Ministry Of Edutainment
By Oracle
Anne is trying to renew her paperwork for her new contract in the teaching industry. The powers that be have deemed that teachers now have to present themselves for an interview at the Ministry of Education along with all the originals of their qualifications, so that they can ascertain that the person presenting the qualifications actually owns them. Ok so TIT, let's just get it over with.
After 4 weeks of travelling back and forth to the labour office and Suan Plu, Anne figures this shouldn't be any worse. How wrong can you be!? 4 weeks of stuffing around to get a visa in your passport, 4 weeks of going to Suan Plu with the Thai recruitment staff from your new school who the Immigration staff know well!
So finally Anne has to be taken out to the Education Ministry to meet all the best educated lateral thinking Thais in the country, I mean they must be pretty good to be working for the Ministry of Education Mustn't they??
She is ushered into a room to be interviewed by a senior official of the Ministry. While waiting Anne noticed how little the staff in the Ministry were actually doing, not unlike any other Government office here. So a burly middle aged Thai woman enters and starts grilling poor Anne about her qualifications, asking her silly questions about teaching, knowing full well Anne's resume shows 8 years of teaching in various Thai schools.
The part that upsets Anne most goes something like this:
"Why do you ********* come to Thailand? Why do you want to work here and send money home? It's not fair on Thai workers is it? We don't need you here in Thailand, Thai people don't really need to learn English anyway. What good is it to them? All these students pay money to learn English and then go back to their villages and never use what they learned, so what's the point? Maybe you should go home, you have been here too long."
In amongst this was personal questions about her relationships and life, none of it any business of this twisted old woman on a power trip 🙂
(The fact that there are thousands of Thai workers in places like Taiwan seems to be irrelevant when a Thai thinks he / she has a great new argument. Pity help them when they do actually enter the world stage!)
Back to the topic, fast forward a year and what is the latest to come out of the Ministry of Edutainment? We have decided that Thai people need to learn English more aggressively in order to deal with the rest of the world!
One wonders why real qualified teachers bother going through all this when there are so many unqualified teachers working full time with little fear of being found out.
Stickman says:
Strange, I have never heard of anyone having to go through an interview like this. I guess the school where Anne was employed must have had a few issues with the Ministry who wanted to check things out.
