My 100th post! I would whoop-de-doo a bit, but I am still bushed from the weekend. Saturday and Sunday, I had the tests for my teacher certification. Well, they had me. Here's what happened....
As you know, the Thai government has now decided that all teachers need to have their official okey-dokey certificate to teach here. Wonderful! Although this seems aimed mostly at we foreign teachers, there seems to be a shit load of Thai teachers that don't have anything like that either.....Hmmm, I say. Upon hearing that I need this thing, I decided to study up on what I needed to do well on it. No one, including my wife has been able to get any concrete info on what material they were going to use as reference for the test. Roong called the people that SHOULD know, and got nothing. So, all I could do was hit the internet, and re-read my TEFL course, and hope.
The tests consist of 4 sections, each section has 150 questions, 600 questions total. What they seem to have done, is just translated the test they give the Thai teachers upon completing their education degree. There are a few, shall we say, quirks on the test.
First, it is geared for Thai educational practices. Nobody that is not Thai is going to have any familiarity with these. Things like "where religion should rank in importance in a child's education". I am from St.Louis, how the hell do I know where Buddhism should rank. We didn't have religion forced on us in school. There were also a lot of questions that asked how you would solve specific real problems facing Thailand's educational system.
Second, if you are going to construct a test for English speaking people, then please have somebody that actually knows the god damn language write it! 20% of the questions made little to no sense. Sometimes you could get the general idea of what they were looking for, but too many times the whole Q/A made absolutely no sense at all. Oh, and along with that, you might also what to get a wild hair, and actually have people that can speak English giving the test. Any question that was asked was answered with "Mai loo" (I don't know). They couldn't tell us when the results would be ready, how we would get them, etc. Although, in their defense, I did find one nice lady that was pretty sure that she knew where the restroom was.
There's more, but I am too tired to rant any more, so I will just finish the story... What I knew, I knew. What I didn't know, I had never heard of before. Out of each section, I am guessing I was sure on about 50 questions, and had a fair chance at another 20 - 30, but on the rest I was clueless. We need to have a 50% to pass. There is no way in hell I will pass it. Yanno, I also found it strange that they consider 50% a sufficient teaching caliber.
One of the other teachers taking the test found some interesting data concerning the first time this test was given. Such as the fact that no one passed the 2nd section, things like that. It seems that the test was too hard, so they re-did it for this next session. Well, it seems that I will have to take these damn things over again. I have 3 years to complete this, so I am hoping that in the mean time, I can find the material to study for it. The only sure way is to spend 70,000 baht and take the 8 month teachers course that some of the Universities offer. This country gets enough of our income as it is, so I am not jumping on that option just yet.
The bottom line is that out of the 40 or so of us that took these tests, I may have hear a few say that they were pretty sure that they passed 1 or 2 sections, but no one was claiming that they passed all of it. We all talked together quite a bit, and there were some pretty damn intelligent people there, all of whom were voicing the same frustrations. My head hurts, good night!
