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BritGAF |OT3| It's good, but it's not right.
- Thread starter BGBW
- Start date
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Body aching all the time?
this is such a wonderful sentence
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
fuck that shit, use skype like a normal person
Jedeye Sniv
Banned
Come and see me live my life for a day, see some middle class drug abuse in action. Get mashup, go do some gardening, play some games, read a book. It doesn't have the sense of depravity and poverty that comes with working class drug abuse, or the sense of the excess that the poshos can do. Just gently abusing substances, it's very polite.
I think it’s probably best to preface with post by saying that I’ve had a especially shitty day today (so, Dave, I’ll join the club), which means I’m likely being more pessimistic than I usually am. Equally, I’ve only been here for like 3 months, so there’s probably more to learn and see.
Still, most of what I’ve learned has been from first-hand encounters, conversations with EFL teachers and more intelligent researching.
Thailand’s popularity has risen dramatically within the last 10 years. Going into Thailand, my girlfriend and I were aware of the idea that it had become a check-list destination by gap yah types. We were hesitant about it, but thought as EFL teachers, the experience would be different enough not to worry about it.
Teaching
It’s awful. I can’t really put lipstick on this.
The problem is that there is no over-running curriculum from the government or schools when it comes to teaching English. There’s no consistency - at least for us EFL teachers.
For example, we (MY GIRLFRIEND and I) work at a primary school teaching kids in one of the nice areas of Bangkok. Our jobs are to teach and help the students practice conversational skills i.e. speaking and listening. I’ll come back to this later. The school is private, has class sizes ranging from 20-30 and we have air-con. We don’t have any OHT projectors, but they’ve recently put into effect projectors which you use with iPads that you rent from the IT office. By all means, we have it pretty good. On our first day at school, we were given the school’s module guide intended for parents. In this, it has 1 page that details the topics we’re supposed to cover in the semester. We were quickly ushered into the English office in the sort of ‘get to work’ kind of thing. That was all the guidance we were given. There are no course books for us to follow, there’s no indication of class ability and no indication of what topics they have already covered. There’s no overrunning consistency, which is incredibly aggravating because it is ruining the children’s education (will somebody please think of the children?).
This may sound good or bad to you. The truth of the matter is that it's good. One of our friends (who we met on the CELTA and who is also in Thailand) has a much different – and much more typical experience. She came into Thailand with a job that an agency had sorted for her. About a week before she was supposed to teach they suddenly drop her no reason. No problem, getting a job as an EFL teacher is incredibly easy in Thailand. After about 3 days, she has a new job sorted and she’s about to start school the following Monday. Nope! They drop her suddenly the Friday night before she’s supposed to start. Luckily she finds a job the day before she’s supposed to start.
The problem isn’t her, in-fact, by the end of CELTA she had developed into a strong teacher; it’s just that teachers are expendable here so some people do get dicked about. Anyway, onto the awful school she’s working at. It’s awful. She teaches teenagers at a school of a couple of thousand, with average classroom size of 50 students and no air-con to boot. She has been given no indication of topics to cover, and has been told she has free reign. They don’t care. Can you imagine teaching a class of 50 people who don’t really give a shit? Especially in a foreign language? Free-reign is nice in a way. If you’re a decent teacher, it does mean you can (attempt) to make creative classes at the expense of your time. If you don’t care, you can save your time and just and do little prep work and just give the students some toss – they probably won’t know any better or learn anything from it.
As you can imagine, this approach is open to abuse by bad teachers. Because Thailand has become so popular, schools and agencies have realized that there is an endless supply of native speaking EFL teachers or travelers who can work for them. This means that to work in Thailand as an EFL teacher, the requirements are pretty low: Be from a native speaking country and have a degree. However, I’m pretty sure some schools would settle as long as you’re white. There’s an influx of bad teachers because of this, people with no basic training, experience or willingness to teach. I’ve been told about teachers who have literally decided the lesson subject 5 minutes before walking into the class and just deciding they’ll teach ‘love’ or something. We teachers suffer because we’re expendable – EFL wages have been frozen for about 10 years or so. You’ll live alright but don’t expect to save any more. The kids suffer because they have terrible teachers.
The running theme is consistency. There’s no consistency from schools or the government to inflict some kind of standard, which is surprising because in 2 years ASEAN (think South Asia’s EU) is coming in and the main language they use will be English. The problem quite frankly is that no one gives a shit. And it rubs off onto the kids.
