October 25th, 2005 | The lowdown by Aliwyn Cole

Teaching English on the Beach.

I work as an EFL teacher at a private language school in the province of Chonburi. My school offers business and conversation classes to adults on an evening, and extra curricular classes to children and teenagers on an evening and weekend.

I initially applied for a job as an English teacher via a recruitment website for EFL teachers. I remember the advert well. It advertised the school as being in a beautiful tourist location near the beach, with accommodation provided, and four weeks paid leave per year. It sounded perfect. I applied for a teaching job, was later offered the position of Business English Teacher, and so I was on my way to Chonburi.

Chonburi is located along the coast, in between Bangkok and Pattaya, and is an ever-developing metropolis of factories, shopping centres, and schools, springing from an affluence of investment in industry and education. High grey condominiums and factories are relieved every so often by Thai and Chinese temples. Perhaps the successful economic development of this area can be attributed to the renowned Chinese business sense of many of the families who live in this area.

As a result of industrial and economic prioritization, Chonburi is a busy place. The congested motorway, Sukhumvit Road, runs through the centre of the province like an artery vein, and the air is thick with carbon monoxide from trucks, buses, and the weekend traffic to and from Bangkok. There is a beach, but both my accommodation and the school were nowhere near this beach. In fact, getting to the beach involved a forty minute ride along the potent motorway on an overcrowded bus, or on open-air pick-up trucks, which serve as taxis. Instead, I was plonked in the heart of an overcrowded suburban area. It was directly opposite the school, so getting to work was easy. However, that was it. No one here spoke English, and was prone to stare at one of the very few foreigners in their area. Getting out and about involved a lengthy walk down a maze of unlit streets, or taking a motor bike, which was difficult due to the language barrier, and the fact that every time I took the bike, I was asked for much more money than it should have cost, according to the Thai teachers at my school.

My accommodation was a small room in a house with a large family. They were very lovely, and meant well, but I was also something of a novelty in the household, and so would get in from work to be smothered with questions from yet another family friend, wanting to interrogate me as to whether I ate spicy food or not and where I was from. My white skin would be admired, and my height and build would be commented on, being of typical Western height and build rather than tiny like so many Thai people.

My first week at my new school was a tough one. I was to teach twenty five classes of fifty minutes per week. There were no set texts or resources, so I was responsible for devising my own syllabus. Each class contained between thirty and fifty students- if they turned up, that is. I discovered that the students, most of whom were hormonal teenagers, didn?t really want to learn English. All they wanted from me was a stamp on their attendance card. Once they had secured that, they would attend to their mobile phones, or look in mirrors and plaster their faces with white powder make-up. Punctuality was literally a foreign concept to many of the students, who would arrive as much as forty minutes late for their fifty minute lessons.

I imposed some new rules: students arriving any later than ten minutes for class did not receive a stamp on their attendance cards, and mobile phones were not allowed during class. I, in return, provided them with hopefully a slightly appealing and motivating lesson, using resources from education websites, magazines, and music. Management didn?t seem to care what I did, as long as I signed in on a morning, and wore the assigned tight acrylic uniform they provided, which was so tight that I found it difficult to lift my arms so as to write on the whiteboard.

As I mentioned previously, my contract stated that I was entitled to four weeks paid leave. What I wasn?t told, until a week before the summer holidays in April, was that the holiday actually lasted for two months. I also discovered that there was an additional three week holiday in October. Two months sounded like a great length of time to be on holiday, but what was I going to do for money?

In fact, there were many solutions. As is always the case, prosperity clears the way for improved education, and so Chonburi has a plethora of fairly well-paid English teaching opportunities. Adults, wishing to climb the rungs of the ladder of promotion, enroll in one of the many business English courses on offer. Parents, concerned for their children?s financial future of opportunities, register their children into weekend classes or holiday camps. Schools vie for the custom, each one advertising their course as the best, and offering tuition from native English speakers. Competition is tough, and so keen are the schools for native speakers, that often experience and certificates are not important requirements, as long as the passport verifies that English is the native language. I discovered that as a female applicant, I was an added bonus as a teacher for the schools. Female teachers are highly sought for teaching young learners of English. Thailand has a very traditional view of male and female roles, and so parents prefer their young children to be taught by women. I applied to a few private language schools, and secured my present employment within a week.

One and a half years later, and rubbish still litters the pavements, dumped without so much as a whisper of guilt for what it looks like in the overall aesthetics, or what it represents to the higher consciousness of global environmental degradation, in a time when the future of the environment, and therefore the human race, is of major concern. Cars continue to race along Sukhumvit Road, some with black clouds billowing out of their exhausts. However, on a personal note, things have definitely improved.

I now really do live near the beach, and can walk along the sand at night, after all the tourists of the day time have retired to the many restaurants or bars which make up the area of Bangsaen Beach, within the province of Chonburi. Work? I love it. Why? Read my next article, 'The Thai child in the classroom'.