hotsoup

Went to funeral a couple of weeks ago. Not all of it!! Days and days. Dress smart all black or black and white. Small

gift If you are at the burn, yes have to put a flower. I was excused most of it except for the final day which was 'unusual'! A rather motley crew of close relatives poled up on the river bank and crossed to the motor boat of the Royal Thai Marine Police, which decked out with a few flowers and joss sticks was serving as the hearse. The monk had the remains wrapped up in two old pudding cloths. When we reached the middle of the river the cloths, together with more joss sticks, flowers, a hat and a couple of bottles of Lao Kao were plopped into the river, plus some plastic bags as 'nothing was to be left behind'. Everyone went back to the house and got plastered. (PS. The hearse in my old avatar is Japanese,

not Thai)

Went to immigration a week or two ago, with TM6 'missing in action'. 90 days due early October. She just stamped the 90 day paper for another 90 days til end of November!

Post Office is the easiest. Probably more than the 900/1900 being quoted. In my experience pretty efficient

When we all sit down to eat; wife children, brothers, uncles, parents in law, nieces etc..about 25 to 30 people it is the closest I have come to the French family of my childhood. Many miles away from most UK and even French life now. Of course there are squabbles, but there is an unusual degree of mutual support if anyone needs physical or financial help. My life is not wholly farm life but some.

The only thing in your rather charming story that made me raise an eyebrow (people seem to have taken to writing novels on TV. I already asked if one published 'look inside' was available in whole on Amazon!) is the thing about not raising the children here. I have some experience of this choice and my conclusion is that it not helpful to take the children away. The women don't like it, much, and want to come home; and the grandparents won't be that enthusiastic, either. Anyway if you buy a SEAT, what do you expect to happen!!? How did it get here?! Good luck

Hotels? I once, when young and easy under the apple boughs, stayed in a hotel in Hat Yai that employed more hookers than maids. I think you just do what makes you happy...and never stop 'wondering'!!

Looked at them all. Mrs goes out and buys a Mazda 3. Lucky!

There are a number of stickers Taxi Drivers can buy, usually in green, to attach to their windows/screens in order that passengers do not distract the driver. We were in a pink taxi the other day in BKK and, amongst those forbidding things it had never occurred to us to attempt in a taxi, there was one that was a graphically rendered approach from the rear that was No F*******

Why does every-one in Thailand feel obliged to go and eat lunch at mid-day 12.00?

AYJAYDEE,,,,,,,,,could you please just SHUT UP????? and let me see if anyone has something generalised or not to offer as an opinion???????

no

Charming remark! And I thought from other posts you were a relatively normal human being! Goes to show TV cannot be trusted. I am overwhelmed by the strength of your free spirit! Take care of yourself. My wife has pointed out that it is precisely because of attitudes like yours that Thais are not particularly enamored of westerners !! More rain, but Laos looking particularly cloudy and lovely today. Lifts the spirit

AYJAYDEE,,,,,,,,,could you please just SHUT UP????? and let me see if anyone has something generalised or not to offer as an opinion???????

http://asiancorrespondent.com/76664/thai-education-part-1-ridiculous-o-net-questions/

http://asiancorrespondent.com/76877/thai-education-part-2-test-scores-standards-and-accountability/

http://asiancorrespondent.com/77060/thai-education-failures-part-3-pisa-scores-and-a-challenge-for-the-21st-century/

http://asiancorrespondent.com/78647/thai-education-failures-part-4-dismal-english-language-education/

Good to have that on the forum! We do know all that! As I have tried to stress our children do not go to school to compete with that incompetence. They go to try and be competent in Thai, and that is hard enough; and to grow up in, what is where we live, a medium size town community. They have friends, they speak the local dialect. Belonging is in some respects as important as learning. They say they learn more in an hour on the Internet in an evening and through discussions with us than anything in school! I don't want them to have only a 'virtual' life!!

If a parent could choose among Wales, France, and Thailand for a place to educate his children, it beggars belief that he would choose Thailand. What's more your kids have scoped out the Thai schools to a "T." They know the difference and just how bad the Thai schools are. In my opinion, you should listen to them and put their interests before your own, if you are in a position to do so. If they grow up knowing Welsh language as their best language, they can correct that later. But if they receive only a crappy education, they may never overcome the disadvantage no matter what the optimists posting here believe.