Remember when I said there’s no set curriculum? Yeah, this results in really fragmented skill levels, in which the kids have a decent vocabulary, but they don’t know how to use it constructively within a sentence. The next problem occurs that you can’t fail anybody – it’s basically an unwritten rule of Thailand. If you do, it’ll look bad for the school, it’ll look bad for you and the parents will be angry, although I’ve heard stories of results getting edited. What this means is to proceed to the next year, you don’t really have to pass any tests, you just simply have to get older. This shamefully has the consequence that skill levels are incredibly varied, so it’s harder to teach.
Like mixing various bodily fluids together, none of this makes a nice cocktail. Because the schools don’t take EFL teaching seriously, neither do some kids. They’ll talk constantly, run around, disobey me, not listen or refuse to work. It’s quite depressing that I’m unable to do some of the fun activities because no one is willing to listen for 2 minutes or watch a demo. Everyone misses out. I have kids who are 9 years old who do not speak or understand any English and continue to disrupt my lessons. I have kids who are 6 years old who sleep through my lessons, and look confused when I give them a worksheet because they haven’t bothered to listen.
On the plus side, some of the classes have some amazing students who are smart, funny, and cute and just in general are really fun to teach and know. I try and teach for them.
It’s hard to discipline the bad kids. You can tell them to sit down and listen, but they don’ really care (or understand). I do have flashbacks of when I was a child learning French, and how shit that was… Although I would see more incentive to learn English… and my lessons weren’t shite, sorry Mrs.Roberts. Shamefully, the kids don’t respect us. I can’t blame them – the schools don’t take us seriously, they have bad teachers, the good teachers only stay 6-12 months and there’s no consistency in topic or teaching method. This creates these really disjointed levels of respect. If you observe Thai teachers teaching, the kids are utterly silent and respect. As soon as the teachers leave, they’re everywhere and talking. Sometimes the teachers stay in so they behave which is nice. Still, I see Thai teachers openly shouting, spanking and wrist slapping to discipline the kids. I guess it instills some fear, but as an Englishman I can’t fathom hitting a child to discipline. Although it’s been real fucking tempting lately.
This all sounds incredibly negative. And it is kinda. The day to day reality is that you have good and bad days. Some days are brilliant and everything works, other days you just wrestle constantly trying to get their attention. Everything else you just don’t think or worry about.
GOING TO STOP THERE. TALK ABOUT TRAVELLING IN ANOTHER POST LOL. Rip kentpaul. eagerly waiting for this post not to be read lol.
Still, most of what I’ve learned has been from first-hand encounters, conversations with EFL teachers and more intelligent researching.
Thailand’s popularity has risen dramatically within the last 10 years. Going into Thailand, my girlfriend and I were aware of the idea that it had become a check-list destination by gap yah types. We were hesitant about it, but thought as EFL teachers, the experience would be different enough not to worry about it.
Teaching
It’s awful. I can’t really put lipstick on this.
The problem is that there is no over-running curriculum from the government or schools when it comes to teaching English. There’s no consistency - at least for us EFL teachers.
For example, we (MY GIRLFRIEND and I) work at a primary school teaching kids in one of the nice areas of Bangkok. Our jobs are to teach and help the students practice conversational skills i.e. speaking and listening. I’ll come back to this later. The school is private, has class sizes ranging from 20-30 and we have air-con. We don’t have any OHT projectors, but they’ve recently put into effect projectors which you use with iPads that you rent from the IT office. By all means, we have it pretty good. On our first day at school, we were given the school’s module guide intended for parents. In this, it has 1 page that details the topics we’re supposed to cover in the semester. We were quickly ushered into the English office in the sort of ‘get to work’ kind of thing. That was all the guidance we were given. There are no course books for us to follow, there’s no indication of class ability and no indication of what topics they have already covered. There’s no overrunning consistency, which is incredibly aggravating because it is ruining the children’s education (will somebody please think of the children?).
This may sound good or bad to you. The truth of the matter is that it's good. One of our friends (who we met on the CELTA and who is also in Thailand) has a much different – and much more typical experience. She came into Thailand with a job that an agency had sorted for her. About a week before she was supposed to teach they suddenly drop her no reason. No problem, getting a job as an EFL teacher is incredibly easy in Thailand. After about 3 days, she has a new job sorted and she’s about to start school the following Monday. Nope! They drop her suddenly the Friday night before she’s supposed to start. Luckily she finds a job the day before she’s supposed to start.
