BKKSTAN wrote:Teacher trainees should serve internships as group ''helpers''in classrooms during their schooling,giving more control of the classroom environment and helping older retrained teachers to focus on the new techniques,not slipping back into the ''old ways''!
In my last two semesters teaching, I was given three teacher trainees to work with. Their time working with me was mostly spent observing, but I also helped with their lesson plans for periods of instruction that they were to give. In addition to that, they had to spend time with a counterpart Thai teacher. I met and spoke with the university professor evaluating them for their teaching certification on a number of occasions; she was very sharp and what they are taught is not much different than what we are taught in the west for giving periods of instruction. Has anyone else had the opportunity to actually see what the teacher trainees go through and are taught in order to receive their teaching certification?
Many post-graduate education programmes here in Thailand are very English language intensive, especially when it relates to sciences and necessarily so, because most of the literature is now in English; this was not always the case. For an example, Chulalongkorn University requires the passing of a rather difficult English examination for entrance into their post-graduate science programmes and this will no doubt be followed by other universities in Thailand. Many Thai post-graduate students, especial doctoral and post-doctoral, are sent abroad for part of their studies (just as many are in the west) to conduct research; these students cannot and are not sent if they do not have a proficiency in English or the language of the country that they are sent to. I was in the field on my last trip with such a PhD student who is going abroad to conduct microbiology research, the subject of her thesis.
Although people can come up with an example here and there, one could come up with an unbelievable number of American examples of university graduates and even a number of post-graduate students that have not mastered their own native language and butcher its grammar, with the excuse: “English was not my major.” It appears that I pick on Americans, but it is just the example that I know of first hand and who else can boast of a university that is ‘accredited’ which teaches the earth is only 6,000 years old and man co-existed with dinosaurs?
I do agree that the schools have not appeared to get any better back in the US. Since they did not have ‘advanced placement’ at the time I was in high school, I took a number of college classes in my junior and senior year, because I was not satisfied with how much I was learning. Everything through the high school level appears to be set up for the lowest common denominator, because one must remember that any failed students are the fault of the teacher
(could not possibly be because a student has no drive or interest in learning).
Of course, most private schools are better than most public schools. Is this any different anywhere else in the world, except some of those that are ideological in nature? Not all public schools are bad. Some of the students I had in the public school that I taught at consisted of the children wealthy business owners, high ranking military and police officers, children of MPs and one was even the son of a Supreme Court judge (among my best students); so, public school in this case must not have been considered too bad.
That is the limb I sit on too 
