I remember the Teflwatch site well. A school I’d worked for ended up in the ‘Hall of Shame’. The site was hilarious because you can recognise the writing styles of people you’ve worked with as colleagues and they’d join Teflwatch using multiple user names, as if to disguise themselves, and then have discussions and arguments with themselves. The mods seemingly never tracked the IP addresses.
Certain phrases or idioms are highly recognisable. For example, if you’d worked with an older American and then ‘Younglover’ started posting on Teflwatch about how their school took the curriculum and ‘nickel and dimed it to death’ - it hardly took peerless detective work to see through it.
The problem is that the law in Thailand provides a penalty for the site owner if anything, even a forum post, is deemed slander. Even if there is only a charge brought the site owner could find the police going through their things and taking away anything electronic as “evidence.“
It’s medieval, but I think it’s to stop Thais from constantly bad mouthing each other and then passing the blame to some other party.
Since the Thais are so in love with shared responsibility, the best thing to do is condemn them as an entire culture rather than just one school or another.
I had a very encouraging experience after doing just what the article suggests and Phil echoes.I contacted him and was responded to very promptly when I couldn’t get paid on time by a curricular activity academy due to no fault of my own- in fact had gone well beyond the extra mile and put up with a very demanding , low paying employer who would require unreasonable amounts of work at very short notice -for free.I contacted Phil/ ajarn.com about my situation and he said sometimes he would contact the advertiser. I don’t know if he did or not, but I got a message within a couple of hours and recieved my much needed pay.. Thanks for the support Phil . Reasonable requests will be taken and considered, if schools are lacking in fair play, they will be found out and Ajarn doesn’t have to list them if they deem it’s better not to. Ajarn can’t take more than a reasonable amount of responsibility and I found his replies helpful and he may have intervened on my behalf, but the owner of the academy seemed serious and paid me with a waiver not to compete or complain to the schools or students we went to.
My sister works as a teacher there in Bangkok and her concern is about how discriminating the administrators can be - if a teacher is not “white” or “a native english speaker” , they become of secondary preference regardless of how well-equipped and qualified a non-native teacher is. As a teacher myself, I am proud to say that our training here in the Philippines is for one to have the heart and skill of what a teacher really is. Our teachers in the schools, though, non-native speakers, can teach very well how to talk, read, write, comprehend English competently. It doesn’t always take a native speaker to be able to teach well especially if they really don’t have degrees in education. Thailand is a beautiful country. I hope that its citizens, specially those who are in the academic profession, do not put too much discrimination on foreign teachers who are not coming from US, Canada, Australia, UK or Kiwiland. There are a lot of qualified teachers around the world, it’s just a matter of choosing well - those who really have the heart and passion for teaching. Remember, Thailand is still part of Asia, so please do not be discriminating towards your neighboring countries who would also want to teach in your good country.
I used to complain about my teaching situation, and while I know I had real grievances, I also recognized that I began to complain about everything to anyone who would listen. Negativity breeds negativity, find the positive and recognize that when you are teaching a class you have more freedom than 95% of 9 to 5 jobs.
By bill, bangkok on 2010-08-02