Tag Archives: dailyprompt

What sacrifices have you made in life?

No way in my real life! I would do it just for movie or fiction. Here is the movie I made about sacrificing a stone.



For the question that WordPress asked us? What sacrifices have you made in life? It reminds me of some killing animal activities in my hometown, Thailand.

As a non-religious person, I used to hear other people saying that we do not need to learn religion, but morality and laws. I agree with most laws, but some are very weird.

I live in Thailand, and we are not allowed to feed pigeons in public. Those people believe that pigeons are the only kind of birds that can bring about virus. That is actually the myth. The weird thing is that people are allowed to sell and buy poison for pigeons, lizards, and gecko. For the poison case, I did not search the governmental website, but these poisons could be found around many shops and also in advertisings.

Does this sound weird to you? Since we are human, we should be kind to animals, but the mentioned laws are different. How about your country? Do you have some weird laws like this? Should we do something to change it? How should we communicate to our government and those people who still believe myth?

During COVID outbreak, most university in Thailand immediately turned regular on-site classes to be online classes. Most teachers or lecturers in my university used Google Meet or Zoom to provide the narrative lesson with slide show during class period. Everything was real-time, like, live video of teaching.



My teaching style was different. I create about 3 video clips per a class. Each got about 10 minutes in length. Every clip got some activities for students to do. They wrote or drew the answers in a piece of paper, and at the end of the clip, each of them had to take a photo of the assignment and submit it at the time. To prevent students copied the work of one another, I also created many versions of assignments. For example, I asked them to compare themselves to their favorite celebrity, and I provide different adjectives for every student. Therefore, they could not simply ask their friends to take a photo and simply write down what their friend had.

Online class is very hard for me because of my dishonest awareness method. Like the above example, I had to prepare 6 adjectives for each of 80 students. This took me whole night to make this adjective list and random them to match the names of all students.

About 3 days each week during the semester, I did not have time to sleep. I invested much time and health to prevent dishonesty and to design the activities that students would do something that is not just taking a note.



After that semester, I felt I cannot do this anymore. I was very tired. Although I got a very good class evaluation from my students, I do not want to be a lecturer of online class again. I told one of my good friends who persuaded me to come back to teach, that I would not teach unless it is full-time on-site class.

We all know that 3 years later, COVID is not considered as dangerous disease anymore, but the university broad still need to continue online classes. Why? Because all the students have to visit the university website, which bring about ranking on Google and Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.



Nearly 10 years, I had been a university lecturer. The latest online classes made me feel, enough. I love my students. I love teaching. However, the online classes cause me the lack of time to do something else. Being a university lecturer in Thailand is not just to teach. We have to create many types of useless documents (that the university board and government want to see), conduct many research studies, write proposal to get research fund (research article without fund will be scored much less than the one with fund), run a seminar project for students and local people, provide academic assistance or academic volunteer to other organizations, and run a project to earn money for university. These are many things, and it is too much for one person to do within a year.

I do not think that this is strength of Thai academic system, but it is weakness. Teachers or university lecturers should have enough time to teach, maybe 80 percent of the time for teaching, preparing, student assisting, or grading, and another 20 percent of time for research studies.

I bought a new laptop to gain ability to create the clips to teach the entire course. I tried to design every class suitable for students who have online mobile device or cellphone. Most students can use their phone to complete the task very well even they were outside their house. However, some of them came up with an excuse that they did not have computer, or they did not know that there was a class at the class period. I do not accept the excuse. I will make everything fair for responsible students, which is the larger proportion of the class.



I think I am lucky that I have enough money to purchase my new laptop during the time that everyone has to leave school due to COVID outbreak. For my friend, she had to borrow the laptop from the university. She had right to borrow it for free to use to conduct an online class. However, the particular laptop was very slow. It was an old one with only 1 GB RAM. She had a lot of trouble during that period.

A month later, the university was reopened, but students were not allowed to attend the on-site class. All teachers had to continue the online class until the end of the semester. The good thing is that my friend can come to school every day and use machine in her office. She sat there whole day to prepare the lessons and to teach her students.

Her teaching style was different from mine. She used Google Meet or Zoom to conduct a real-time class. She does not like to show her face on camera, but she shows the PowerPoint slides instead. I heard that many other teachers or lecturers did the same thing.