Saradoc1972

As my favourite drug cop back in Germany put it:

Those raids are like striking down onto a heap of flour with your flat hand; there isn't really less flour afterwards.

Glad those dangerous things are off the road for an afternoon or so. Just imagine the skin rush you can get from the contaminated PVC those thingies likely are made of ...

What on earth are TOEIC, TCT and PGCE? I was thinking I get a TEFL or CELTA, have my degree legalized and off I go.

TOEIC - A test that is usually taken by students from non-English speaking countries when they wish to attend a university in the US/UK etc... The maximum score is 1000 points. The MOE or the TCT is now requiring teachers who aren't from the US/UK/Australia, NZ, Canada or Ireland to take the TOEIC and score at least 550.

TCT - Teachers' Council of Thailand. About 10 years ago they were given the task of licensing all teachers in Thailand, both Thai and Foreign. Some people think that they are inept, arbitrary and corrupt. Others describe them in less complimentary terms.

PGCE - I believe that this stands for Post Graduate Certificate in Education. This is the British term for becoming a qualified and licensed teacher. Just as in the US, getting a PGCE involves a year of studying and an internship during which you are mentored and observed by an experienced teacher.

Cheers.

So I shell out another 100 € and take another English test. Whatever. As long as taking a course is not mandatory.

It's exactly what I said: If you are the authority to issue guidelines as to who can get employed you rely on shiny bits of paper and specify them. CPE, TOEFL, IELTS, legal/business English won't do.

Honestly, they don't know what they're doing to me. It's another test where I will hear: "Did you make a dinner reservation?" with the obvious answer being "Flight 261 to Osaka." ;-))

I have had Uni qualified folk in English at my place. Most do not have a clue and I ''teach'' them stuff. I have no degree but I Know I can perfect stuff.

Did I say stuff, mai dee.

If true, it seems that 'the penny has dropped'!!

Possessing a degree in order to be able to teach is complete nonsense as degrees are complete nonsense!!!

Having a good command of REAL 'English' English and the desire and eagerness to teach Thai children is always going to be far more valuable than having a young degree holder in modern origami intent on getting drunk every night and having a good time wasting the money that his/her school pays him for 'having to teach' those stupid Thai kids (that don't like him anyway just because he shouts at them as he would rather be watching the TV with a can of Leo in his hand).

It is about time that the Thai authorities woke up to these so-called educated 'farang' scammers'!!

"Having a good command of REAL 'English' English..."

It sounds as if you believe that people will do well only if the above is true. People who speak REAL 'English English are by far in the minority in this world among NES's.

Well, I did study law straight at the Queen's University of Belfast back in 1994 for a year, Northern Ireland not being exactly a tourist destination back then. So I ended up in a catered hall with 100 other students as the only non-native speaker (apart from Jonathon from India with whom nobody was sure what he actually spoke),

Let's just say I spoke real English English to a nice level before I got there (stupid TOEFL-thingy 100%, 660 pts out of 660 of 550 required to enter university and 8.5 in IELTS on top where 6.0 would have done) and for the first three months it didn't help that much. Apart from some 10 English, most everyone was from all about Ireland and did they have nice local accents, everyone his very own. Most notably the chap from Ballymena.

I could obviously enough converse with people, you just ran into bus drivers who shouted "santy" at you when hoping to convey that the single fare to City Hall was "seventy" pence.

What I am saying is that you need a moderate command of the language first, and up to there it will not matter so much what teacher you get as long a they've got acceptable pronunciation and can talk English straight, as you don't know where you will end up in life. If you really want to able to speak the language you THEN, after acquiring a vocabulary and sound grammar, need to go where it is used everyday by the natives ;-))

What on earth are TOEIC, TCT and PGCE? I was thinking I get a TEFL or CELTA, have my degree legalized and off I go.

It seems that we are indeed singing from the same song sheet here.

You cannot, however, get a 'teaching' work permit without the possession of a degree (not at the relevant office in Bangkok, any way), and so I wonder just how many people with TEFL/TESOL qualififications are genuinely legit. in this regards.

