So………..I have now updated my photo album on flickr to include all the photos I took during my time at KSP. Click on the box on the left of this page. One day. maybe, I might see my way to adding captions to every single photo!
Well, I am now reinstating my blog back into the public realm, after taking it off the airwaves last week until we had left Kasintorn.
We finished yesterday – whoop!! I spent 3 full days doing all that preparation I was told I had to do, and I got everything done at about 4 p.m. – and then we went to collect our wages. We got a full month’s pay (a bit less than the full whack), plus the housing allowance for this month, so at least we are not out of pocket. I had been starting to think that they might not pay us – a bit of a worry – but they did. So we left for the last time at half past 4.
No one at the school has officially told me that I will no longer be working there. Not the principal, not his deputy, nobody. They have not said a word to me about it. Rob was just expected to pass the message on, I suppose.
Since the first weekend in February, we had had a bottle of very nice sparkling wine in the fridge, and the occasion to drink it was meant to be our 6th anniversary on February 23rd, but we have had so many rounds of laryngitis/bronchitis/feeling unwell at weekends that we hadn’t popped that cork. That all changed last night, however, when we took the bottle with us to our favourite Indian restaurant near Khao San Road, “Bombay Blues”, and stepped onto the balcony and sent the cork flying into a tree! A fantastic dinner ensued, and then we went to a nearby bar and met up with some friends, where we stayed until about 1 a.m. – and nothing to get up for in the morning!
It’s a great feeling to have done 3 years’ teaching, and to have finished. Time to have a holiday – which is what we set out from England to do, on 23rd February, 2005!
There is talk of some photo-swapping. Last week I took a photo of Ed – or He Who Shall Not Be Named. It has become a bit of an urban legend among the teachers, as has another one that one of the other teachers took, so there will be a bit of exchanging going on. You can see my photo at the top of this page, for the time being.
Oh! There’s another thing I found out last night.
An American teacher, let’s call her “A”, who has Indian parents, started work at the school last semester. She has just done a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and her friend, “M”, who had just done the same course, started at the school at the same time.
And you will be shocked to hear that they informed “A” that as she has “Asian features” (i.e. dark skin), she would be paid 5,000 baht less a month than her pale, Celtic-looking friend. I heard this last night. They actually TOLD her this, perfectly matter-of-factly. It’s true – the people who send their children to study English at schools such as Kasintorn really do believe that the whiter the teacher, the better. There was a Dutch couple in the town where we lived last year, and the woman was basically refused jobs because of her dark skin – and they TOLD her that that was the reason. It’s not even surreptitious – they just say it. Can you believe this bullshit?
I am glad to be out of the Thai education system.
So. I have found out that I now have to do all the planning for next year as if I was staying here. 40 songs: typed up. 40 storybooks: chosen, and the titles typed up to correspond with the weekly topics. 20 weeks’ worth of vocabulary words – 6 per week – and conversation questions (1 or 2 per week): thought of and typed up.
This is all on pain of not getting paid for March. I WILL NOT BE HERE!!!!!! Why should I do all that work? Blackmail.
The thing is, I did all the same work at the start of my job here, meaning that the person who had my job before me did NOT have to do this preparation when she left. The point of doing the work is to plan for the coming year’s teaching.
I am finding it difficult to accept this. I don’t think it’s fair.
Rob had a meeting with Mr Apisak, the school director, yesterday, and was told that we are not getting new contracts for next year. Apparently this is because the budget won’t stretch to it.
For the next school year, there will be another 2 classes added to the English Program (the section of the school where all the teachers are non-Thais), and they are advertising for new teachers who will be paid at least 5,000 baht per month less than we are now. They are looking for agency teachers, who are notorious for moving between jobs quite regularly in search of more money, so they could be facing a high turnover of staff.
There is also talk of the school CUTTING the wages of the teachers who are staying here. This is partly blamed on the fact that the school built a new building last year, and they have a lot of money to pay back. So the teachers here are possibly looking at working even longer hours AND getting a pay cut!! All because the school miscalculated their finances. It’s totally unfair to penalise the teachers in the interests of paying back the money for the building. At the moment, teachers here start work at 8 a.m. and are not allowed to leave the school until 5 p.m. – which is made even longer by leaving the house at 7.15 a.m. and getting home around 5.45 p.m. – how can they work longer hours than that?
Anyway, this obviously leaves Rob and me with no job for next year……..but we have been offered 2 interviews in the past 20 hours. Tomorrow (Wednesday), 3 p.m. – Thewpaingarm School, very near to where we live at the moment; Thursday, 9 a.m. – an appointment with an agency who are looking for a kindergarten teacher and 2 for primary. That one is downtown, so we would have to move to a different area of the city, which would be quite exciting.
Ultimately I have no doubt that we will get jobs for the coming year. It’s just a matter of where, really.
And thus ends the suspense. There are some other teachers here who are now thinking they might leave. 3 and a half weeks until the end of term, and Mr Apisak is not being too forthcoming with appointments to go and see him and talk about all of this. In contrast, our contract says that if a teacher wants to leave the school, (s)he must apply for the privilege a minimum of 2 months before the leaving date. So how come it’s fine for them to keep everyone waiting until there are 3 weeks to go? Some other teachers might even be finding out that their contracts aren’t being renewed, even as late as this, so I am very glad that we know our situation now.
That’s all the news for now. Next up: how did our interviews go?
