In my previous posts, I highlighted organizations that put on events for youth in Thailand, focusing either on education or leadership skills. These events are wonderful and fit excellently into the Thai culture and concept of sanuk.
Yet, these events require a lot of people power to make a difference here – from the planning to the coordinating to the volunteering to the facilitating. The Books for Thailand Foundation is a bit simpler than that, but makes just as much of an impact.
Thailand’s fiercely independent spirit and lack of colonization has benefitted the country in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most tangible and visible effect is the fact that Thailand has been the regional economic powerhouse for sometime. However, next year, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Economy Community (AEC) goes into effect, bringing a European Union style agreement for free movement of qualified workers among the 10 member nations with the lingua franca being English. This impending development for the region has had a rather significant impact on the work that I am asked to do here.
I recently had some visitors come to my rural village in Thailand. Since school had recently started up again, I decided to have them come and help me out in my classes. We played a bunch of games to review what was taught last semester. Everyone had a ton of fun!
Yesterday, school “started.”
I put “started” in quotation marks because, while all of the key players were at school, nothing of consequence actually happened. The teachers were there. The students were there. Even the principal, who is rarely at school, was there.
But I did not teach.
My first semester of working in Thai schools in now on the books and completed. Last Thursday the students had their second of two days of testing and the school shut down for the semester after that. Officially, by the government, school was supposed to go until October 10, but I’m not complaining. We’re supposed to go back on November 1. It is officially bpit term, literally meaning “closed term.”
Last week, I attended a Peace Corps workshop called Student Friendly Schools. This was the second time ever that Peace Corps did the Student Friendly Schools workshop; the first time was in Malawi. This is a new global initiative of the Peace Corps. Myself and 14 other volunteers along with Thai counterparts attended a two-and-a-half day workshop to learn about gender-based violence and school-based gender-based violence. Then we started working on a plan to implement what we learned back at site.
As I’ve mentioned, most learning in Thai classrooms is done through rote memorization. My job is as a teacher training, and I want to help my co-teachers to learn more student-centered teaching techniques. Part of that has involved introducing fun and games into the classroom. It hasn’t always been easy, but thankfully my co-teachers are willing to give it a shot. Check out some of our classroom activities!
After my conversation with my co-teacher about critical thinking and watching how schools work here in Thailand, I feel comfortable saying that learning, in the Western sense of being curious about a topic and wanting to learn the why and how of it, is not valued here. Learning in the sense of memorizing and reciting is valued. Which brings me to tell you about how I have spent my time after school for the last couple weeks.
When comparing eight of the countries that are a part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Thailand ranks eighth. The two countries that were not included were Laos and Burma, which are widely regarded as low performing. That means that children in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam were more proficient on the test. And Education Ministry officials are “stunned.” However, an honest look at the Thai education system reveals lots of room for improvement.
When I got my nomination for Peace Corps in April 2012, I was told that I was nominated for a Primary Teacher Trainer position in Asia set to leave in January 2013. I imagined that I would be training a large number of teachers on a host of topics, from discipline and classroom management to new teaching methods through monthly trainings at a number of schools. The reality of my program is that my job is more to focus on training two specific teachers at one school in better ways to teach English.