Hi All,

My girlfriend and I were planning a holiday over christmas later this year but the school has just changed / confirmed the dates. She have been told they are to have October off and not December like the previous year. Is this normally the case to change from year to year? It seems a little short notice for both students and teachers.

Thanks,

Benjamin

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Public-Holid...08-t156175.html

http://www.thaivisa.com/bank_holidays.0.html

Check out both. The rest is up to where you work in.

Hope that helps

You can go to http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Official-Gov...08-t161605.html to get a list of government school "official" holidays.

^However, school directors usually have powers undreamed of at Western schools, so it's not unusual for a director to suddenly decide to cancel a holiday or schedule a mandatory meeting or camp during a 'scheduled' holiday.

You will notice that most Thai schools have Father's Day holiday in December, but not much else. And you get a day or two at New Year's. You may not know until the night before that you have a holiday.

Thanks for all the replies. I have looked at the suggested links and found that they refer to bank holidays or single days off. I`m trying to understand how a school can decide to change a whole month, 8 weeks before taking the holiday. Should I just revert to the "it`s Thailand" attitude!?

Thanks again

^Yup, pretty much. Thai teachers are basically wage slaves and will do things we'd never imagine- I've even heard of places that required them to work every Saturday for months at a time- partly because they can never be fired and it's a safety net kind of job for them.

Many school directors haven't figured out yet that along with the relative ease of letting foreign employees go, comes with a correspondingly lower tolerance for being treated like wage slaves.

I guess as a relative newbie (two years) to thailand and it`s ways I will still be surprised. I was starting to look for flights and organise things. Lucky I didn`t book anything! It`s also canned meeting my parents... never mind!

Benjamin

PB, don't forget Constitution Day, 10 Dec.

Normally Oct is the break between terms. That's when I'd expect to be off.

Welcome to Thailand. This is a little too common. I work in a school with a lot of foreign teachers, most of who try to get back one a year, or every two years.

One year they just cancelled the October break altogether--I think it was the APEC or some convention. We weren't notified until several weeks before. Part of this was the fault of the gov't, which hadn't decided how far out of central Bangkok to change it.

Other years, it's been changed. Try make an airline reservation and tell you may leave on the 3rd or the 5th or maybe the 7th and see what happens.

Almost every year, we have no idea the exact date we leave--it's up to the Director. This results in deductions in pay and a great deal of inconvenience. In all of these instances (except the convention), there are no students there.

This year, I am going back in October and I'm setting a date and just telling them. If they don't like it tough!

One year in early March, the Chair of the Dept. of Foreign Languages was telling me to do something at the end of the month. I said I could not, because I was leaving on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again, etc., because she and her administrators never got me a work permit or an extended visa, so of course I would not be there. I went, knowing I would not work there again.