Teaching In Ireland Vs Thailand (A Brief Note)
Firstly, it’s important to lay out where my experience comes from. In Ireland, I taught in a standard government secondary school. In Thailand, I teach predominantly in a standard government high school (the same age group as Ireland).
While I have been in different educational institutes in Ireland my thoughts and experiences are drawn from a singular secondary school. Similarly, though I have taught in different institutions in Thailand I will use my high school experience as an example.
My first weeks in Thai education were a whirlwind. Like any new experience, we are trusted into the unknown and can only truly understand it retrospectively... at the end of the school week, month or year.
The first class you teach in a new school is always memorable. You quickly know what works and what doesn’t. As an English teacher, you are hyper-aware of every word choice and every reaction in the beginning.
You watch the student’s faces to see if they know what is going on. My first class was a lower grade. I spoke for a few minutes and gave an introduction; where I come from, and how long I’ve been a teacher. The reactions were befuddled; wide-eyed stares comprehending very little of what I was saying. I had to change my tact.
“And my favourite football team is Liverpool.”
And with the utterance of that final word, applause, cheer, and everyone is happy except the Manchester United fans who sit in the back row. This was my introduction to the Thai classroom.
During that first week, I was truly at the height of being a foreigner or, falang as Thai’s call Westerners. I didn’t know the language, the history, much about culture, or anything about workplace etiquette other than what I had been told by my teaching agency. And yet, I was welcomed with open arms. Students smiled at the new foreign teacher and said hello and any other English phrases they could cobble together: “I love you”, “you handsome teacher” “Where do you come from?”. The school had over two and a half thousand students compared to my Irish school which had 600. The lightness of attitude I perceived also surprised me. Despite the number of objective criticisms a foreign teacher might levy on the Thai educational system the students seemed to be genuinely and simply happy.
But above everything in my initial experience, two things stood out the most. I will discuss them by comparison. Firstly, in Ireland when school ends at 4:30 everyone goes home. Teachers wait at the gate to usher the students out and deter fist fights or suspicious activities. By 5 p.m. everyone (except for perhaps the secretary, heads of staff and cleaners) is gone.
A silence prevails inside and out.
In my school in Thailand, 4:30 came and went... and yet students still huddled together in groups, they played football, volleyball, cards and mobile games. There was no rush to leave; perhaps it was because only work waited for them at home. I have come to realize that for many students’ high schools are a safe place, a place of fun, an escape, and a social hub. In Ireland, on the contrary, school is something to be overcome, or arduously gotten through.
Secondly, in Ireland, at lunchtime and at the end of the day schoolteachers are tasked with being supervisors. Or maybe the better descriptor would be security guards. We had to be vigilant and break-up delinquency wherever we saw it... from students stealing food, to throwing firecrackers, to kicking in lockers, to smoking, to fistfights, to blowing up a toilet with a firework. Anything was possible.
As previously mentioned, my Thai school had over four times the number of students and yet there were no teachers ever on supervision (except for the two staff guards at the front gate). We didn’t supervise because there was nothing that frequently needed supervising. Teachers could even leave the school premises to have their lunch. There was no breaking up regular fights because nobody was fighting.
This was the beginning mystery of my teaching life in Thailand.
Why did students want to stay on after school? And why was there so little delinquency?
Everything else came later.
In Ireland, on paper, the educational system is more developed than in Thailand. But in my experience, the Irish secondary system demands you to be a full-time disciplinarian and only part-time educator.
At the end of the day (in Irish secondary schools), you often feel defeated by the seeming vindictiveness of students to each other and their frequent outright hatred of teachers.
For all its shortcomings and issues, at the end of school in Thailand you don’t feel that way. If anything, you get a sense of gratitude. It’s very rare for me to teach a class where the students don’t thank me, the teacher, in unison (no matter how the class went).
In future posts, I will try to pry deeper into exactly why I think these differences manifest and what there is to learn from teaching in the West and the East.
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