Motivation

After the incident last Monday, (read the Thai Election entry, about half way down) all of us foreign teachers did go to this Saturday function. If our boss only told us a couple weeks in advance exactly what was going on and could we please help out, none of us would have had a problem with it. The bottom line is that the Thais do not communicate effectively with us. We thought we were going to promote his school simply by showing our farang faces, which insults us. At this meeting he called, he explained everything in a more clear matter. OK, so we'll go, and we did and it wasn't so bad. The kids were real cute, but if we walked out amongst the parents, all we got was stared at, so we hid in the teacher's room until the children arrived to the classes. This whole promotion art contest the director sponsored drew less than half the children he expected.

So this brings me to my next question to contemplate, which I did with my fellow teachers. In the US, private companies give incentives to work hard: promotions, raises, bonuses, comissions. If you work for a government enterprise, you know you aren't going to get rich, but you will trade that with more stability in your job and get good benefits. Teachers in the US resign themselves to the fact that they will never get high pay and they do what they do because they love it. And they are teachers only -- they are not expected to be sales people.

Here in Thailand, it's a hybrid. We have private schools which are, bottom line, businesses out to make a profit. The teachers still make a very low salary. The teachers are expected to do much more than just teach the kids. They are to do promotional advertising for the school and kiss ass to any potential 'customer' who might walk through. And for what? What is their motiviation? They don't get higher pay or a bonus for every new student signed up with the school! Basically they work their fingers to the bone to make the boss rich. This mentality I do not understand at all. In America we all ask, "What's in it for me?" Here, they seem to do it "For the spirit of the workplace." When these two perspectives meet, it clashes and is sometimes ugly, like it was for us. We farangs didn't get anything out of this promotional event held on our weekend. But we came in and did our minimal duty and went home.