KRUSTY THE CLOWN, HE VERY GOOD TEACHER

I suspect all TEFL teachers start off eager to apply the lessons they learned on their month-long Certificate course. They carefully choose how to Present, Practise and Produce or Test, Teach, Test, formulating their lesson plans with a genuine concern that the subject matter be interesting, clear and relevant, some even staying up into the early hours crayoning and cutting and pasting until they have achieved something approximating the perfect lesson. Sadly, rarely in my experience do students share the same enthusiasm for elaborately decorated or cunningly crafted classroom materials, however pedagogically sound and well-intentioned. We all soon learn that, by having a two-minute read through of the textbook in the break before lesson starts and winging it, we not only avoid a lot of extra work and save a fortune on craft materials, but we also gain the time to have something resembling a life.

There is one facial expression that is commonly identifiable in all new TEFL classes. It says, quite simply, “Entertain me.” TEFL Certificate courses should have an Applied Slapstick module, or a One Hundred And One Classroom Jokes handout, as proper preparation to teach English to foreign students. At least for those studying in England, most are on holiday and they are damned if they’re going to let an English course ruin their fun.

As an illustration of this, in all my years stumbling around in TEFL, I have never once come across a student who knows the phonetic alphabet. We spend hours during the TEFL course studying it and trying to memorise it, only to never use it again in our lives, except to occasionally mention it to a veritable ocean of blank faces. Don’t get me wrong, the phonetic alphabet is a fantastic invention, practically indispensible to anybody who wants to learn English efficiently, or even read a dictionary, but nobody bothers. It’s bread and circuses citizens want in the TEFL classroom, and with the prices they are often paying, they don’t expect Billy Smart’s, they demand Cirque du Soleil.