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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN


If the title of this blog sounds melodramatic, even Poe-esque, that's kind of the idea. Metaphor plays to the right side of the brain, the creative side. My main point is that, once in one, a graveyard is a hard place to get out of, and so it is with Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I should know, I stumbled into the TEFL graveyard a baker's dozen years ago at a time when my contemporaries were chasing their dreams and hatching their lifeplans. Rather than swim off in search of adventure and distant, unimaginable horizons, I made the unconscious decision to tread some water for a decade or two.

Recently I have come to the conclusion that it's easier to leave organised crime than it is to leave TEFL. Once a TEFL teacher always a TEFL teacher, give me a man and I'll show you the TEFL teacher. But there is hope. Buddhists say the art of living is to totally accept suffering. Drowning isn't supposed to be half as bad if you stop struggling (yeah, like the person who survived to write that one knows...), so whilst in a graveyard why not sit down, crack open a can of Special Brew and enjoy the dark and the silence for a while?

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