O.K. Today was the first day of Ed’s evaluations of the foreign teachers at the school. Almost everyone has been summoned to the office, it seems, except for me and Rob. Ed was his usual delightful self, it turns out, telling teachers what he thinks of them and their teaching. He has been telling people a “score” that he has come up with for their performance over the past school year. He has spent a total of 20 minutes in my classroom since last April, and he sees fit to assess and pass judgment on how I do my job. Everyone I have heard from has been insulted, discouraged, and not one ounce of praise, with their score for the second semester generally being lower than for the first. The reason for one of the teachers getting a score of 19/50 in semester 2, compared with 31/50 in semester 1, is that he “has a problem with management”.
How could anyone possibly have a problem with the management of that school?
He was also told that if he didn’t hang around with “the posse”, he would have done better and would be more highly thought of. “The posse” is, of course, made up of the people that Ed sees as being against him and stronger than him – a threat to his authority.
However, one teacher’s treatment really takes the biscuit. James, from Missouri, has been working at the school for 2 years now, maybe 3, and in the meeting today Ed told him that he reminds him of a street cleaner who has been cleaning the same bit of road for 2 years, but using the wrong end of the broom. Ed also said that he believes that James is not cut out to be a teacher because when he leaves the lesson, he doesn’t go on thinking about teaching – it’s not what goes through his head.
Ah, so Ed continues to think he is a mind-reader, which is also the basis for his horrendous paranoia. Well, that and the fact he abuses sleeping pills and is an alcoholic.
Anyway, Rob and I seem to have been kept till last – I think everyone else has had their meetings. So we’ll see what they say to us. I can imagine the tactics Ed will try to use – shouting down any dissent, trying to intimidate me, pulling that nasty sour face. but he really can take a running jump. I have had enough. My faith in my abilities as a teacher will not be remotely affected by my “score”, and I don’t want to work there any more anyway. I will tell you what happens tomorrow!
Tomorrow we have parents coming to visit the school to see whether they want to send their kids here. So the place is in a frenzy, cleaning, tidying up, taking photos of classroom activities for a teacher to put into a Power Point presentation to woo them further. It’s funny when something like this is imminent – things really shift up a gear.
In other news, I learnt last week that a teacher last year was fired, and for one hell of a reason. She was called to the office and asked, very directly, whether she had been looking for another job, to which she didn’t know what to say. So the head of department sort of said, “Well, we’ll just have a look on your hotmail, shall we?” and clicked a few buttons, bringing this teacher’s email account up on the screen. She had a message from some time before in her email inbox, and the school had read it using “spyware”. WHAT?
There’s a wireless internet connection at school, and we have all been told that we can connect to it with our laptops. (How kind of them.) This involves giving the school the names of our computers, meaning that any computer that’s connected to the network is open to scrutiny.
Imagine! A teacher was fired after the school spied on her email activities! It’s all about surveillance here. We kindergarten teachers were told in a meeting last week that we must “be careful” to not use the internet before 4 p.m. because the principal can see which classroom computers are being used at any given time. We were also told that we must go round our students’ tables while they’re working, as the principal has seen us on the classroom cameras sitting at our desks while students are working. So we are really encouraged to be constantly worrying about being seen doing something wrong on the cameras.
5 more weeks until the end of this school year. Then 1 more year of crazy bullshit here, and homewards! Can someone switch on the time-warp?
Well, today we were greeted with the non-appearance of Ed. Crack out the champers! He’s gone to England for his interview.
Yesterday we had a power cut. Keith, one of the teachers, was looking out of the window and caught the eye of one of the bus drivers. The driver made 2 gestures: flapping his hands like the wings of a bird, and drawing his finger across his throat. In other words, a bird had flown into one of the main power units and died, putting the power out. This happens quite often here.
In a bizarre twist of fate and timing, though, Ed happened to be looking out of the window at the same time, and saw the driver’s sign language. He later went to Keith and asked him to back him up in reporting the driver for the personal threat he had made. He thought the driver was pointing at him and saying he was going to, er, have him.
Ye gods! When will this madness end?
There is now speculation that Ed will be leaving tomorrow, after the mid-term tests are done. We’re all hoping so.
A happy ending to the book-copying saga, hopefully: Just before the school closed for Christmas, Ed came and told me that they had worked out a way of copying the books but with less paper, and that therefore I had the go-ahead to get them copied. Less paper is always a good thing, anyway, so no problem. I wonder if it will ever happen. Time will tell.
Well, it’s all coming out in the wash now.
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At said school Christmas party, Ed was offering prescription drugs to another teacher.
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As one of the other Western teachers was getting in a taxi to go home, Ed tried to get in too, and then accused this teacher, in graphic language, of molesting little boys at work.
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The reason Ed got beaten up by the bus-drivers is because of the bruises on his girlfriend’s face……
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People who live in Ed’s neighbourhood say he is drunk every night.
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The woman who lives opposite him saw the whole beating episode (it was in his front garden), and rang her sister, who is a teacher at the school. She obviously told her sister what she’d seen. This teacher is then summoned to the headmaster’s office for a dressing-down, and is blamed for spreading “bad gossip” about the school and ruining its reputation. I don’t really think the blame is hers, somehow.
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While being set upon by the bus-drivers, he grabbed his girlfriend and used her as a human shield. Nice boyfriend, huh?
So, yes, Ed was indeed back at work on the first day after the holidays. No reference has been made to his behaviour at the party – no consequences for him. He has, however, been “spoken to” by a fairly senior Thai teacher, with much shouting and waving of arms and wagging of finger by Ed, according to the teacher who saw it through the window, and then the next day he was absent. Everyone was hoping that was it, and then he is back again today. But I suppose he has had a formal warning. We just want him out. What a nasty piece of work. He goes to England for a university interview later this month, so hopefully he’ll stay there. There are a few things I’d like them to teach him.
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