gerryBScot

I actually met a priest in AA he was in my home group. We were talking about spirituality and religion one night. the result was Religion is a form of worship. You can be religious and not be spiritual. Spirituality was a way of life. You can be spiritual and not religious.

Yes Big Carl Happy New Year, I met a couple along the way and one in particular who got sober in his mid-sixties was adamant that AA really helped him to understand the real meaning of God for the first time in his life, a surprise for someone who had been a priest for 40 years!

That theory has been debunked, which in itself would not be an issue where it not for the psychological impact it has on people that buy into it.

Pedro you should have seen the psychological impact active alcoholism had on me! If you had, you would agree that AA is a great thing and would be happy that there was no escape for me, because you would not want to be around me if I was drinking.

Only thing that I do not condone in the OP's writing is this 'God aspect'.

Onni I did not utter the 'G' word so you don't know what I think about God and whether or not I condone or otherwise!!!! The 'G' word in AA is a red herring which keeps people out of AA. No one has ever told me in AA that I need to go to church, no one. A lot of people have said I need to find a power of my own understanding with the sole requirement that it is greater than me, a higher power. Many people choose to call that power God or Higher Power but it can equally be a bottle of brown sauce with HP on it or any other embodiment physical otherwise including GOD, Group Of Drunks, so long as you believe it is more powerful than you. The Christian God, the Moslem Allah, the Buddhist Buddha, the Atheist Belief and that of the Agnostic too or alternatively none at can all be transformed by AA spirituality which is quite distinct from the Judaeo-Christian God. AS they say in AA, religion is for those not the way to hell, spirituality is for those on the way back.That's it. As a result of this, many reach the conclusion that AA is a religious organisation, fearful of encountering nuns, priests, rosary beads and weeping effigies and stay away from meetings and sadly a fair few of those pay the ultimate price. Where AA is revivalist is the sheer zest and enthusiasm of the people in it who have got their lives back.

Everyone to their own.

I enjoy a drink, usually go out twice a week to meet up with good friends, and will carry on doing so.

While I respect your choice, I do not see why people should preach to others.

Most 'reformed drinkers' lost control of their drinking, I have not, and neither have my friends.

Enjoy your new choice of sobriety, but let others decide for themselves.

Hey Duncan I want to assure you I am the last person in the world who would seek to interfere with your enjoyment of a few drinks with your friends.

Preaching is the last thing I wish to do, so apologies if that's how I sound. If I am targeting anyone it is the fair few people, myself included, who as you rightly say have 'lost control of their drinking' but who remain steadfast in their commitment to it. I am not a reformed drinker! I am an alcoholic and reform was not an option. This took me thirty years of drinking to accept and honestly it was insanity from the beginning and stayed that way until I signed off.

Have a great New Year and I hope 2016 is a memorable year for you and yours.

If your kids are young it might not matter so much where your children are being schooled at the moment. I'm actually frightened by what passes for education in most Thai primary schools and I don't think it really gets much better at secondary. It really is primitive and I can't see how it provides children with any real basis for continuing education. It's not just the content of teaching, which is at best old-fashioned in any event, but it's also the values that prevail and which of necessity your children will pick up. Schooling your kids in the UK might not be very attractive to you personally but you are doing your kids a wonderful favour. Also there are only really a handful of top class international schools in Thailand, the rest are rubbish and there are undoubtedly better bilingual schools, better in terms of value and also the educational experience.

First of all a very happy New Year to all. I never thought I would survive a Christmas or New Year without getting drunk but in my first year of sobriety I went to a gig in Surrey, south of London, on New Year's Eve into Ne'erday proper, which featured some of the biggest names in rock music who also happened to be recovering alcoholics. I was in a venue without about 1500 others and as well as enjoying the music and revelry we were all celebrating being sober for a new year. Let me assure you a life without alcohol is a real possibility if you want it.

A new year triggers New Year's resolutions : quit drinking, quit smoking, lose weight, get fit etc. Personally I tried giving up most of them at New Year but I never had a hope in hell of succeeding. It was only when I was desperate enough to phone AA as a starting point that things began to get better with regard to my relationship with alcohol.

