Here's where I make a point of not calling it a racket. It's just known and accepted coming in that everybody will pass because the teacher will have taught a test the students are already familiar with, hitting each and every point in turn, and if the students don't pass the first time, they will do some sort of penance (hold that thought) before receiving a retest or grade correction. And this will happen after final testing, so a good teacher is one who turns in final grades and goes home.
Here's where it gets weird (at least for me). Say I've taught my way through the following exchange: "What is your favorite subject?" "My favorite subject is [English]." "Why do you like [English]?" "Because it's {fun}."
My test, which must be multiple choice, would use the same principles applied to a slightly different situation: "What is your [favorite, best, grossest name] food?" "[My, Your, His, The] favorite food is fried rice." "Why [do you, you, he, not] like fried rice?" "[Because, After, For, Why] it's delicious."
Such a test question would be an utter failure on my part. Education here is not cognition, comprehension, application; education is rote repetition. And it doesn't matter what preconceptions, expectations, or biases I bring in, that's just how it is. Asking for anything else is forcing the students to fail.
Return to penance: last term, while visiting my new digs during the study week before finals, I couldn't really figure out some of the stuff I was seeing: most of a classroom in the hallway, lined up on their knees, filling out tests on each other's backs; clustered around a teacher's desk, again on knees, drilling answers; lined up outside the classroom getting caned on various locations.
*DING DING* these are the students who did not pass the pretest. *WHACK!* Just imagine what happens to those who have to re-take the final. Naturally, our darlings in the English Programme did not receive such public penance: their parents have enough money for their children's shame to be private. But in the Regular Program, the public shame is an important motivator.
Assuming that actual teaching is a sneaky sort of underhanded inclusion, inferences line up:
This is why Thailand is a great place for the backpacking party-hoppers.
It is also why there is such a high turnover of certified and qualified teachers.
And why I've so enjoyed the RP--a twofold reason.
On the one hand, it is the most basic entry-level position, the meat grinder designed to ferret out people like I was last term. The classes are big and loud and wild and there is little actual expectation of a farang being able to accomplish much, and the honesty does me well, or at least a helluva lot better than the appearance-based expectations found elsewhere. It was hard, or it would've been had there not been so many other issues going on, to come home, look in the mirror, and say, "I am a music teacher" when I knew damn well that 95% of my students couldn't read music.
Now, I am under no pretense of teaching content: grammar, vocabulary, and other mechanical issues are taught in the English classes. I have explicit orders not to go there, so I don't have to worry about the students actually understanding the wretched grammatical vagaries that took a few hours of study before I could teach every semester.
I have a set of learning outcomes and a pre-post test that dictate what I teach, so it's not about creating a killer syllabus and then making sure everyone passes.
What little content I have consists of generally pre-existing knowledge that most of the students have already seen on tests. Otherwise, my job is to find new and exciting ways to get the students speaking English. I'm under intense scrutiny based on my personal history, but otherwise I get the impression it would be a, "Okay, go have fun, we'll see you if you make it to the other side!" type job.
I like that the pressure is internal. Such is my ideal situation, because when someone says, "YOU MUST PERFORM OPTIMALLY!" my automatic reaction is to shut down in the face of the expectation that I am not, have not been, and need someone yelling at me to motivate me to do my job; trust me and I'll grind to the bone for ways to excel.
Hmm, I've gotten so worked up I've lost the other reason. I think it amounted to the nature of my job: on paper, my job is to make sure the students can pass the multiple choice test that outlines a basic conversation. Absolute success would mean, officially, that the head of the school could come up to any of my students and have the typical Thai-farang conversation: what's your name, can you eat spicy food, what will you do next? Where I can excel, where I can sink my retentive teacher fangs, is in the sound of their speech. Which is also about the only thing I can offer in the company of a faculty who've studied grammar and mechanics extensively.
So at the end of the day, if I walk home after hearing even one student say, "What is it" instead of "whad id id" I've done some actual teaching, and compromising my own ideals and expectations is not an excuse to shy from the mirror. And that's pretty cool, because it's some of the most enjoyable teaching I've ever found.
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