Graduate School Essay

Well, I got distracted from looking at grad schools and ended up writing this instead. I feel quite happy with it at the moment although I'm sure it needs more revision. It gets kind of heavy-handed there at the end.

Working with Dionne Bensonsmith in the summer of 2008, I created the basis for an educational case study about the Midwest Regional Rail System, which was a plan for a train system connecting states in the Midwest by high-speed rail. Students were to look at the various costs and benefits in terms of Deborah Stone's market model, but also look at the policy in terms of its effect on the community (using Putnam's "Bowling Alone" as background) and the government as an actor (using Lindblom's "The Science of Muddling Through" and interviews with federal employees). I conducted extensive and exhaustive research to prepare packets of information that the students could use to analyze the policy including a comparative history of transportation between Japan and the United States and other packets that laid out possible beneficiaries of the program. It was the most challenging, interesting, and rewarding experience of my life and it gave me the ability to take apart any issue, look at the actors, the motives of each actor, the connection between actors, and predict how moves in various directions would come to harm or help each one.
This detailed level of analysis has been particularly helpful in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language classroom as a classroom is a room full of actors whose willingness to learn is affected by many factors (language ego, personal background, learning history, proximity of holidays, etc.) and the better the teacher can understand these factors, the better he or she can plan and teach each lesson. For the past year and a half, I have been working hard to understand and engage my students. It has been difficult because the Thai educational system leaves much to be desired in terms of student discipline and diligence.
I started working in Thailand at a small private primary school in a rural town nicknamed "Monkey Town" where learning and developing rapport with students was quite fun and easy as they were young, enjoyed playing English games, and I met with them often. After six months there, I moved on to teach almost a thousand students at a government high school in Bangkok. I taught twenty-two classes and met with each class only once a week. The students at this school were a far cry from the last as the students here had grown up and many had started to believe that school was less of a learning institution and more of a place to test boundaries of authority and social norms and a proving ground to show relative power within the community of their peers. In other words, hormones were raging.
Before I started teaching in Thailand, I had written research papers in college about its recovery from the Asian Financial Crisis and its role in creating the Transboundary Haze treaty with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The papers I used for research (especially from the United Nations Human Development Programme) were overwhelmingly positive about Thailand's capability to create a sustainable economy, but when I lived in the country, I started to realize that cultural gaps had led outside analysts create a false optimism regarding Thailand, and the Red Shirts protest that escalated into a Guerilla conflict within the city of Bangkok proved to me and the world that despite Thailand's optimistic rhetoric the large gap between the rich and the poor made the rich richer and deteriorated the poor's confidence in their government. Before I lived in Thailand, corruption was an idea. In Thailand, I got a first-person viewpoint from our school's corrupt director to the underpaid policeman intimidating taxi drivers for a piece of the fare.
I became an English teacher in order to increase my students' access to the international community and increase their chances to become successful and productive members of society who, rather than becoming corrupt themselves and hoarding their wealth, could help create a new educated middle class that would ameliorate class disparities.
It has become clear to me that although there are many foreign English teachers in Thailand working towards a similar goal, I am much more interested in attacking the problem from a different angle, and with a Master's degree in Public Policy, I would have the ability to understand governments and their constituents and some of the required clout to recommend the best course of action for improving a nation or a community's quality of life by improving the quality of their democracy.
Thailand is not the only country suffering from a sub-par democracy. Politicians and the mass media have complained for years about voter apathy, and yet we still employ a first past the post electory system, and our president is elected by a college of elites. The internet and grassroots movements have improved the lot of many U.S. citizens, but lesser-educated, poorer groups do not have the same voice in our government as rich lobbyists. Our primary and secondary schools still rank behind many other nations. If we want to spread democracy to the rest of the world, we have to improve our own first. Because I firmly believe this, because I desire more than anything to work towards the betterment of my country now that having lived abroad I can understand and fully appreciate our strengths and weaknesses, I would like to take the first step towards that goal in obtaining a Master's Degree in Public Policy. From there, I hope to obtain employment within local government or a non-government organization to help the voiceless be heard and improve on the relationship between our people and our government. Thankfully, we do not have violence in our streets, but the divisions we have created in our society and exacerbated through mass media outlets must be addressed so that we can return to prosperity and better maintain peace in the international community by becoming more unified instead of degenerating into a bickering mess.