For those who have survived the festive period in sobriety so far for the first time, be wise to the fact that the month of January is a notorious graveyard for many drunks. Having white-knuckled the festivities and thereafter being confronted with the January blues, many of us succumb. The general experience of most of us is that when we go back out it is much much worse and it catches up with us in about 24 hours, meaning we are quickly back to square one. I have never heard anyone in AA who went back out for further research, come back and say it was better and that they really enjoyed themselves. Au contraire...

The solution: take it one day at a time, get to a meeting and don't take the first drink. It's as easy and as difficult as that. Find like-minded people to talk with.

If you can't get to a real meeting there are online meetings. Go to http://www.aaonlinemeeting.net for details of how to join an AA meeting through Skype. A marathon meeting will be starting on New Years Eve and continuing right through the night into New Years Day. You do not need to be alone.

Whatever, good luck to all with their continued sobriety through the New Year celebration and into 2016 one day at a time.

I would go for it yourself and not underestimate your own abilities. It seems you already command the student's respect. It might be fun if you have the time and inclination to research material for him. I couldn't really advise on contents as it is out of my league but I am sure there will be some interesting online resources. I recommend you look at nrich.maths.org for a start.

To my mind such a relationship will always be inappropriate. A teacher-student relationship has a unique dynamic and I think the introduction of Ugandan affairs destroys that. Consider the implications of pillow talk. Avoid like the plague I say.

There's no rhyme or reason to any of this. You can have a good bachelors degree from a top university, PGCE, QTS but it doesn't guarantee you a job; they certainly enhance your opportunities but there are no guarantees. Likewise you can have the PGCEi without QTS and get into top schools. Depends on how you present yourself and an element of luck. If I were you I would get the home based PGCE with observed teaching practice, secure Qualified Teacher Status and then put yourself into the international schools sector and go for it. It's a slower boat but in the long run it should lead you to the promised land of milk and honey!

I am not honestly sure how useful random measures of blood pressure really are, forget the quality of that machinery. They might be useful if your BP is dangerously high or low so long as you go to see a doctor immediately. However in those grey borderline areas between normal and high when decisions are taken about using medication to get BP under control, I think you really need to monitor it in a slightly more scientific way. So I would suggest a daily or twice daily routine at about the same time, so that you have some chance of comparing like with like and then over a week, say, calculate your average BP.

The scarlet-backed flowerpecker also has a very distinctive rapid clicking call which is usually how I recognise it. It is fairly hyper at the best of times and can sometimes be difficult to actually see.

There is no need to have TEFL or equivalent nor is there any need to be a native speaker. It really is between you and the school. You need to find a school to offer you a job. The best thing to do is get your paperwork organised and present yourself at schools.

Your economics degree should suffice in terms of getting a waiver from the Teachers Council of Thailand, but your employer will take care of that.

However there are many pitfalls and if you scan this forum you should get a good sense of the various stunts you're likely to encounter.

Hi can anyone advise how long Canon's warranty is on DSLRs purchased in Thailand from an approved dealer? Many thx.

Craig thanks for this link. I've just had a shufti and what is so striking from the first few minutes is here is a genuine report about something in Thailand which is working really well and for which Thailand should be applauded. Good news like this has been in short supply in this country in recent years.

Lopburi has already made it clear this is not a uniquely Thai problem. Google Southbank International School in London, charging £25,000 per year for fees, for an example of another horror story. Bear in mind that the UK has some of the most comprehensive screening systems anywhere for this kind of thing. These guys are determined and will find out every chink in the armour and exploit it.

Thanks Richard for that clarification. You are completely correct because Thais never pronounce the final /t/ in percent and beer is always pronounced 'bia' with no /r/.

I think it depends on the words' origins. 'Beer' and 'percent' have both been transliterated from English so the ์ symbol indicates the words need to be sounded. 'Ajarn' is Pali (?) in origin and according to wikipedia is from the Pali word 'acariya' which is how อาจารย์ would be pronounced if everything was sounded. Drop the ย์ and you have อาจาร which is pronounced as 'ajarn' with the final 'r' sounded as an 'n'.

