Entries from February 2008 ↓

Lately I have been thinking about how we instill values in our children. I think the work we do as parents in raising up our children in the right way and the moral way is one of the most important jobs we can do. In fact, I can’t even think of anything that compares to its importance.

I am trying my best with our kids, but sometimes it is difficult giving them the right amount of guidance and help to make them into the children I want them to become. I understand it is hard to do it alone and that is why my husband and I have started attending church regularly. The values that we want to instill in our children are helped with our friendships we get in church.

After making a couple of posts about teaching, I can’t help but think back to my time teaching. I have some really fond memories of my students and even some of my co-teachers, but I can never forget the endless grind of rules and regulations. It seems like the rules and regulations were always making things more difficult for teachers.

You can read it an earlier post of mine on teaching regulations in Thailand. It’s that feeling of being a rubber band stretch to the limit. Now, that feeling is gone because I am in a fulfilling job here in the states. Unfortunately, all it takes is thinking back to get those old feelings again.

It looks like TEFLWatch is changing places now. The main page and articles will continue to be available at TEFLWatch.Org, but the TEFLWatch forum has changed to TEFLWatch.com. You can get instant communication about issues on TEFLWatch Forum and get all of your TEFL Blacklist, Rantings and Ratings on TEFLWatch.org.

This is a good change and should make things a bit more separate. It’s my understanding that will be eventually having separate ownership and separate hosting. That can only be a good thing for teachers who want to report bad schools.

I guess restructuring is a good idea after two years of growth, threats and expansion.

I am really glad that my husband and I left Thailand last year. We had been following the news and found that there were several plans to institute anti-foreigner laws in Thailand. It was going to make teaching more difficult or just down right impossible.

The biggie is the new rule that my friends are fretting over right now. Teachers are required to take a class on Thai culture and then pass a test before they can get a teacher’s license. They have to pay for it out of their own pockets. The class and test wouldn’t be so bad, but they require you to show proper respect to a Buddha in order to pass the class.

What does showing proper respect mean? It means bowing down to it. As a Christian, I find it impossible for me to bow down to other idols.

Learning to live and work abroad was one of the best experiences me and my husband have ever had. It was a great opportunity to learn about different ways to do things. We also had the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas.

New ideas are the lifeblood of any growth. Early on, we tended to forget or just take for granted the ideas we found and now many of these ideas are lost or forgotten. It didn’t take us long to realize that we needed to keep track of these new ideas. Our solution has been to come up with an idea notebook.

We use the idea notebook just to record ideas we come across. We can later go back and check them and remember even more details. It sure makes the experience of living abroad even better.

I have been looking at different TEFL institutes out there, but lately it seems like some courses have been doing bad things. The TEFL Institute Chicago seems to be one such institute. Unfortunately, it has been getting some negative feedback from both TEFLWatch. It seems like The TEFL Institute might not be a good course to attend according to the information that can be found on The TEFL Institute and TEFLWatch.

One of the things you must be vigilant on when you are both a parent and a TEFL teacher is unscrupulous schools. In some locations, it can be tough to find a school that you can afford to send your children to. Public schools can be out of the question for non-local kids and international schools can be prohibitively high.

In this void, there are sometimes school that spring up. When these schools are registered with the local government, they can be a Godsend for parents, but what happens when these schools exist solely to take money from parents and don’t deliver a quality education to the students? It’s a travesty.

In Thailand, foreign students are not allowed to study at public schools and they have to pay higher rates to study in private schools. Education expenses can make it difficult to teach English abroad if you have kids.

Right now there is a developing story on TEFLWatch where accusations are being thrown around about Faith Christian Academy in Thailand. There are those who are saying that the school is not legally registered and is operating illegally. I hope that this isn’t true and would hope that the school would quickly prove to everyone that they are legal. We need quality education for our kids, not carpetbaggers trying to take advantage of a tough situation.