The problem isn’t her, in-fact, by the end of CELTA she had developed into a strong teacher; it’s just that teachers are expendable here so some people do get dicked about. Anyway, onto the awful school she’s working at. It’s awful. She teaches teenagers at a school of a couple of thousand, with average classroom size of 50 students and no air-con to boot. She has been given no indication of topics to cover, and has been told she has free reign. They don’t care. Can you imagine teaching a class of 50 people who don’t really give a shit? Especially in a foreign language? Free-reign is nice in a way. If you’re a decent teacher, it does mean you can (attempt) to make creative classes at the expense of your time. If you don’t care, you can save your time and just and do little prep work and just give the students some toss – they probably won’t know any better or learn anything from it.
As you can imagine, this approach is open to abuse by bad teachers. Because Thailand has become so popular, schools and agencies have realized that there is an endless supply of native speaking EFL teachers or travelers who can work for them. This means that to work in Thailand as an EFL teacher, the requirements are pretty low: Be from a native speaking country and have a degree. However, I’m pretty sure some schools would settle as long as you’re white. There’s an influx of bad teachers because of this, people with no basic training, experience or willingness to teach. I’ve been told about teachers who have literally decided the lesson subject 5 minutes before walking into the class and just deciding they’ll teach ‘love’ or something. We teachers suffer because we’re expendable – EFL wages have been frozen for about 10 years or so. You’ll live alright but don’t expect to save any more. The kids suffer because they have terrible teachers.
The running theme is consistency. There’s no consistency from schools or the government to inflict some kind of standard, which is surprising because in 2 years ASEAN (think South Asia’s EU) is coming in and the main language they use will be English. The problem quite frankly is that no one gives a shit. And it rubs off onto the kids.
Remember when I said there’s no set curriculum? Yeah, this results in really fragmented skill levels, in which the kids have a decent vocabulary, but they don’t know how to use it constructively within a sentence. The next problem occurs that you can’t fail anybody – it’s basically an unwritten rule of Thailand. If you do, it’ll look bad for the school, it’ll look bad for you and the parents will be angry, although I’ve heard stories of results getting edited. What this means is to proceed to the next year, you don’t really have to pass any tests, you just simply have to get older. This shamefully has the consequence that skill levels are incredibly varied, so it’s harder to teach.
Like mixing various bodily fluids together, none of this makes a nice cocktail. Because the schools don’t take EFL teaching seriously, neither do some kids. They’ll talk constantly, run around, disobey me, not listen or refuse to work. It’s quite depressing that I’m unable to do some of the fun activities because no one is willing to listen for 2 minutes or watch a demo. Everyone misses out. I have kids who are 9 years old who do not speak or understand any English and continue to disrupt my lessons. I have kids who are 6 years old who sleep through my lessons, and look confused when I give them a worksheet because they haven’t bothered to listen.
On the plus side, some of the classes have some amazing students who are smart, funny, and cute and just in general are really fun to teach and know. I try and teach for them.
It’s hard to discipline the bad kids. You can tell them to sit down and listen, but they don’ really care (or understand). I do have flashbacks of when I was a child learning French, and how shit that was… Although I would see more incentive to learn English… and my lessons weren’t shite, sorry Mrs.Roberts. Shamefully, the kids don’t respect us. I can’t blame them – the schools don’t take us seriously, they have bad teachers, the good teachers only stay 6-12 months and there’s no consistency in topic or teaching method. This creates these really disjointed levels of respect. If you observe Thai teachers teaching, the kids are utterly silent and respect. As soon as the teachers leave, they’re everywhere and talking. Sometimes the teachers stay in so they behave which is nice. Still, I see Thai teachers openly shouting, spanking and wrist slapping to discipline the kids. I guess it instills some fear, but as an Englishman I can’t fathom hitting a child to discipline. Although it’s been real fucking tempting lately.
This all sounds incredibly negative. And it is kinda. The day to day reality is that you have good and bad days. Some days are brilliant and everything works, other days you just wrestle constantly trying to get their attention. Everything else you just don’t think or worry about.
