Another hardship for TEFL / TESL teachers in SouthEast Asia

I recall when I first moved over here to Thailand and how almost everyone I knew was some sort of English teacher and while I wouldn't say that the jobs were the best, you also didn't have a lot of responsibility or oversight so you basically just had to turn up and do the best you could - or something similar to that - and then be nice and wai people and you would get around $1000 a month cash at the end of each month.

It wasn't a great job, but it was a decent chance to get an easy visa and not be hassled by immigration all the time about how long you have been here. With a work permit, things change a lot about how you are treated by officials.

I basically just flow with the breeze and don't seek career advancement. I am a part time teacher that covers for the other teachers that leave early because this isn't the dream job they hoped it would be. I turn up on time, I turn up dressed nice and not hungover and I do my job and then go home.

There have been a lot of hardships over the years as far as teaching English as a second or foreign language in Thailand, but there's always something new.

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Teaching English has always been a bit of a bumpy road in Thailand because of many things including

• unrealistic promises to incoming teacher
• lack of supplies to actually teach
• very little in the way of support from administration
• unruly classrooms where the kids are difficult to control in a foreign language

There are many other factors but for the most part the positions have been and continue to be a bit of a revolving door of people that are here today and gone tomorrow. I have been at my school, which isn't nice, for 6 years now and I am the only foreigner that has been working there this entire time. When we bring in new people they always start out with a great amount of enthusiasm but that very quickly wanes. For the most part the people who come in are just drunks who want a way to stay in the country longer and they always are completely unprepared for the actual job. I tried to warn them in the past and give suggestions on how to maintain their sanity but these days I can normally tell just by looking at someone whether or not they are going to make it.

But things got made a lot worse as far as employment is concerned because the Thai administration in my school and many others, seem to think that AI is the end-all solution to their woes.

I've seen them implement the digital babysitter for their English classes, often at the hands of a Thai teacher who barely speaks English and often speaks it less proficiently than the students do. That's not a great thing in a teacher but the administration allows this to continue because they believe that the AI is infallible and that it will correct everyone, student and teacher alike, as they go down this difficult road.

I have sat in on a few of these classes with one of the only administrators that seems to give a crap and I, a completely fluent-in-English person, was quite confused by what the AI instructor was asking them to do. It should come as no surprise that the students were mostly lost and the "instructor" was basically just hitting forward on every page as if they had any idea as to what is going on.

The problem here is that as far as any other observers are concerned, this looks really high tech and unless someone speaks on the level that I do comes along, they aren't going to notice that the teaching is either extremely basic, or it is in some situations teaching the kids things that are wrong. I also overheard a lesson that would have made some of the more conservative teachers angry because it was teaching them to speak about gay couples as if that was a perfectly normal thing.

Thailand is a very open-minded country but we have a large mix of religions and if some of these parents knew that it is teaching their kids about how "normal" it is for families to have two dads and two moms, some of them would be outraged about this.

It hasn't become much of an issue yet but the problem is that the headmasters' greed is going to get the best of them and things like this are going to continue to be used because it is basically free and it never needs days off and won't ever turn up to work hungover.

The public schools in this country get a budget from the government and it is largely up to the administration how this is spent. It is not a real mystery where a great deal of the money ends up because our headmaster drives a Mercedes Benz and lives a rather lavish lifestyle for someone that is in charge of a single primary school in northern Thailand. He is definitely pilfering the public fund and things like this AI teacher allows him to do it easier.

I don't know what he is reporting to the government who are probably also on the take, but I would imagine that he takes the salary allowance for foreigner teachers and then simply says he hired some and in the meantime the computer teaches the kids.

I wouldn't have much issue with this if the AI was actually accomplishing something but I really think that it is holding the kids back even further than having a teacher that was out at the pub until 1am the night before. The AI makes mistakes, especially when it comes to understanding the spoken responses that the students make. A Thai accent in speaking English is quite difficult to understand at times and when this system is likely looking for an American or British accent, it often just tells you that you did it correctly when the student in question wasn't even close.

I don't butt in and try to reprimand anyone because my worlds would be smiled at and then nothing would change. Unfortunately I don't really think that the administrators actually care if the students are learning anything. It is not possible to fail a grade in Thailand. Even if you know nothing and are getting dumber each year you will be passed along to the next grade.

But now, because AI is so new and exciting and there appears to be a large group of people that believe it to be the solution to anything, anytime there is a lapse in actual teachers they simply plug in the computer and have it do its thing. I think the students were at first quite ok with this because they just go mental in the classroom and the Thai teacher is basically just there for crowd control.

Now any time some teacher leaves or does a runner (collecting their salary for a month and then just disappearing over a weekend and never returning) the admins just roll out another computer.

At the moment there are only 2 actual teachers at my school of around 500 students. Me and an Australian girl who I'll be honest, likely will not make it to the end of the term. I can see it in her tired eyes that she is not cut out for this, few people are. When she does leave I already know what is going to happen. She will not be replaced.

I suppose from a purely selfish point of view this actually works out in my personal benefit a great deal but there are times I look at how most of the students aren't actually learning anything, and I feel kind of bad about that.

I think that AI and computer technology is a great tool for many things, but using it for teaching Thai kids English is not the magic bullet that I believe that headmaster thinks it is.

They are going to replace a ton of human workers with this stuff and seriously regret it later on once it is already too late to do anything about it.