Testing times
How is the COVID-19 situation affecting schools and teachers?
Our school has asked teachers to cancel their travel plans, and if you are not willing to do that, you will need to self-quarantine for 20 days when you return to Thailand
Think about what students you want to teach!
Are you the serious, lecturer type or do you enjoy clowning around?
New teachers in Thailand often give plenty of thought to where they want to teach and how much money they want to make. But strangely, one question few teachers seem to ask themselves seriously is what kind of students they will be happy with.
The dreaded Summer break
Six weeks means just far too much time on my hands
When I tell people back home how long I get off they think it’s some sort of perfect dream. However, there’s a certain length of time for a perfect holiday. Six weeks is way too long in my opinion.
Problems that foreign teachers face here
Postbox letter from Josh
It just seems to me that the problems teachers face always come down to common narratives.
Bye, bye Thailand
When poor evaluation strategy and lack of communication mean one thing - the exit door
I have taught at five schools in Thailand and only ONE has let me finish the semester and given me a recommendation letter. I've had enough of this place to be honest.
What's a foreign teacher's contract worth?
What happens when your teacher agency won't pay up!
We were contracted to be paid for the full month of September but we were being told that our last day at the school was September 16, 2016. Something was rotten in the Kingdom of Thailand - it was like we were having our arses kicked out of a job too early.
Get it down on paper!
The secret to managing office politics
Conflict in a workplace can pop up unexpectedly. This is why it’s necessary for you to write things down. This way, when it comes time to defend yourself or to shed light on the matter you can look back to your notes and bring up exactly what happened
The slaughterhouse called marking
It's boring, thankless work, right? Should we even bother?
Hunting down every error is hard on a student's ego, but also very time consuming for a teacher faced with a full class-load of papers. But there are ways around it.
Perfectionists: stay away from English teaching
Some rules of the road
There are some businesses you’ll get into in Asia as a teacher where the best you can hope for is a good one year and then you leave either because the environment is just so toxic or because you are going to get burned out or maybe you’ll just get sick of living in a rural area.
Classroom management muscle
Lessons from Arnie in Kindergarten Cop
Let us spend this blog investigating the question of classroom management. To do so, I'd like to use a visual example from a movie, something we can all relate to in some way.
