Cat and mouse: Thaksin torments the Thai government

Ousted PM Thaksin Shinawat is playing mind games with his deposers. He’s traveling all around Thailand and being very public about it. The coup squad are doing their best, but the aging bunch now in control are struggling to keep up with the master manipulator. They have smartly set up a special group similar to the ICAC in Hong Kong to investigate the assets of Thaksin and his henchmen, but it’s taking time to build a concrete case, not due to lack of offences but simply of how purposely covert and obfuscated all Thaksin’s acts of patronage and embezzlement were. Thaksin's behaviour has suprised or confused somepeople. For my part, I always knew his ego was too big to accept defeat or acknolwedge his crimes against the people that choose him to serve them.

With the folk in the north still under his spell, the interim government really have a task on their hands. Better news lies in the terrorism riddled south of Thailand. The interim PM has taken massive steps by publicly apologizing to the people for their treatment under Thaksin, and legal measures have been taken to assist unfairly charged suspects and blacklisted teachers in the area. A few maniacs continue to kill innocent people though, despite losing some of their hysterical reasons to do so

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Tomorrow I’m doing a one day visa run to Cambodia. It’s part of a process to basically go back to square one in terms of applying and acquiring all the documents to make me a legal teacher. Anybody who switches employers has to do this.

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....and the students go marching in..................

Today – as with every Friday – the students in my school did their marching duties. As part of school discipline procedures, all students (in nearly every school) must stand outside for the national anthem, say a prayer, and work up a sweat by marching. I was walking past the masses of kids as usual when they started doing their chanting. Suddenly I started having flash backs of football matches. Images of Southampton playing Man Utd, Liverpool, and Arsenal came flooding back. I couldn’t figure out why. Then I got it: the shouts from the kids were echoing off the school walls. That noise – unified shouting and chanting reverberating round – was the first I had heard since my football days. Sounds are second only to smells in triggering nostalgia.

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“The Departed” starring Leonardo Di Cpario, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson is great. It’s based on a Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs, but this western version is better. It’s a definite break on the Hollywood slump.

Canada high performance strategies

Sport Leader Dr. Peter Davis Joins Canada's Own the Podium 2010 and Road to Excellence Initiatives@Canadian Olympic CommitteeFormer Director of the Coaching and Sport Sciences Division for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) Dr. Peter Davis is joining Canada's winter and summer sport technical initiatives as Director Sport Science, Medicine and Technology. Davis, who will be based in

Kindergarten flop?

I thought I knew a lot. Not everything, but a lot. Now I'm wiser.

Teaching Kindergarten has forced me to throw all my plans out of the window. When I first came to Thailand, I was trained to teach adults. I then got a job teaching big classes of teenagers and I slowly learned to adapt, big time. Now all that experience counts for nothing as once again, I'm back to square one.

KG kids don't listen. Not because they are rude but because their concentration spans are so short. They don't respond to verbal lashings because they don't really understand what you're mad about. They do stuff - stuff like calling you over to check the answer to every question on a worksheet - one at a time - because they need the security of you saying "yes, well done" every minute. And of course, they don't sit down when you tell them to, they have energy and they need to burn it.

I've fallen back on a few tried and tested bribes. I give out stickers to good kids, I play hangman, all that stuff. It's hard though, my school has made me a math teacher and the mathematics department has no resources, and my own self-produced worksheets have to be sent to the head office department to be approved. It makes for a rough ride right now.


Dylan is also on full throttle right now. Inside three weeks he has begun to walk , point, and speak "Da, da". His brain is so stimulated that he wakes and sleeps all kinds of crazy hours. I'm not complaining though, it's a joy to watch him on the move.

After my mistake of buying a fake Chinese mp4 player last week, I've invested in a Samsung YP2. The reason for this being that it supports ogg vorbis. A lot of people don't realise just how poor quality mp3 and wma (the former, especially) can be. To any music fan, I strongly recommend ogg vorbis . It matches aac (the imusic, ipod and mp4 format) and it's non proprietary meaning it doesn't use the evil drm and it doesn't make money for greedy corporations. You can use ogg vorbis on your favourite media player and encode CDs just like you do with mp3 or aac, just check here.

The same group also make a lossless codec for those who want to back up or copy their CDs onto their pc. You could do this with mp3 or aac but the sound quality is a lot lower because these formats actually discard a lot of the information from a music CD, it makes for a smaller file but much lower quality, the sound is ok on a portable but can be gruesome when played on a powerful set of speakers.