Any good iPhone or Android apps for phonics for older students ?

with many apps they would have sound , but flashcards are not much help if you do not have an English speaker with you and do not know a word or group of words and guess the wrong sound

I would suggest you make a Powerpoint slide show with animation and sound. I don't know if there are apps but I am sure there must be.

This link will take you to comprehensive documentation about teaching phonics including 'how', 'what' and 'when' etc. Worth reading if you are interested

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf

Once you get your kid going other texts I highly recommend are the Dr Seuss books, most of them over fifty years old, but they really complement the phonics stuff and have brilliant graphics.

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How do you teach Phonics to someone who has already gone thru the Thai school system of "parrot" language ,

hear it and repeat it !

As you know the problem comes with unknown words and not knowing how to sound them out ,

Any online material for "students" already out of school that would like to improve

My experience is this phonics system works well with older children too. In fact the older the child the more rapidly they can progress.

Well learning to read is a complex process of associating symbols to sounds. It's a characteristic of language learning that speech precedes literacy. As a native English speaker resident in Thailand I can say for sure that my spoken Thai far outstrips my ability to read Thai which in turn is ahead of my ability to write Thai; and my understanding of what people are saying to me in Thai is ahead of all three. This is a natural process and applies to most people living in a country where they are not native speakers of the first language. In the same way over time your kid will build up a mental store of English words/ phrases /structures from talking with you and whatever English language media s/he hears at home together with whatever s/he learns in school.

Let's divert to an English lesson in a Thai classroom involving a simple reading activity. What does a Thai child do when they come across a word they do not recognise. Note the word: recognise. My experience is that the student will do something like come to an abrupt halt, omit the word altogether or make a wild guess at it. At this point the 'ABC', which all of Thai kids can recite, is useless to them because 'apple' doesn't start with an 'ay' sound as in 'A-B-C-' but with /a / as in cat; if they are able to decode the '-ple' they are likely to pronounce it by using Thai pronunciation rules for 'p' and 'l' which means they are likely to say something like 'a-pen'.

So phonics starts by getting children to associate a letter and then clusters of letters with distinct sounds, to sound out words and then run the different sounds together to make a word. So 'cat', a simple word, is learned as /k/ /a//t/ , three sounds are uttered and then joined together. The idea is that as kids progress they will associate new words they are reading with the words already in their mental store.

Let me give you a crazy example of how effective this has been. My son, six years old, and I were reading before he went to sleep. I should add using a notebook so when we had finished I closed the document to reveal another one, an article I was reading with a paragraph headed 'theoretical background'. He was able to read this, not fluently, but he broke down all the sounds and them put them together. Of course he doesn't understand what it means, but it seems to me that being able to code and encode this stuff is, as he did, a prerequisite to comprehension.

In the UK they are now testing six year olds' phonic awareness. The test includes words that don't actually exist like 'shog and 'chob' etc. I don't agree with this element of it as I think it is pointless to get kids to read words that don't exist but the fact that they are testing ability in this area is indicative of how important it is. I find myself agreeing with the late Chris Woodhead, the first head of OFSTED, the UK teaching standards inspectorate, and it is the only thing I agree with him on, that phonic ability is critical to language learning.

The first thing I would do is buy a set of Oxford Reading Tree flash cards - you can order them online about 1500 THB including delivery. I can also steer you to some online material if you are interested.

Here's my tuppence worth. Phonics. Check out something like the Oxford Reading Tree (just google it or go to its publishers site at Oxford University Press), a compendious series, widely used in UK schools. You can do nothing better for your child than to teach him or her how to read. Nothing has quite the same impact on a child's language development than reading, and nothing has quite the same impact on reading than phonics. Once a child has mastered the ability to read in English they have the foundation for all subsequent learning and academic development. Learn to read, read to learn. I have a six year old son that I have reared on this stuff and my testing suggests he has a reading age of a ten year old old native speaker. I'd be happy to give you specific tips if you wish.

You are a most fortunate fellow to appreciate the likelihood of a premature death if you carry on. The majority carry on and fulfil the prophecy. Proceed and prosper. Good luck.