues, after playing the fool, I've learned the truth about English teaching in the land of Thai.

Other people have yaked over and over about the low pay and lack of airfare reimbursements here. It's good to know that information. It's true. However, I won't go into that. I'll stick to my personal working experiences at a government school out in the sticks near Lopburi.

Check this out:

I had five English speakers at my school. Four were Thai, and one was a white-faced fool from the west (me). One BIG problem here was every Thai teacher had a 'piss-off' attitude towards every other teacher, be he Thai or American. This meant the 'team' never really formed. We never worked together on any concepts or lessons. I personally believed it would have been a great idea for all the English teachers, the real one (myself), as well as the 'pretenders' (the Thai) to assemble and plan 'themes' for lessons once a week or so. I presented this idea a few times to the 'head' of the English department, to no avail. This went over like a lead balloon. Crash and burn. No, no one ever shared his or her ideas with me, the native speaker, the one employee who was getting paid more than the director himself.

So.....all during both semesters, my students faced a daily 'barrage' of English concepts coming from every direction. For instance, one week while I was working on the present progressive tense, one teacher was working on simple past, another on future perfect, etc. What a crock. It could have been done much better. We could have all gotten on the same page from the beginning with one Thai teacher introducing and translating vocabulary, another going over grammar, another phonology, etc, etc, etc. But nope. PISS OFF was the attitude there.

Another problem I encountered at my school was 'undermining'. I once had a 10-minute argument with my M6 students over what we English speakers say: "I am going TO home." or "I am going home." Give me a break. The reason I had the argument to begin with is because one of the Thai teachers went behind my back and told my M6s his 'opinion' of what was 'correct' (the former). Like I don't know my English. A guy who was born in the US and as lived there for 38 years. And this Thai is about to get a MASTER'S DEGREE--God help us all.

There also seemed to be a 'piss-off' atitude on the part of the students toward homework and speaking practice outside of class. For some unknown reason, the higher-ups in Thailand believe that a student should learn in, and ONLY in, the classroom. This applied to my English classes, of course. My boss and my fellow teachers accepted this and went along with it. When I'd give my students homework to complete or practice after class and bring it completed to the next class, they wouldn't bother. Someone has put the idea in Thai students' minds that there shouldn't be any homework in an English class. It is an idea I spent a year futilly trying to root out

To complicate this problem further, about half the students at my school would see me, the native speaker, in only two 50-minute classes a week. The other half saw me only once a week. I remember there was a series of holidays during the first semester of last year. I saw several of my classes in late June just before these holidays and didn't see them again until mid-August. I was never asked to make up those 'lost' classes, either. I tried to hold make-up classes on Saturdays, but it was just pissing up a rope. What a fine way to teach students.

So, I agree. Thailand IS great, but only if you're here as a tourist. Forget working here. It MIGHT be better in Bangkok. Bangkok is like a separate city-state compared to the rest of Thailand. Maybe it should seceed and become its own entity.

Don't tell anybody I said Thailand is great to visit. I want Thailand's beautiful, quiet beaches down south, and its awesome, uncrowded mountain bike trails in Chiang Mai, to stay that way.

Elephant

A good place to begin looking for information regarding living and teaching in Thailand and Immigration related issues (Paperwork forum) is: www.ajarn.com

Don, you really should tell others about this info.
It seems no one else knows it. I had no idea there were other places to update my address with the immigration guys. When I go to immigration to get my address info updated, my Thai boss takes me (from Lopburi). Even HE doesn't know of any other places we could go to get it done, and he's the director of my government school.

Also, every time I've gone, I've been told by the guys in room 401 "90 day, come back here." I've thus done as I've been told and have gone to Bangkok when I need the stamp.

I'll be leaving Thailand in the coming weeks, so I don't need (thankfully) to visit 401 anymore. I hope others will be able to avoid running to BKK every month for the few seconds it takes for an immigration official to simply stamp a piece of paper. Apparently, it CAN be done in other places. I wish I would have known that about 8 months ago.

SS

I needed you one year ago. From my recruiter on down, I've always been told to go to Bangkok to do the 3-month updates at immigration. Even the guys at my TESOL outfit told me that is the place to do it. Mind you, they never told me that was the 'only' place to get the stamp, but they never said there were other places, either.

You should repost this reply as its own message. It's good that usable info like this makes it onto the net.

Utter nonsense. Please see the following link for where in Chiang Mai you can do your 90 day reporting:

http://www.imm3.police.go.th/eng/imm_border.htm

I know a guy who can drink 44 beers in 16 hours, sleep it off in 8 hours, and then go teach a full day, no problem.

Don't think 'drunks' are substandard when it comes to teaching. Some of the best teachers I've ever seen love to suck on beer bottles.

MY THAILAND FENCEPOST FLUENCY PROJECT

Let me tell you why I'M not teaching in Korea at the moment. You see, I've started a project here in Thailand called 'The Fluent Fence Post' project. I have gathered about 50 fence posts together (about the same size as my classes of Thai students) to see if I can get them to the same level of fluency as that of my Thai seniors.

