Every child she teaches
had the childhood she had.

This site is named after a real person. Not a brand, not a character — a woman from a village in Rattanaburi district, Surin.

Her mother is from Don Raet, in Rattanaburi. When her parents married they did what nearly everyone in that village does: they went to Bangkok to work. So Ploy was born in Bangkok, in 1999, and raised in the village, by her grandmother.

In Isan that is not a rare sad story. It is the story. One child in four in Thailand lives with neither parent; in the Northeast the rate was nearly three in ten a decade ago, and nearly nine in ten of those children live with their grandparents. The research has a name for it — the skipped-generation household — and Ploy is not a teacher who happens to come from one. She is one of those children.

• 1999Born in Bangkok to parents from Rattanaburi who had gone there to work.
• Don Raet, RattanaburiRaised in the village by her grandmother. Nobody in the house spoke English. There were cassette tapes. She learned from them.
• November 18, 2010Gold medal, English Story Telling, Level 2, for Ban Han Hee School — the best in the district, aged about ten.
• ThirteenEighteen kilometers to Rattanaburi High School by motorcycle, alone, every morning. Passed the exam for the special program. Her family could not pay the fee.
• 2010 → 2022Twelve years. Nothing.
• 2022A one-room apartment in Bangkok, shared with her mother. She cannot hold a conversation in English.
• NowShe teaches it, in the village schools around Rattanaburi, and interprets in every classroom a foreign teacher works in.

The best in the district, at ten.

On November 18, 2010, at the student arts competition run by Surin Primary Educational Service Area 2 and the Rattanaburi school network, a girl from Don Raet stood up for Ban Han Hee School and told a story in English. The category is printed in English on the Thai certificate — Story Telling — because it was the English competition. She won the gold medal, Level 2, the upper primary. She was about ten, and she was the best in the district at a language nobody in her house could speak.

Both names appear with their permission.

The seat that cost 12,000 baht.

Rattanaburi High School had a special program — the air-conditioned room, smaller, better teachers, the one where English was actually spoken — and you had to pass an examination to get in. She passed.

Then there was a fee, about 12,000 baht. She cannot remember now whether that was for the year or for the term. A person excluded by a fee does not retain the fee's terms, only the exclusion. Her family could not pay it.

The system tested her. She won. It put a price on the next seat, and she could not buy it. That was that.

The figure is Ploy's recollection. The school still runs the program and still selects by examination; no fee schedule from those years is published anywhere now, and that is its own kind of answer.

Twelve thousand baht a year.

The number is worth stating plainly, because it is small. One seat in the room where English is spoken is about 12,000 to 24,000 baht a year — roughly 1,000 to 2,000 baht a month, US$28 to $57. It does not select for talent, effort or merit. It selects for the ability to pay it, and nothing else. The children it keeps out have already passed the part that tested the other things.

ploy.com does not take donations. When USAEnglish's non-profit registration numbers are published on this site, we will say here how a seat can be sponsored, and by whom, and we will publish what every baht did. Until then, the right thing to do with this number is to know it.

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