Why does it 'beggar belief'? Have you lived in rural Wales and rural France? In Wales the average age of farmers is over 60. The youth unemployment rate is much on a par withe Spain. Rural France is not that different with the exception that the most profitable businesses are those renting porn videos. In both places the keys are a. to have land and b. to ride on the back of 'tourism', or benefits. In Thailand if you don't work you don't eat. You learn to be independent and self sufficient. Sure there are downsides; but so there are anywhere! And anyway they are learning Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Chinese and Japanese. Probably they can correct those, later? I am/was asking a question that is important to us. I was not seeking offensive comments!!

I've never studied or taught in the UK, only in Thailand, so can only really make comparisons with NZ.

But I would assume that the average level of government/public schools in the UK is much higher than that of government/public schools in Thailand.

A good indicator is class size, as although the Ministry of Education prescribes that classes should only have a maximum of 35 students, some classes have upto 40 or 50. In NZ I think it's a maximum of 30 students and one of the election issues is that the opposition party wants to decrease it further.

Also Thai schools often have a lot more "school hours" than in NZ, although don't necessarily have more "learning" time, due to a large amount of time spent on school activities + assemblies, which means less time for kids to play and have fun. This is often blamed for a lower quality of learning when students are in the classroom.

Many parents then send their kids to tutoring services outside of school hours, as they want their kids to get ahead of the others, as Education is very highly valued in Thailand.

However this results in the students spending even longer studying, with even less time to play, which is again often blamed for a lack of focus during school hours.

As a result, I believe that many classes proceed very slowly during school hours due to a lack of focus from students. Which means that the quality of learning in the classroom is often quite low, and special classes are actually needed in order to teach content which should have been learnt during class.

Also copying of homework and cheating during tests/exams is epidemic in Thailand. In NZ we would often copy homework, although not anywhere near as much as they do here.

But I never knew of anyone in NZ who was cheating on an exam, let alone anyone who was actually caught (admittedly I was in a good class when I was at school, other classes probably did sometimes cheat), however when supervising exams I've lost count of how many students I've caught blatantly cheating, and there were also a lot who I suspected of cheating but wasn't 100% sure so didn't pull them up for it. Many Thai teachers don't even bother to check that their students aren't cheating, and when they do catch them the punishments, if any at all, are usually significantly less than what I would have expected in NZ.

But this isn't surprising, when newspapers in the past few years have featured articles about hundreds of prospective teachers and police officers, who should be role models for integrity and honesty, cheating in entrance and civil servant exams.

However in saying all of this, I believe that good private schools are likely at a much higher level than government schools, and are probably on par with western private schools, yet likely have much lower school fees.

And even simply getting your children into the top streamed classes at a public school can give a level of education on par with western schools. As the students in the top classes usually all have very good study habits and are focused when in the classroom, often more so than your average western schools.

I also believe that with the support and encouragement of their parents as role models, students can learn good habits and not succumb to the vices many others do. By living in Thailand you may have more free time to spend with your children and play an active part of their education and their lives.

OP might want to read what I have been writing in the 'Should we listen to the children?' forum. If you want the children to learn Thai and have Thai friends, then they need to be in a Thai school. If you want to, and can, go home then you need to do it. Regrettably I have come to the conclusion that most schools in most countries are useless; the trick, if that is the right word, is to discover what your children are capable of and who they want to be and go for it!

Good luck

I am so sorry. There was no intention that this thread should aggravate people so much!

Maybe I should have been more explicit! Anyone been into a Lycee recently in rural France?

We did not take the children out of some hypothetically wonderful European education system and dump them in Thailand inwhat many people regard as one of the worst education systems in the world. The children have been to school in Wales, France and Thailand. Arguably the best was Wales. A system which recognises that testing is maybe not the best way to encourage learning. The problem there is that education is Welsh medium. Not the most useful language if you want to be free to move around the world; but entirely necessary if you want to work in Wales. Quite a lot of racism there too unless you are from the 'area'! It is all a bit odd. We had 2 children when my wife was very young. When they started to grow up we thought 'why don't we have some more?' Maybe things have changed in Thailand. While we were always on the qui vive for problems with Luk Khreung, it seems there are more problems now..and as much more with the teachers as the other children. Women encounter 'glass ceilings' in many places; maybe that is what the children are encountering. The little ones say school is stultifying. They say teachers don't care and the Thai children simply play games on their smartphones and galaxies all day. And they cannot read and write Thai correctly either!