I worked for over 31 years in the chemical (polymer) industry as a chief chemist. I moved to Thailand and we (my wife and I) built a private kindergarten school. I am now a consultant to the industry.

I wanted to work after I left school and took the part-time ONC/HNC (the latter qualification being equivalent to a part time degree, level wise). The first time around I managed to get a two year teaching license to teach in my own school but the last time I went to renew this I was asked one question "what degree have I got"? "I don't have a degree but have an equivalent level qualification and a TEFL certificate" I retorted .........."next please" was the terse answer to this!!!

Definitely sounds qualified enough to me and I doubt you for instance would not be able to teach yourself new tricks over a good book.

Thing is, comparing educational qualifications internationally is difficult if possible at all. So they look out for a university degree requiring 3 years of full-time attendance. That is probably unfair, especially if you yourself should have happened to train apprentices or something like that. It's still a lot better than in continental Europe where you need to have a relevant degree or vocational training for next to anything or it's the dole for you.

There is already a huge emphasis on grammar here which is mainly taught by Thai teachers, most of them have shocking pronunciation and can't string a sentence together but they usually know their grammar inside out. But what the kids need is a lot more listening and speaking practice, this is where a native speaker is advantageous/preferred. Sure a German, Filipino, Swede or Italian with good command of the English language may well know more grammar rules than a native speaker but, usually, they are not as accurate and fluent as a native speaker.

I have many friends and some colleagues that aren't native speakers and I honestly don't know any that speak fluently without making any mistakes, the same can't be said for my English, American, Candadian and Australian friends/colleagues. They may only be small mistakes but they are mistakes nonetheless. If kids are practicing speaking and listening with a foreign teacher then it is benefical to them if that teacher is a native English speaker. If they are learning grammar then a Thai, Filipino, German, Russian, Afghan, Kenyan or Korean with good English skills will suffice. With fluency comes accuracy, instead of 75% grammar and 25% everything else like it is now it should be at least 50/50 so the kids can actually understand and speak English properly.

I honestly don't know about grammar of any kind in Thailand ;-)) When I get over here I find myself unwillingly falling back to baby-English talking to people and asking myself if I am being polite in doing that.

You are absolutely right in saying that knowing your grammar is not cutting it when you cannot properly string up a single sentence and pronunciation is of the sort that makes your toe-nails curl.

I am not a native speaker and there will be some minor mistakes, like I find myself looking up whether that's "a grasp of" or "a grasp at". If we were talking face to face you would not be able to identify my accent or even suspect I was not British for quite some time (unless I am tired or having that bad hair day).

Point is, that doesn't matter up to a point, if you are really fluent and can give people some speaking practice. School English obviously isn't good enough for that. If I, given my background, or those colleagues of yours make some little mistakes, there will be hardly any Thai kid not making them no matter how many native speakers they find themselves exposed to, short of a full bi-lingual upbringing.

German schools still ordinarily don't have native speakers teaching English and (well, at higher levels at least) that's good enough for most practical purposes. I suppose Thai officials would be elated at that level of English and even pronunciation in Thailand. Then, after mastering a moderate level, it would be time to seek out native speakers, preferably living in a country with English spoken everyday.

I tend to look at our Russian immigrants in Germany. They have beautiful German, just a bit of an accent and sometimes don't know all the proper words and sometimes a preposition is not right. But you can listen to them and it does not strain your ears. Same with my Ukrainian girlfriend, that is genius level non-native German. Then try being a lawyer listening to some Turk presenting his/her problem in German. Hand me those aspirins.

I take on board most of what you have written.

OK, let's look at this from a different angle then - you seem to put a lot of emphasis on the fact that somebody who has undertaken a degree is possibly going to be more disciplined than ordionary folk and be more capable at teaching as a consequence of this.

Don't you think that there are enough people well able to do this that decided to bypass the education route and seek work without having all of these fancy pieces of paper with some important sounding people's signatures on them to pursue something in life that they WANT to do. I doubt that every successful author has a degree behind them. You simply do not need a degree to prove that you can be disciplined in life and can write half properly and proves absolutely nothing to me.

