Thailand Visa Information

A Bad Day In The Life Of An International Teacher – Avoid Making This Mistake Yourself

Teaching overseas is the best way to combine great working conditions with living an exotic lifestyle. But it’s not without pitfalls for the unwary. I’m going to share a little story with you about how an experienced international teacher ended up having a really, really bad couple of days…
When you are getting ready to move overseas, you will definitely want to take a very close look at what kind of visa you need to get. Moving your teaching career abroad isn’t the same as going on holiday. You are not entering the country for tourism purposes, and most countries distinguish between tourism visas and, well, non-tourism visas!

You many need to get a non-immigrant visa, or a business visa or a working visa… there are many names and number designations that are country specific. For example, teachers who are moving to the United Kingdom require a working visa (or a working holiday visa if they’re under 30) but I needed a non-Immigrant B visa to enter Thailand to take up my post here.

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Working at a Thai University

What kind of stuff do you teach at CMU? I teach English language skills - grammar, reading comprehension, listening, and writing, to all the university students who are non-English majors (the English majors are in a separate program). I have students from engineering, general science, biology, foreign languages, accounting, and many other disciplines.
English classes are required for all science and humanities students. These classes cover the first two years of study. As many as 1500 students may be enrolled in a particular English class during a semester. That means that there are probably about fifty or sixty sections being taught by twenty or twenty-five ajaans, each with two or three sections. Some of the lessons involve listening to a tape, and on certain days you can hear the same lesson reverberating through the hallways, as different classrooms play the same tape at the same time, but not quite in synch with each other. Or, you may hear a humanities tape and a science tape mixed together in the air. Charles Ives would have been proud.

Continue reading Working at a Thai University…