What Frustrated Me About Teaching in a Thai Public School

First published in 2020, expanded in 2026: I wrote the original version at 23, while I was still inside the experience and very sure I understood what I was looking at. The frustrations were real. What I had less of was context. Five years in Thai classrooms, and years of hindsight after them, gave me a better sense of which problems belonged to my school, which came from the structure around us, and which were simply things I had a lower tolerance for than the people working beside me.

The frustrations were real. My interpretation of them was incomplete.

Years later, I can see more of the system around those moments: different incentives, different expectations about hierarchy and flexibility, students learning a difficult subject in a second language, coworkers with different stakes in the job, and workplaces across Thailand that operated nothing like mine.

Where I was younger was in assuming that the explanation for what I saw was obvious.

I was not wrong about what I saw.

I noticed classes starting late. I noticed students talking through lessons. I noticed grades changing in ways I did not understand, classroom rules being undercut, and foreign staff finding out important information after everyone else seemed to know it.

At 23, I was very good at the first one.

I taught in Thailand for five years, which is long enough to know that being irritated by something and understanding it are not the same skill.

The Clock Was More Negotiable Than I Expected

If a class was scheduled for noon, I expected class to begin at noon.

At my school, that was often more of a suggestion than a guarantee. A 12:00 class might begin at 12:10 or 12:15. A school activity could rearrange the day. Students might still be coming from somewhere else. Sometimes the schedule changed and nobody seemed especially alarmed by it.

I was.

I had grown up treating punctuality as part of professionalism. If a timetable existed, I assumed following it was part of the agreement. So I read a looser relationship with time as disorganization.

That was one possible reading.

Another teacher might have experienced the same environment as flexible, forgiving, or simply normal. The schedule had not changed. The meaning I attached to the schedule had.

Classroom Management Got Harder When Students Could Not Understand Me

Students talked. A lot.

I could ask for quiet, get about sixty seconds of it, turn toward the board, and hear the room begin again behind me.

At 23, my first interpretation was classroom management: I needed better control of the room.

That was only part of it.

I was teaching science in English inside a Thai public school. Some students had enough English to follow the lesson comfortably. Others were trying to learn a difficult subject in a language they barely understood. For them, forty or fifty minutes of English-language instruction could become something closer to endurance than learning.

Of course some of them talked to their friends.

I still wanted them to stop. Understanding the reason did not magically make the classroom easier. It simply made the problem more accurate.

The Grade I Entered Was Not Always the Grade That Stayed

This was one of the harder adjustments for me.

At my school, I learned that the grade I entered was not necessarily the grade a student would finish with. A student could do very little work, submit almost nothing, or sleep through much of class and still end the semester with a passing result.

At 23, I saw that mainly as a question of standards.

Years later, I can see that grading sits inside a much larger system. Repeating a class affects students, families, teachers, school statistics, and the institution itself. I did not understand all of those pressures then, and I still cannot claim to know exactly which ones shaped every decision at my school.

What I can say is that the academic gaps were real from the classroom side. Some students were ready for the material. Others struggled to read basic English. Moving everyone forward did not make those differences disappear.

My frustration was not imaginary. My younger mistake was assuming the policy had only one explanation.

Being Responsible for a Classroom Did Not Always Mean Having the Final Say

One day I assigned seats.

The next day, everyone had moved.

I asked why. The students told me that a Thai teacher had said they did not need to follow my seating chart.

She had not discussed it with me first.

I was furious.

What bothered me was not the seating chart itself. I thought I had been given responsibility for classroom management, and then discovered that my authority could be overridden without a conversation.

I still think that was poor communication.

What I would not do now is turn one incident into a theory about Thai teachers generally. One coworker made one decision that made my job harder. The experience was enough on its own. It did not need an entire culture attached to it.

Foreign Staff Were Sometimes the Last to Know

Communication was another recurring frustration.

I expected some information to get lost across a language barrier. I was working in a Thai institution. English was not the dominant language, and I was the foreign employee.

What bothered me were the moments when important information existed, English-speaking staff knew it, and foreign teachers still found out late.

A schedule changed. An event appeared. A responsibility shifted. Someone would eventually tell us.

Eventually was doing a lot of work.

With hindsight, I also understand that I was standing at the edge of an institution built to function in Thai. I was not at the center of its communication system, even when my job sometimes made me feel as though I should be.

That did not make late information less inconvenient. It did make the bigger picture easier to see.

My Coworkers Were Not Nearly as Bothered as I Was

This is one of the most useful things I can see now that I could not see clearly at 23.

My Filipino coworkers noticed many of the same things I did. If I asked, they had opinions. They could tell you what annoyed them. But most of the time, they seemed far better at letting those irritations remain small.

I do not know why. It would be easy to invent an explanation about culture, personality, money, family obligations, or job security. I did not ask enough questions then to know which of those, if any, mattered.