Another thing, this disciplined thing, if somebody studies to be a teacher ie: how to teach foreign children more specifically, even having teacher training in the classroom as well as being taught the best methods of teaching, down to the best seating arrangements for specific lesson types then wouldn't this be a more beneficial qualification than, to give you a real example I came across, an American lady who got an art degree from Nevada University!!

As things stand, she would get a job teaching English in Thailand whilst the TEFOL/TESOL holder cannot, legally, any way.

Please tell me the sense in this!!

I suppose the two of us have no quarrel with anything here. I am not saying someone w/o a degree cannot be the best teacher ever, I am not saying an art degree will prove helpful in any way or with anything at all.

I am holding that if you have a meaningful degree under your belt, you are likely to be a very disciplined sort of person, and to have an academic or abstract view on things. Having gone through university you have learned to learn, for yourself, and that makes the difference. In itself it is not a guarantee you will, then, perform in real life or does preclude anyone without formal qualifications from being as good or better in that field. Just look at all those IT-professional dropouts.

I myself am not a native speaker of English, but having had to actually learn that language and after attending (excuse my Irish) six years of Latin at school I probably have a better grasp of grammar than most native speakers. Next problem would be conveying that grammar in a way intelligible to kids.

Why Thai authorities try to insist on that degree (from what I read you can get a job with just your TEFL) seems to be firstly based on culture (see above) and secondly they probably had it with the non-descript farang taking up a teacher's career to make a living abroad, maybe had too many failures. If as an authority you have to put up guidelines as to who can get employed it's probably the easy way out to rely on shiny papers, although it may be unjust on the non-degree-holding individual.

If you should ever have the privilege of holding a conversation with a German teacher (they are much disliked over here for being insufferable know-it-alls) you will actually ask yourself how anyone with a degree in education can ever be let loose on those kids. ;-))

It seems non white skinned people or people without a degree feel discriminated against. TIT not the west, you can bark all you want, you'll just get tired and realise it's the wrong tree.

That is not my point (if that was a reply to my earlier post). I am German, white, and I hold a degree in law. What I will never be, though, is a native speaker of English; close to it with every single Cambridge University certificate they invented, but not native.

My point is: what's the buzz about being a native speaker?

A white skinned native English speaker with a TEFL certificate and a positive attitude is considered qualified to present the language to Thai students.

Thai people have a perceived regard for white skinned, western educated people with a positive attitude. It's a fact, it doesn't mean it is correct.

If you don't have these qualifications and attributes you will be discriminated against.

Seems true. But what is the deal with having to be a native speaker?

If you have learned a foreign language from scratch you will have more experience at how the language works grammar-wise than that native speaker who never lost a thought about it until his TEFL-course.

If true, it seems that 'the penny has dropped'!!

Possessing a degree in order to be able to teach is complete nonsense as degrees are complete nonsense!!!

Having a good command of REAL 'English' English and the desire and eagerness to teach Thai children is always going to be far more valuable than having a young degree holder in modern origami intent on getting drunk every night and having a good time wasting the money that his/her school pays him for 'having to teach' those stupid Thai kids (that don't like him anyway just because he shouts at them as he would rather be watching the TV with a can of Leo in his hand).

It is about time that the Thai authorities woke up to these so-called educated 'farang' scammers'!!

Well, if you are not cut out for the job you do and on top of it don't like it, there is no way you'll do a good job, degree or not.

But that is not the point why Thai authorities prefer people with a degree, it rather is exactly the boozy native speaker you describe. From what I read they demand a degree to at least have a better chance picking decent people with self-discipline to be an example to the kids, which is important in Thai culture.

Having successfully gone through university education does not automatically make you a better teacher and there may be some "naturals" who at home did plumbing or sth., but with an academic background you have far better chances teaching yourself stuff according to needs and a more abstract look at the language itself. I am more or less talking chances here, whether a bachelor on the films of Tom Cruise will be beneficial for anything I don't now (and there used to be such a thing) but it at least proves you can write a page or two of coherent sentences straight.