GOING TO STOP THERE. TALK ABOUT TRAVELLING IN ANOTHER POST LOL. Rip kentpaul. eagerly waiting for this post not to be read lol.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
I think you are an exception to the rule
Jedeye Sniv
Banned
tbh I don't have that experience with weed and never have really. Maybe when you get ridiculously, precipitously high, but for the most part my impairedness is no more than most people after a few drinks. But I feel super relaxed and easy going and can go off on some fun conversational tangents.
Those images remind me more of doing mushrooms than anything else.
....and alllllll my friends too then? Middle class, casual no-sweat drug use is really quite common.
NinjaBoiX
Member
Kent, why you say this? You aren't helping!
We'll probably just update this thread 8bit. Keep an ear to the ground.
Edit: Tash, stonerdawgs got a giggle from me!
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
I'm sure you'll get through this bro, just go bikini shopping
heh, separate definitions of middle class i guess
Great post, Chinner. Very interesting read. You're pretty interesting when you're not being a massive troll!
Add me and all my friends to this list. Getting high and being a functional 20/30 something is our norm.
Add me and all my friends to this list. Getting high and being a functional 20/30 something is our norm.
One of my friends died from too much weed, such a shame.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
I may or may not have a picture of noffles in a fedora that not only am i dying to share, have an avatarised version to accompany
Interesting (and oddly familiar) shit.
The lack of a curriculum would drive me fucking bonkers. I get pissed off that me 'n' the missus did a different number of GCSE's because we went to different schools.
Where is the line for casual with weed? An 8th every now 'n' then? An 8th a week? An 8th a day?
Post it. He's banned. What can he do? ?
Jedeye Sniv
Banned
What def of middle class are you going by? I'm going by good job + good education + home owner
By casual I mean that we do it like it's no big deal. Like having a glass of wine is no big deal, even if you do it every night. Frequency is fairly irrelevant, it's how you approach it that counts IMO
Wow Chinner. That pretty much summed up my (UK) high school. Especially the part about moving on to a higher class only because you're one year older. Unusually, I found it quite bizarre that Thai teachers get respect but foreigners don't over there. It was always the other way round during my primary school days (abroad) unless the local teacher used corporal punishment (The foreign teachers were seen as interesting, different and cool. This was probably because of their unorthodox teaching methods). Sure, you had the odd masochist kid who always loved to get in trouble but everyone else didn't mess around.
Eh, kinda. I know what you mean, but I think it can be extremely difficult to have an accurate perspective on weed if you smoke daily for a long time. More so than alcohol. Having a glass of wine every night is one thing, but getting drunk every night is another.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
EDIT: Noffles am cry so i edited the pic, but if you click on it, you get the whole shebang
Il keep that here, need to shop the people out of the full pic
I think I'm in love
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
Jedeye Sniv
Banned
Is Noffles coming to the meet? He can borrow my hat.
NinjaBoiX
Member
Gimme the names! Is this from a BritGAF meet?
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
nah it's just noffles
That's a bit harsh, he was before your time, and is still therefore your superior
NinjaBoiX
Member
His friends all look so much cooler than him. I wonder what that's like?
Little Old Man
Member
I thought the guy with the vest was going to be noffles since that guy has such a smug ready to troll expression on his face.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
He's like a less cool version of Green Scar, none of them look as cool as you bro <3 xoxoxohbchbkrewnc vd
This lead me to look up some of the older BritGAF threads.
I thought 'Threads should be SFW and inviting' was the original tagline to one of them at first. My memory is going.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
noffles featured in Madstacks beyond thunderlord and in here too, 400 posts or something
but yeah
ninjaboiX youd better watch urself as ur approaching my fuckin' territory on the Threadpostcount
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
i wish id got into this thread earlier, but i didnt know how to post in a community
KP's last post on that page fucking cracked me up.
She gets grandad rights on account of being my missus and being a fucking boss.
Rubbish King
The gift that keeps on giving
That's glorious. Paedophilia, (false) poster deaths, weed, booze and self mutilation. A week in BritGaf
Yeah yeah congrats on the sex and all.
After eight and a half years, we deserve a sex-cake at least
Jackben
bitch I'm taking calls.
Astute observations on the teaching, Chinner. Sounds very difficult honestly, not sure I would have the patience or stress tolerance to deal with such lax standards and loose structures. Teaching sounds hard enough without all that bs. Hopefully you find better days with the rest of your time there, however long it is.
Some things never change
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