Thailand: A Visit to Krabi Elementary School

Recess at Krabi Elementary
Originally uploaded by Tatsu2.

On the taxi ride into the town of Krabi, Luce pointed out the local elementary school to me. I guess all those years of teaching really did something to me because the pull was irresistable.

The next day, I was up at the school, armed with the few documents I brought along proving my background as a teacher, speaking with the staff to see if it would be possible to arrange a tour of the school in exchange for perhaps a guest teaching appearance by me.

Much to my surprise (as security is particularly tight in Japanese schools these days following several horrific incidents of random people walking in from off of the street and killing/injuring students and staff), nobody seemed to need to see any documentation and they seemed perfectly willing to take me at my word that I was indeed a teacher. As luck would have it, I had come on the day before the school's big Sports Festival, so there were no normal classes to visit as all the students were busy practicing and preparing for the next day. One of the teachers, however, was kind enough to give up her time and take me on a grand tour of the school right there and then.

The school that I visited happens to be somewhat unique in that half of it is a standard government run public school and the other a semi-private charter-like English/Thai bilingual pilot school.

The bilingual school is quite fascinating in that the bulk of instruction (and student guidance!) for the students appears to be provided by homeroom teachers hired from Western countries. All classes (except for Thai) are taught in English. Many of the foreign national teachers do not speak much Thai and have little to no knowledge of how things are done in the Thai school system. Therefore, as might be expected, they bring to their classrooms Western assumptions about class management and are allowed to act on these assumptions with virtually no interference from native Thai teachers. The two foreign national teachers who sat down to speak with me that day seemed to see it all as a Thai experiment in importing Western schooling methods wholesale into Thailand and seeing how kids turn out.

The bilingual school has maximum class size of 30 while the standard government school has up to 50 crammed into one class. Yet, according to the two teachers (based upon their experience doing periodic teaching visits over to the government school side), the government school students are much more disciplined and respectful.

Why is this so? The two speculated that part of it could be related to the relative-affluence of the households students were coming from. The bilingual school determines admission based on some type of aptitude entrance examination administered in kindergarten and requires that parents bear part of the financial burden for the tuition. Students therefore tend to come from wealthier families that can afford both to provide the tuition and the support necessary to pass the entrance examination in the first place. My two new teacher friends (Let's call them Mr. A and Ms. S) reason that this accounts somewhat for the higher incidence of "bratty" unruliness within their classes (when placed into comparison with what they've observed in the government classes).

This said though, the parents of the bilingual school students are for the most supportive of the Westerner teachers and willing to go along with pretty much whatever methods they choose to employ in their classrooms.

As students in the bilingual classrooms come in speaking virtually no English, I suspect that probably another reason for the unruliness is just the plain frustration at not being able to understand what is being said to them that I think probably happens anytime you immerse a child in a language not their own.

Yet, despite the difficulties the teachers spoke of, the English the students speak by their 5th year (as deduced from looking at short stories they had written which were posted on one of the walls of their classroom) looked pretty impressive to me. Ms. S however seemed to be somewhat concerned that their relative skill and comprehension levels in subjects such as science, math and social studies were not on par with their peers who had received their instruction in Thai.