What are the class sizes of your children OP?

Well interestingly enough..and not usual for Thailand the P6 class has 19 children and the M2 28. When we went to look at the school in Hua Hin P6 had 55 children!! and the 2 Luk Khreung were perched outside the classroom door.

One does wonder where all the money goes to!? Thailand has proportionately to GDP one of the highest education budgets in the world already. Very few countries actually have a functional education system, regardless of wealth. If you point to a few there will inevitably people who say no, no! The UK, the US have pretty much useless education systems. Some will say Germany, Finland Australia, Singapore are relatively better...maybe. You can always go the South Korea, China route. That may produce better levels of learning in Maths and Science, but they are hardly countries which you would cite as models of achieving either wisdom or well-being. To generalise it would seem that in Thailand there are twin problems. There is pretty much a disregard for learning to think and teachers are so selfish, protected and blinkered they never think either. Maybe some Education Ministry officials could go on a tour of the world before rushing to re-invent Thailand in the same mould?

It is quite well known that Thai family names were not much used historically in Thailand .

One of the children now says she has a problem because she does not have a one syllable nick name! She is called Larissa Everyone says La is a quite common Thai nick name..short for Ladawan or whatever. Not acceptable..what about Sa?..equally common..no! She has Thai names, but they are a bit long!!

Apparently you cannot 'appropriate' a Thai surname unless you are a blood relative +++if you want to create a new surname it cannot be more than 10 letters long!! Well there are rules and rules...what shall we do? And did you know one of the most common names for a boy in Thailand is Benz!!!!! In your dreams??

Over supply of a lot of things in Pattaya. Second only to Detroit as the rust capital of the world

I think you are stuck in August

Move on

#BBCtrending: Irish gay marriage brings Armagayddon

Anyway I thought everyone knew badgers are gay if not hermaphroditic

Have any of you actually been to Kiev?

It is a dump, as is most of the Ukraine. Lot of cotton and potatoes. Putin is naturally worried that Uncle Sam will install some hardware and then it would be Cuba all over again. But never mind, the real powers in the US got rid of the Kennedy family when they started to go AWOL. I guess they can do the same with Obama or whoever comes next!

The idea of a NATO summit in Newport has to make one smile though. Have any of you been to Newport, either? Makes Kiev look like Cannes.

There are many mistakes we make in life that cannot be un-done. Divorce, however is one of the great human inventions. Of course you will lose your house, your children, some part of your income and your collection of Rembrandt etchings (because you forgot them in the attic) when she changed the door locks. But then you were free!..........to make the same mistakes all over again in a distant country aka Thailand

Jihadi problem?

That is the least of Britain's problems.

A country and people that were once a mirror to hold up to people of how to run and organise a society.

Now a bunch of abject retards. Scared of everything, accepting any rules and regulations imposed on them. Spying on each other with more cameras than anywhere on earth. Allowed their country to be over run by peoples they spent centuries terrorising. Corruption in public and private life rampant. Constructed a society where no young person can afford to buy a house. No wonder, though British, we don't live there!!

I have arranged with the Post Office to have him delivered here. All you have to do is, at your end, find an appropriate box in which to put him for transit, with a suitable food supply, Generally speaking deliveries are are made, here on both even and odd days, providing that a.It is not raining and b. There is no OTOP festival in town. This of course limits delivery days to about 10 days a year.Choose wisely.

Who is "him", Mr hotsoup?

I am a mammal with very sensitive feelings, and I demand to be called by my name, ZUMA.

Don't like you as my future daddy.

Go and find your own badger.

Mr Hotsoup? Madam to you...I have my own badgers, already, thank you; and I spend a great deal of time and effort to prevent them being gassed by the British 'Authorities' on the grounds that they have TB, which clearly they do not. On the other hand the pampered cows have a whole lot of debris, icluding pus in their milk. I was naturally concerned that Mr Zuma was going to be homeless. Mr Soutpeel tells me that there are indeed Badgers in S. Africa. I thought Mr Zuma was the president of that countrynot a badger? But black and white, who can tell? I hope you find a quick solution to the 'problem', if that is what it takes My regards s.εξοχότητά του Zuma

Will be very interesting to see what happens. Many supermarket chains are being challenged to investigate their supply chains. Natural Fruit is of course owned by an influential Democratic Party family. I wonder if the soldiers have the guts to take them on?