What I can say is that they had a different relationship with frustration.

The job seemed to remain more important than the annoyance of the day.

That does not mean they were better teachers or better employees. It means that, from where I stood, they had mastered "like water off a duck's back" much better than I had at the ripe old age of 23.

If a timetable said one thing and reality did another, I wanted to know why. If someone changed a classroom rule without telling me, I replayed it. If communication was messy, I wanted the system fixed.

Some of my coworkers appeared much better at deciding, consciously or not, which problems deserved emotional energy.

That was a skill I had not developed yet.

Thailand Was Not One Teaching Experience

There was another problem with the way I thought about the job when I was younger: I treated "teaching in Thailand" as though it described one workplace.

It did not.

I had friends at international schools with very high academic standards, stronger administrative systems, and expectations where many of the things that frustrated me would not have been tolerated.

I knew people working in tutoring centers where lateness was absolutely not casual. Parents were paying directly for a service. Show up late often enough and you could have angry families and a real employment problem.

Other friends worked in public schools more like mine. Some seemed bothered mainly by students who had little interest in learning English and barely mentioned the things that drove me crazy.

Those workplaces had different incentives, different parents, different administrators, different student populations, and different consequences.

We were all "teaching in Thailand."

We were not doing the same job.

Everyone has a different boiling point. What is annoying to me may feel like freedom to you.

A strict timetable might make one teacher feel secure and another feel trapped. A school where plans change constantly might make me crazy while someone else loves that nobody is watching the clock.

The older I get, the less useful I find the question, "What is teaching in Thailand like?" without a second question immediately after it: At what kind of school, in what role, with what expectations?

Teaching Back Home Is Not Exactly Paradise Either

There is also a temptation, when describing the frustrations of working abroad, to imagine that the version of the profession back home is somehow the neutral one.

It is not.

American teachers have their own institutional pressures. A 2026 Learning Policy Institute report found that about one in seven U.S. public-school teachers moved schools or left the profession between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years. Teachers reporting lower workplace satisfaction were also more likely to report heavier paperwork and administrative duties, longer working hours, larger classes, and test-related job insecurity.

RAND's national teacher research has also documented high levels of job-related stress and burnout among U.S. public-school teachers.

I include that comparison for one reason: the alternative to an imperfect workplace abroad is not an imaginary perfect workplace at home.

Every system asks something of the people inside it.

The more useful question is which tradeoffs matter to you, which problems you can tolerate, and what the job gives you in return.

I Did Not Love Everything About the Job. I Loved What the Job Made Possible.

This is the part my 23-year-old complaint list could not yet hold very well.

I did not love everything about the job.

I loved what the job made possible.

It paid me every month. It gave me somewhere to live. It gave me a school calendar with predictable breaks. And because my ordinary life was now based in Southeast Asia, those breaks opened onto a completely different map.

And there was another reality that my old complaint list did not capture very well: what an ordinary work week could look like once I left the school grounds.

These were not all school-break trips. The photos below were taken during normal work weeks. I still had classes, coworkers, paperwork, and a timetable to return to.

The bigger trips still mattered, and the school calendar made plenty of those possible too. But the most important shift was not only what I could do during a long break. It was what became ordinary between Monday and Friday.

I could finish a frustrating day at school and still live in a place where beaches, islands, boats, festivals, and sunsets were part of the week rather than something I had to save for one annual vacation.

I also had longer breaks that could support much bigger plans. One nearly three-week Australia, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia itinerary was already built around the school calendar before COVID-19 cancelled it.

And I was not the person with the most impressive calendar. One friend worked at a luxurious international school on an island. During one stretch of travel, she visited family in the United States, spent time with her future in-laws in the United Kingdom, and then flew to Italy for the trip on which she got engaged.

That is why I think conversations about travel and work become too narrow when they begin and end with remote jobs.

Remote work is one way to build travel into a life. It is not the only one.

A stationary job abroad can change the distances, costs, and calendar around you. Mine did.

I wrote more about the practical side of teaching in Thailand, including salary, school calendars, visas, and how the job made travel possible, in Teaching in Thailand: Salary, Visa, School Year & Travel.

The outcome does not cancel the frustrations.

The frustrations do not cancel the outcome either.

At 23, I thought the question was whether the job was good or bad. In hindsight, the better question is what the tradeoffs bought me.

If You Are Considering Teaching in Thailand

If you are considering teaching in Thailand, I would not use this article to decide whether you should go.

I would use it to build better questions.

What kind of school is it? Public, private, international, language center, tutoring program? How strict is the timetable? How are grades handled? Who has authority over classroom rules? How are foreign teachers included in staff communication? What happens when plans change? How much vacation time is actually usable?

Those questions will tell you far more than a generic promise that teaching in Thailand is either amazing or terrible.