I had plans to write more - about the illusion of Thailand as paradise, an illusion that befalls many newcomers , and how that can change to manic depression for some over time - but it will have to wait. Dylan calls, or rather, he wails.

I'm thinking of strarting a seperate blog to unleash all my political urges. I'll make it separate as it will no doubt be controversial to many, and I don't want to lose friends. I've been planning to wrie a piece on PETA for some time.

All Thai schools are not the same....

So in Thailand, there are four types of school. Now that I’ve worked in all but one of these different types of establishments, I feel I’m qualified to make some comments.

Government schools. As you may expect, government schools tend to be the least equipped. Class sizes are big – often in excess of fifty students per class. Some of the better schools in this group can offer modern classrooms and a decent salary though. Beware; many government schools have very old fashioned teachers and attitudes to foreigners.

Bi – lingual schools. Just like where I work now. Bi –lingual schools are usually modern in architecture and attitude. Facilities are good. Plenty of employment opportunities exist for foreigners here though salaries are usually not higher than the better government schools.

Private schools. These establishments usually exist on high streets and in shopping malls. They provide tailored lessons in private classrooms. They usually have a high turnover of staff and pay pretty low rates but they are a good source of temporary or part time work or a good start for new teachers.

International schools. For the real teachers, It’l schools provide a high salary. Most of them expect applicants to have a legitimate .degree in education. Needless to say, they have high expectations in terms of work rate and performance. Thai International schools still have a surprisingly high turnover of staff.


I don’t want to name names. Anyone spending more than a day outside tourist Bangkok will find at least one example of each of the above establishments. If you are really looking for work it’s best just to drop in. make sure you are dressed as a worker and not a tourist though. I know from my days of head teaching that appearances mean a great deal to Thai staff.

Right now I’m working in a bilingual school. I’ll provide more details on everyday life there soon.

The first day

It was 0530 hours, I was the most scared I had been in years. My hands were shaking, I had not slept all night. I could feel my stomach clenching. What was my fear? A fight to the death? A meeting with the underworld? No, it was my first day teaching Kindergarten.

Sure I had taught teenagers, but they were teenagers. They could be controlled with voice, actions, and expressions. They had some idea of learning. But Kindergarten????!! You’ve seen the movie Kindergarten Cop, right? And I was teaching mathematics, never done that before. And I was being observed, observed by someone who knew about teaching maths in Kindergarten!!!!

So the nerves grew until I entered the classroom? Then I saw how small they were. The day did indeed see casualties – one kid left screaming after his friend stuck a pencil in his ear, another kid wet himself and one girl started to howl as her mum left the school. But somehow we all made it through.

Oh, and my new school is very nice. Now I work in bi-lingual school, I can make some comparisons and give more details of teaching choices in Thailand. I’ll do that when I have more time.

Crime and safety

No I have not left the country, or lost interest. I've had a rare thing known as a holiday, and well deserved it was too.

I start work next week in my new job. I've discovered I'll be teaching kindergarten kids, which is not my idea of full time work. Still, with everything I've been through work -wise in the last few weeks, I just want to get my head down and stay out of hassle for a while.


My old blog was actually getting popular. My new one is still a secret. If you know anyone or any site that might like some inside information on living in Thailand, please let them know about me!

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Crime in Thailand

People planning to visit Thailand for the first time often ask me "Is it safe?" "What about malaria?" "Is there a lot of crime?". It's not an easy set of questions to answer. My usual response to the malaria thing is to point out there is far more chance of being hit by a car in Thailand than catching malaria. It's the fear of disease that gets the amount of risk distorted to people.

As for crime, well like any capital city , Bangkok has its share. The good news is that most crime is non confrontational due to the Thai psyche. You are a lot more at risk of having your wallet swiped that being assaulted. The yobs , or hoodlums or mall rats as they are known in the west are different in Thailand. They dress in a way that they see as rebellious but would have them laughed out of any western gang. I'll try and get some pictures for this. In general, they cause a lot less unrest. One of the best day to day pluses of living here is that I can usually walk down a street without having a gang of teenagers putting on a macho show.

It's not utopia though. When violent crime does happen here - it happens big time. I've mentioned before about the vocational colleges and their fighting. It gets bad. The only danger to foreigners though is being caught in the crossfire. Other violent crime can be bought about by a Thai losing face. This often happens in a debate or a bargain at the market that goes wrong, often with the foreigner not realising that shouting or insulting a Thai in public is a big loss of face for them. Employ some common sense, don't let anything get more heated than it needs to.