I sometimes wonder what's the big deal about native speakers, i.e. why they are supposed to do a better job teaching people their own language seemingly regardless of academic or vocational background.

Myself, I was at one time asked by some church service to teach some adult refugee German. I didn't even know where to start apart from correcting the chap's mistakes (who had got himself a workable knowledge you'd wish for with any immigrant).

If you have really mastered a moderate level in a foreign language, it would then be time to go to a native speaker for tuition or, better still, visit the country where it's spoken everyday. We didn't have native speakers at school (there is an increasing percentage now) and it worked out fine. Some former Soviet Union states I visited certainly don't have them and just listen to the German some people there speak!

If sentenced to 99 years and over not all alarming at all. I do believe in death penalty and dont care if others disagree.

Sent from my GT-I9190 using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

Let's not talk death penalty here, it's beside the point. You will always find some particularly gruelling case where you can get a huge majority of people agreeing to death penalty or a true life sentence (and even then the next equally gruelling case is just around the corner).

Point is, if somebody is facing something like a life sentence on account of three-strikes or even "just" a decade or three in prison anyway (picture yourself being 40 now and then 70 when getting out - it's basically your whole life): what incentive is left NOT carrying a gun and using it to try and shoot your way out or pre-emptively killing your victim? You basically just lost most of the deterrence.

Is it really that simple to have a work permit? Just setup a website and operate in Thailand ?

No it's just simple to work in Thailand setting up a webpage. Doesn't have to do with doing it legally by virtue of having a work permit. Getting that business visa and the work permit (two different things) would entail setting up a company with a 51% Thai majority, employing 4 Thais, and only then you can you employ yourself and have the company pay you income.

If there is no contract, no company, no income and only a website, then who can prove anything?

No, I am not a lawyer, but I have lots of experience (also from similar cases) and in this case, I would not be worried at all. It is just one partners word agains the other and nothing else.

I'll call this the non-lawyer practical approach. The onus of proof is always on the claimant to the point where he can satisfy the court with enough facts that in themselves may not be conclusive that this should be reversed. It will depend on circumstantial proof like clients or who registered the website and possibly correspondence. As I wrote there is actually a contract and a company, as to whether a Thai court will bother with some quarreling foreigners on that basis I cannot say.

As to holding people in the country - this has been done many times by hoteliers stopping non-paying tourists leaving - so with the right "fees" and the right telephone numbers I guess he could do it. The real question is how would this benefit him?

That might be a different case as it might constitute fraud checking into a hotel without intend to pay, i.e. it's mixed up with criminal law here. Whether it's still fraud if you intended to pay and only ran out of money later is again a different story, but as things work in LOS you might be right about the right fees and contacts. Benefit might be a lot of pressure for an "amicable settlement"; most people don't react well to being detained by the police.

The US have the largest prison population the world by a very big margin. By absolute numbers those 6 million prisoners are way more than Stalin ever send to Siberian gulags in the Soviet Union, per capita only North Korea gets anywhere close (although that includes "vanished" people and it can be safely assumed US prison conditions are not anywhere near comparable to both in a positive way).

The main problem is those totally outrageous sentences of decades and more. This swells the prison populance like nothing else. Germany raised criminal sentences around 2000 and we are now at 80.000 prisoners where before it was 65.000 with the same low-ish crime-rate, and the individual states get sued time after time for inadequate prison conditions now.

If somebody is not deterred from committing a crime by the prospect of jail for even only a year or two, losing his job, his home, possibly his family and social circles, threatening 20 years will not do the job.That perpetrator will commit that crime thinking/hoping not to get caught. Most later convicts never lost a thought on what might happen or what they might say to their defense if they get caught.

For centuries lawmakers have even introduced death penalties for some crimes they wanted to vanish, and the only result was executions of people who proceeded anyway.

Europe-wide maximum sentences will range between 15-30 years, normally around 20 years effectively by parole or otherwise. A handful of people in a given country might actually never get free, but that is it. One of the reasons for this is that it is held that jailing up people for good for general prevention is making them objects of state actions, i.e. taking their life away effectively for the purpose of deterring others.

