Article

[Ladphrao]

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Hipsher-Interna...alManagers.html

[The Dan Sai Kid]

IMHO, it's not just foreign teachers who need to be trained in the culture of the country. I believe that the indigineous staff should receive training in appropriate ways of dealing with foreigners. I

I've worked in some schools where the farang staff were resented because of the higher pay scale. It's not the farang's fault that they can make more money. Surely people know the score before they come to work in these places.

And, to balance that, I've also worked in schools with fantastic Thai staff that were were treated like sh1t by some farang staff.

[PeaceBlondie]

IMHO, it's not just foreign teachers who need to be trained in the culture of the country. I believe that the indigineous staff should receive training in appropriate ways of dealing with foreigners. I

I've worked in some schools where the farang staff were resented because of the higher pay scale. It's not the farang's fault that they can make more money. Surely people know the score before they come to work in these places.

And, to balance that, I've also worked in schools with fantastic Thai staff that were were treated like sh1t by some farang staff.

Agreed. Thais don't generally know how to deal with farang. They have no concept that, for example, I was spending 80,000 to 100,000 baht per year to see my family and get visas, and that several English teachers who were native Thais made more salary than I made.

I don't doubt that some farang have mistreated farang staff. I shouted at my boss one time, in the staffroom, when she totally failed to do something that was essential to my staying in Thailand, and I probably lost a lot of brownie points for that outburst. What I said wasn't so demaning, but the volume of my voice made me lose.

[Buki]

It does pay of to learn the culture of your employer and the employer must also learn the culture of his/her employees.

I used to work with a Korean Manager (koreans employers are known to be slave drivers but are generous to their employees) back then, we had a very harmonious working relations because he made an effort to learn how my people worked and me and the staff have to learn his culture as well. He appreciated it very well and in returned treated us fairly nice. It was really a symbiotic relationship with management and the faculty. We provided what the teachers needed and the teachers must deliver that desired service to our clients. Even, our native speakers worked well with management. I think it really depends on what managerials styles to adapt.

We always have orientations with new staff about cultural behavior of our clients and our employers, making the lives of our staff a lot easier dealing with foreigners and my boss orients the students and foreign staff with the culture of my country so they would know how to fit in. It really worked well for my school though.

Though the usually faculty politics are inevitable. People talk about people and I hate that very much.

there was something in the article expressed the need to learn the language and the culture for us to understand English much better and gives us a better way in teaching it to them because of our acquired knowledge of their language. Their sentence patterns that are in different dialects are different around the world and it does help to know that difference. For us from the Philippines, Malaysia and some neighboring countries find it easy to learn English since our local dialect sentence pattern is similar to the English language. So countries like korea, thailand, china and among others have different patterns and it would take some time for them get used of mental translations. We would know that also when we try to speak thai and it is difficult for me because of the patterns. Aside from that, there are different categories of politeness in languages, unlike in English we can either use "please" or some degree of polite words but in other countries, there are actually words and phrases that could be considered polite, most polite, rude and most rude. With that knowledge we can explain to them cultural difference and they would learn from it and would appreciate you very well for taking the time to learn their culture.

I think being a foreign teacher does make us worldly individual, because we are continually learning from our students and does bring us a better perspective about the world we live in.