There have been several extremely violent and tragic crimes here in the last year or so that have tarnished the image. My heart goes out to anyone who suffers. In analysing the events, I noticed that western media, local language media, and local English language media all reported different details. Suffice to say that it does appear that things got personal in every case, none of the cases seemed to be a random attack or short argument. I don't mean to sound cryptic there, but i don't want to speculate or discuss details in any of these events that were so tragic.

In summary, I'd say that as long as you keep your wits about you, and stay sober at least some of the time, don't get too personally involved with anyone too quickly and don't let any disagreements become too public or verbal, then Thailand is a place you can enjoy without any more risk of crime than back home.

The roads though? Aha! That's a different story!

Well it was always going to happen sooner or later.........

My afternoon class has been difficult. It was designed for teenagers but was actually a mixture of adults, teenagers, and a thirteen year old that could debatably be classed as a kid. The lessons are three hours long which is a drag for the keenest of pupils, and the assigned course materials are not the best either.

Yes I know, a workman always blames his tools. I must be honest, I've been doing little to no preparation for these classes, but I honestly believe I've done Ok in the circumstances. I've taught classes like this before and they've been a disaster. Now I'm more experienced, I've done Ok (so I thought) and some of the students like me.

But these two certainly didn't.

Bow and Pye were their names. Both of them had attended one lesson with me before. Yesterday Bow and Pye were both absent. I had decided to play things light, I even got some of the kindergarten kids from next door in to sing some songs for us and lighten the mood, they did so with gusto.

Today I decided to get down to some work. The subject was food - a sure hit with Thai people - and the question was "What's your favourite food?" It went something like this:

The students walk in. They're a serious bunch it must be said. Not my kind of students but you don't pick and choose.

"Hello Bow!" I say with a smile as she walks in. She's not bad looking so my smile is genuine.

"Uh" she says and sorts of gives me a half nod.

"Hi Pye!" I say as the young teenager walks in. "Hello" she says quickly and hides away in the corner.

The other students enter, chat a little, then settle down.

I ask Bow: "What 's your favourite food, Bow?"

She looks at me as if I was speaking Swahili.

"What's your favourite food?" I repeat, slowly.

"Ally wa?" She says to the other students. That's actually a little rude. The other students start to translate but I stop them.

"What....... food ............do...... you........ like ..........to.......... eat?" I say as I mime the act of eating.

"Eh?" she says.

This is an elementary class, not a starter class. Bow must have sat some kind of placement test that did not include "How are you?" or "What do you eat?" Still, it's my job to help her.

I let the students translate for Bow and she responds by burying herself in her dictionary and refusing to look up for anyone.

I turn to Pye. "What do you like to eat Pye?" I ask. I 've been demorilised into simplifying the question by now.

"Huh" she looks at me.

Oh no. Here we go again.

"What......food.....do....you....like?" I'm smiling, but I could murder some bastard right now.

"Ally wa?"

Oh no......I'm stuck in some kind of educational Bermuda Triangle!!

I give up and let her friends explain in Thai, which kind of defeats the purpose of learning English but sometimes you have to decide to delay the entire class for one student or sacrifice one spot to save the class. That's the reality of teaching.

I assigned the class a grammar task in the workbook and nipped to the toilet. As I returned, Bow and Pye were walking down the corridor. They mumbled something in Thai and passed on. I went into the classroom thinking they had just gone to the toilet in a pair, as girls do.

"They've gone" said one of the other students. One who actually liked me.

And....in my best Kevin Spacy voice...."Like that.......they were gone". They had paid for the course, and after twenty minutes decided they didn't want any part of it.

I've said before, a good teacher looks at his or herself when problems arise in the classroom. I can sympathise with the girls, especially the younger one. She most likely expected a teenagers course with fun and games. Now I can do those courses and do them rather well, but with adults in the room, they like to actually, you know, learn stuff. Classes of greatly mixed ages are a challenge, you have to strike a balance and they'll always be at least one who feels the balance isn't right for them.

I must admit, the rather unsociable and slightly ignorant attitude of the older girl didn't help. Some people think teaching is a one way thing, the teacher can wave his Harry Potter magic wand and turn the student into a party animal that speaks fluent English. That's not the case. Teaching is a two way commitment and like anything in life that takes time to learn, you have to be willing to push yourself and make an effort. If you don't want to learn, you won't get far.

So I hope Bow and Pye will give it another chance and perhaps I can give them the type of lesson they want. I honestly feel in this situation I didn't do much wrong, but there's always room for improvement in a teacher, and next time I'll try my best to spot the "I'm about to walk out" student before he or she does a runner.