The final term of my contract is starting in just over a week and, once again, there are all kinds of mistakes. Well, that I’ve caught… I still haven’t seen my complete schedule, but the part I’ve seen is incorrect.
I took part in a study about grading culture at the University level in Thailand. When my comments were finally summarized to me, I realized how stupid this whole thing is… Like, I felt like I soared out of my body and watched from a third-person perspective as the interviewer made a breakdown of everything I said in order-of-operations.
Then, when this whole nonsense with the schedule happened, I immediately went to work to find out what was happening. You see, I had to send the school my schedule that begins in June way back in March… for some reason, it takes that long to get the schedule information to me.
While we select courses, sometimes those courses get canceled or rescheduled… so even though we are “choosing” our schedules, they never work out like that. Not once since I’ve been here has the schedule I wrote out on a piece of paper been the schedule that pops up on the Registrar’s website. To the point where I’ve had classes overlap, meaning they schedule me to be in two places at the same time (I was blamed for this because my handwriting was too hard to read, never mind the fact that they are called the “Schedule Team” and write all the schedules), I was assigned classes on days where I had physical therapy when I broke my toe and therefore had to rearrange my whole rehab schedule and pay for it out-of-pocket, and I was once even assigned classes on Saturdays, which meant I worked 6 days a week.
I learned with my error with the rehab that once the schedule is posted on the Registrar’s website, that means it cannot be changed because if it’s there, students can begin registering for the class… and we don’t get to see the schedule before it’s revealed to the students (don’t fucking ask me why, I don’t understand it either).
In the few weeks before registration begins, the website for registration is taken offline and made inaccessible while they program in the new schedule. There’s just one problem with that, nothing is ever actually offline, and it’s always hosted through some URL that is currently active because they don’t know how to close it off to intranet only… and it still recognizes all valid faculty credentials as admins…
So that means, knowing what the editing URL is for the Registrar’s website (just based on how basic they are for all of them… meaning the “grading” url is grade dot school dot foreignlang, and the “textbook sales” url is store dot school dot foreignlang), I did some creative Googling and found myself on the closed Registrar’s website and watched them input my schedule in real time.
As I watched them input the incorrect schedule, I got on the phone to the scheduling team and demanded to know what they had sent to the Registrar’s office since they were inputting it incorrectly. They caught it, and everything is fine....
But this is the level of oversight I have to go through every three months. Plus that ridiculous grading system, which is corruption… plus I get paid so little.
I have to begin making exit plans now and unfortunately it’s hard to make plans. Aside from the total whiplash uncertainty of Trump (he’s imposed travel restrictions on many places that I would usually go to get new Visa documents, most obviously Laos, but who knows if that will still be in effect in October, November or December once I have to actually leave the country), the tensions between Thailand and Cambodia are not good and I’ve heard murmurs of another coup. I mean, the legitimacy of this current government is tenuous at best since the party in power didn’t win the election and the current Prime Minister is the daughter and niece of two Prime Ministers who were ousted by the military previously.
My goal was to go to Phnom Penh to do my Visa paperwork, but if the skirmish at the border continues, my back-up would have been Vientiane… but if it’s off-limits to Americans, that means the only place I could go would be Singapore… and Singapore is prohibitively expensive. I looked into it and it’s just as expensive to go there as it is to return to California.
So who knows what the future holds… but big changes are coming. Again.
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