Archive for the ‘Living in South East Asia’ Category

This interview was conducted by email over the last week or so, with me submitting the main outline and then asking a few back up questions when the main answers came back. My questions are in bold, and the ”back up” questions and answers are in italics.

1. A brief history of your career
This was covered in a recent interview in the BKK Post but here it is again:

I began life in a completely different field—selling industrial equipment and negotiating Joint Ventures in China.  When the company I worked for had a problem with our customer in China, I was sent to Hong Kong to resolve it. 
When the company went under, I was somewhat abandoned in Hong Kong. 

The job market back home was not that good (and my field was very specialized) so I thought I would look for a job in Hong Kong.  A friend suggested I teach English to earn some money to pay the rent.

Before long I was teaching full time and loving it!  I then started opening small schools around Hong Kong.  But after several years I was burned out.  Married by then with a small child, we decided to move to Thailand.  Soon afterwards I decided to pen up a TESOL course.  The main purpose was to find and train qualified teachers for the schools in Hong Kong!  But after some initial success I decided to expand.

2.    A brief history of TEFL International, the secret of its success and the principles behind it

Started out as a Trinity course.  After some differences of opinion with the CE of Trinity at the time, we became independent on 1 Jan 2000.  As a small, newly independent school, I decided that the only way we could credibly tell our students that our course was internationally recognized was to be truly international.  Thus, the rapid expansion.

3.    A list of some of the things that TEFL International does now
 ·         TESOL Courses
·         Volunteer Programs
·         Guaranteed Jobs programs
·         Teacher Training for local teachers (usually through the Thai Ministry of Education)
·         Teach/learn language programs
·         Teach/Intern programs
 
4. Can you give some details of TI’s charity/non-profit status and structure

First of all, we do not need to be a non-profit.  We could avoid all taxes by moving our base to some offshore tax shelter.  And it’s not like I enjoy having all of our accounts (including my salary) available to the public.  But we work with universities and universities feel better working with a non profit than a for profit.  Plus, we do a lot of things that non profits do like real volunteer work and assistance for the less fortunate. 

I do not know a lot about US tax laws (which are extremely complex).  But every year we have to hire a special accountant to do our taxes and submit them to the IRS to ensure we continue to meet US non-profit status. (more…)

Which country is better to live and teach in is always a huge question, but if you love living in Thailand, you probably won’t like living in Japan and visa versa. Here are some reasons why-

(more…)

The IHT write it, I pass on their wisdom on… Someday I will reach TEFL enlightenment and all that will be in reverse!

First of all, the rather odd and sometimes insulting nicknames that Thais give their kids to keep them away from the attention of jealous demons:

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/america/name.php

The subtext here is the hatred of foreigners and all things foreign that can sometimes lie behind the Land of Smile. It can be healthy sometimes, like the way the Thais seem to be reclaiming Kao San road in Bangkok from the unwashed backpacker types and are starting to pay more attention to their traditions, but the sudden awareness of this feeling is perhaps the biggest “wait a minute, everything is the opposite of how it seems” shock moment long term residents in Thailand are likely to go through.

Continuing the culture shock theme, even New Yorkers who like the idea of wildlife reclaiming the shores seem less than enamoured of the cormorant’s tendency to vomit at the slightest opportunity:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/europe/bird.php

It’s another case of how understanding another culture (human or animal) can only go so far to making you accept it. Sometimes, though, there comes a moment when you realise that something that happens in the country where you are a guest is your business. The Japanese love of cutting down the forest of South East Asia to make disposable chopsticks is one. And for the English, of course, the thing we can’t stand most of all is how people treat their animals. In Japan, that’s whales. And in Spain that’s bulls:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/news/spain.php

As I’m not one of those Englishmen who put animals before people (famously the national association for the protection of animals was founded years before the one for children in the UK), I will finish with something a bit more serious. The Turkish government continues to deny any existence of the massacre of Armenians, even though it was carried out under the Ottomans rather than the modern Turkish state:

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/opinion/edjacoby.php

Not sure why I’m doing a world tour of countries that can’t deal with history like normal adults (Turkey, Spain, Japan), but it does seem to be turning out that way. Should any politicians from those countries be reading, denying massacres is another thing I can’t be bothered talking about (see below).