Here is what I've found so far:

Fence posts don't cheat on homework. Just like my Thai students, my fence posts won't do homework in the first place even when they're told to do it hundreds of times. So it's all good.

Fence posts don't bring dicitionaries, pens, pencils, notebooks, et. al to class even after being asked hundreds of times. This is fine....neither do my Thai students.

Fence posts are a LOT quieter in the classroom, so all the posts are able to hear what any individual post says. However, fence posts won't even try to speak or practice English,I'm discovering. Again, this is not a problem, as neither do my Thai students.

My fence posts should achieve the same level of fluency as my Thai students after only one year. Considering my Thai students aren't fluent after TEN years studying English, this should easily be achieved.

I predict no one will care, ultimately, that my fence posts will not become fluent. Not to worry, however. My Thai students' parents don't care one iota that their kids have been in English classes 6, 7, 8, and even TEN years and still can't even use pronouns!

Who needs Korea when one can engage in such an exciting project?

I'll keep you updated on progress from time to time.

RhenoThai

This is the part I like the best:

"But if SK schools offer full reimbursements, it's because they are using a strategy and are serious about getting good teachers."

Having taught in both countries for several years, the one thing you can say about Korea is that you will make more money there. The second is that you will spend a lot of it taking vacations in places like Thailand pumped up and excited when leaving for your vacation there and finding yourself getting increasingly depressed as the date of your return flight to Korea approaches.

Money isn't everything. If I didn't know this before I went to Korea, I learned it while I was there.

My sense is if the OP has all the complaints he does about Thailand after teaching there for one year, a similar list by him following one year of teaching in Korea will probably take a lot longer to read.

Yeah, Thailand teaching positions don't pay as well as the ones in Korea. If they did, probably 99.9999999% of the teachers presently in Korea would be in Thailand.

I'm happy they're not.

So why aren't you teaching in Korea?

Having taught in Thailand for a year, I am posting my take on the land of the Thai. I hope this helps those who are considering coming here to take a certification course or to teach. Enjoy!

1. If you take the TESOL/CELTA training in Thailand, you won't have a chance to get it for free. No schools that I know of here offer free training. Like I said above, some in Korea DO offer free training. Taiwan might as well. I'm not sure.

2. If you take the teacher training in Thailand, you will have to get here somehow. Most people come by plane. If you fly here to take the course, you'll have to cover the airfare expense yourself, and you won't get reimbursed for it later if you go to work in Thailand after you graduate. If you fly to Korea after you finish the course, you will get reimbursed only for the Thailand-Korea leg.

3. Thailand's pay is far too low for a country whose schools don't reimburse for airfare. You can make 3 or even 4 times Thailand's pay levels in Korea plus you'll get your plane ticket expense back. Sure, we may be 'spoiled' because of the airfare reimbursements. But if SK schools offer full reimbursements, it's because they are using a strategy and are serious about getting good teachers.
Go there and get your fare back while the getting is good.

4. Thailand's academic standards, at least outside of Bangkok, are far too low. At a school where I taught near Lopburi, a '50' was a 'D'. Cheating and grade inflation is also prevalent at this school. Thai students not college-bound goof off and still get good GPAs. What's 'goofing off'? Talking, doing homework, horseplaying, sleeping, or even getting up and leaving without permission.

5. Thailand's universities weigh a student's GPA too lightly when considering a candidate for admission. This means students don't have to try too hard in the classroom, and they don't, believe me. In my classes, cheating was prevalent, and students often slept, talked, and even engaged in horseplay in the classroom during lessons. And these were the college-bound seniors!

6. Most Thai students won't respect you--they'll think you are a loser being as you are HERE in Thailand and not back in a 'good' job in the western world they see on TV.

7. Thai schools don't really care about the quality of their teachers. Westerners come here all the time passing themselves off as teachers when they are really just sad sap drunks who need to come to a place that will hire them AND allow them to continue sucking on 10, 20, and even 30 beer bottles a night. If a 'farang' (foreigner) teacher here sleeps through his 8:40 a.m. class because he is still hung over or drunk from the night before, nobody cares. Many recruiters here complain about the prevalance of 'loser' drunks who've come here to teach. It's no one's fault but Thailand's. If Thailand really cared about this problem, it wouldn't be happening. Thailand needs to care if this problem is going to end.

8. Thai bathrooms are FILTHY. Most have no toilet paper, soap, sink, or towels. They usually don't even have running water save for the basin valve and squirter. Yes, this means that when a Thai is done in the bathroom, he doesn't bother to wash his hands. Sure, he might use the squirter to spray himself off a little bit, but is that REALLY dirt I see under the typical Thai's fingernails, the same one who handles food, utensils, straws, et al? When H5N1 arrives, and it is going to arrive, the bathroom habits of the Thai are what will cause most of the deaths.

HZ