One day, I'll find out who to send this to and actually do it, but I feel like I would be telling them what they already know. Cheating is bad in Thai high schools, and it should stop. That's easy. The teachers in the school need to be paid a lot more. Schools could also benefit from new technology and the training to use said technology. On the other hand, the government could also stand to pay its police and soldiers more.
It must be difficult for policymakers to attract foreign investment to Thailand, give kickbacks to their political allies, get paid themselves, and improve the standard of living for a large nation. One wonders what a policymaker does with his or her time on a daily basis. If someone paid me to do it, I would happily try to find out.
Dear Mr. Ministry of Education for the Kingdom of Thailand,
I am an English teacher from America working at a government school in Pinklao. I have worked as an English Teacher in Thailand for almost a year. I am writing today to ask you to think about a cheap and easily-implemented reform to the Thai public education system. Farang and Thai teachers have a problem with students completing their own work in class and many students also cheat on their tests. In the classroom, usually a few students complete the assigned work on their own and then these students share or are forced to share their work with the other students of the class. These students who copy the work scribble down whatever they think they see on their classmates’ papers and sometimes this produces almost unreadable work. It is not good that students do not do the work on their own. Many students play and talk in class instead of listening to their teacher. When handed the work, they have no idea what to do but have no problem copying the assignment from their classmates. Homework is often treated the same way. This defeats the purpose of the work entirely. The work is meant to challenge the students’ knowledge of the subject and to help them understand the subject by practice. Copying is not practice. It is a mindless activity that can and often is done in another class while another teacher is trying to teach another subject. I know that copying is an epidemic in my school because most worksheets that students return to me all have the same errors and I can see students copying each other’s homework while I am trying to teach. The worst part is that the students in the class who let students copy their worksheet are often not the smartest or most proficient at their subject, but rather the most confident.
The high school I attended to had a simple solution to this. It was not perfect, but it at least made us fear plagiarizing our work. On every assignment we completed we wrote, “I swear that I neither helped nor received help on this test or assignment,” and then we signed our names. There was also an honor council run by students and supervised by teachers that reviewed cases regarding cheating or plagiarizing work. Any student that broke the code and cheated on an assignment was sent to this council. Again, it was not a perfect system, but it did help to show students that the school was serious about students completing their own work. If the government implemented a system like this for its schools it could help to improve the education and discipline of students at little cost.
I think the Thai education system could also use a union or a ministry to control or standardize what Farangs (foreigners) teach, but I think that would be more expensive than the aforementioned "quick fix."
-I'm goin' back to lesson planning
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