‘Sascha, you know what is missing here? The ability to think’ That quote of one of my colleagues over here at Udon Thani Vocational College says it all and I couldn’t agree more. During a conversation we had last week we tried to figure out why Thai people would rather spend their time searching for and copying things they find instead of using the same amount of time to think [ Read More ]
As time goes by! The next semester at Udon Thani Vocational College comes to an end and since last term’s ‘cooking adventure’ was such a success I decided to invite my students again to our big college kitchen and cook ‘European food’ with them. Last term we focused on German food (Schnitzel and potato salad), this term it was ‘forza Italia’ time. Pizzaaaaa! Now you might say ‘come on, everybody [ Read More ]
Over the past few weeks I received a lot of mails asking what it takes to teach English as a second language (ESL) here in Thailand. So here’s a short post covering the most important facts and qualifications you need to know. Personal Qualifications: Don’t take this to easy! You really need to be able to adapt to a completely new culture, life style and learning approach. I’ve seen many [ Read More ]
Since my time in Udon Thani slowly comes to an end it is time for a final recap. I already told you more than once that I love teaching and most of my students and I probably will say it again in a final post, however this post is about my college and the education commission which supervises all colleges. I figured that, if I give these complaints in a [ Read More ]
A few days ago I had the chance to meet a television superstar here in Thailand. Christopher Wright is an English teacher who produced several successful DVDs and books, has his on TV shows (Chris Delivery) and an incredibly funny and successful stand-up comedy program (Chris Unseen). I was quite surprised and lucky that he took the time to great me and even had some minutes left to talk to [ Read More ]
During my life in Thailand I meet / met a lot of interesting and fascinating people. This is their place to tell the world what they think about all different kinds of subjects. You will find interviews with students, colleagues, workers, farangs and more random citizens, tourists or friends. Today it is one of our awesome Diploma Level Tourism Management students. She talks about her life in Udon Thani as [ Read More ]
This is a short post about something that’s kinda bothering me right now. It’s regarding my work as a teacher so if you’re more into the travel stuff of my blog, feel free to skip this entry. I already wrote about the fact that many students here at the college, when getting older, tend to forget about their studies and try to take the shortcut instead. While this is obviously [ Read More ]
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a nice party and a lot of fun celebrating into our possibly last year on earth. Like every year, the first day of January always brings a lot of new things with it. So does it this time. Besides many things that, luckily, do not affect me, there is one new rule that bothers me quite a bit. From now on [ Read More ]
During this years North-Eastern Thailand Vocational College Championships I was selected to be one of three judges sitting in the committee of the English speech competition. Besides being the by far youngest judge, I also was the only non-native speaker there. Turned out that the two old English guys and I did have total different points of view on how to judge students and their speaking knowledge. They are only [ Read More ]
Day number 4 of the North-Eastern Vocational College Exhibition hosted by our college. While the upcoming two days are more an exhibition style, the past three days have been all about competition. The North-Eastern Thailand Vocational College Championships 2011 took place and showed some great and impressive skillsets as well as some funny failures and emotional victories. I do not have the time and the ability to write about all [ Read More ]