If I read about our good PTC Manning battling against a maximum sentence of some 130 years (this is just ridiculous) I asked myself why he even bothered putting up a defence. Like he would envision to be able to live outside prison after even 20 years of a highly regulated existence inside.

Well, got 35 years (ridiculous!), possible parole after nine years. OK; now we're talking.Thing is, it's all up to the mercy of the state and it's parole board, when a citizen is entitled to laws that will enshrine rights instead of a broad framework that will allow for anything or nothing. And it's that hopelessness that will make people commit suicide. A rate of 43 per 100k is way above acceptable.

Detaining somebody in the country is a rather rare option with civil law. In some cases (don't know about Thailand) this can be done, where the other party is suspected to move assets out of the country. Such rulings tend to be rather hard to come by, especially a personal arrest (i.e of the defendant himself) is only heard of in child support cases or where a party is sued for rendering a personal action, not just paying money.

Normally, legal systems say: we provide a forum, summons has be served one way or the other, defendant doesn't turn up having left the country or not, he's in default. Whether plaintiff can actually get money from the other party is not the problem of the court, especially abroad, and the same goes for a cease-and-desist order. The latter may not be held enforcible anywhere else for either legal or practical reasons.

Two foreigners can sue each other in Thailand, it's not a question of either citizenship, immigration status and in some cases you wouldn't even have to be in the country.

I obviously don't know the Thai provisions on international law but it tends to be what the UN regulations propose states to adopt. Here it will, based on the rather sparse information the OP provided, not be a question of international law, as the subject clearly "touches" the Thai legal system, both parties having formed some impromptu partnership and worked on Thai soil. UN IP provisions might allow for another forum in another country, but Thailand kind of feels right here (don't ask me about IP).

A "contract" in the narrower meaning of the word, i.e. some piece of paper with a lot of provisions in legalese or else, will not be required for this. You have a contract when two or more parties agree on something, a written form or even legalization is only required where the law in question states so. When you march up to a street vendor and hand him/her 40 Baht in exchange for your bowl of Somtan, you have entered into a legal agreement, a very basic one.

The problem here is always, that those gentlemen agreements tend to lack provisions of any kind for the case of the mutual endeavour turning sour, and the biggest problem is proving what was the purpose of what ever you agreed on. Turkish immigrants in Germany do this all of the time and you get a major headache sitting with them in court when they then summon their multiple distant relatives as witnesses to prove s.th. to exactly the same authorities they wouldn't touch with a ten-feet-pole otherwise. (And they are all telling the naked truth which just happens to be somewhat subjective.)

You can have a partnership of sort when you embark on a trip to the country in a leased car among two people, I don't know what Thai law makes of this.

The whole case could, as was mentioned in a post above, go belly-up if both were working illegally. Thai law may not want to endorse that sort of behaviour by granting any party legal recourse (same as in some countries with under -the-table-work), but I wouldn't bet on this. The problem will be with immigration, and unless plaintiff has a lot to gain here that may prove to have been a rather bad idea.

Next problem will be the choice of forum and legal standing. Not being a resident in Thailand any more will in all likelyhood not be the point, there may be provisions for this. Plaintiff is normally supposed to submit his summons to defendant's home address, which may be out of the country. Unless this happens e.g. in the European Union or between states with mutually agreed procedures, this is a major undertaking and quite costly. Failing that, there might be the possibility of a default court where defendant has no address in the country, in Germany that would e.g. be Berlin-Tempelhof.

If a lawsuit is successfully delivered (even by public delivery), a defendant will likely have to be advised to take a stand as otherwise a binding ruling will result if he/she defaults, if the case has any merit under Thai law and is not dismissed outright. This would normally be binding only in Thailand then, but a verdict can then be submitted to defendant's home country to be legalized there, again in court (which is again a major undertaking and tricky if that other courts has problems with legal procedures abroad)

To the point, IF a summons is actually served, the OP should definitely seek legal advice which especially in the case of IP law could prove costly, for otherwise the other side is likely to get what he asks the court for. Whether the whole thing is worth that is best known to the parties.