I'M A TEFL TEACHER - LOVE ME DO

Some conceal it better than others, but all TEFL teachers desperately want to be liked. This may coincidentally stem from a generalised and chronic lack of self-esteem (perhaps the subject of a future post), but may have more to do with professional (used in the loosest possible sense of the word) survival.

My own bête noir was the pink forms that used to sit on the Principal’s desk every Friday, mocking us with their pale pastel pigment. Where I worked students had to complete a questionnaire at the end of the course, and one question in particular drew morbid visions of Judge Jeffries donning the black cloth before pronouncing sentence. It read, “Please write the name of your teacher and choose one of the options that follow: Very Good, Good, Satisfactory or Bad.” One particular colleague of mine, E, used to neurotically grab the pile of forms at the end of every week and read through them avidly with the expression of a man dreading he’s been written out of a millionaire relative’s will. At every “Satisfactory” he’d visibly stiffen, at every “Bad” he’d die a little inside. Then would come the rationalisation, where he’d rush off to find a colleague who’d taught the same student and goad him or her into destroying their character - an upstanding, affable, Austrian computer programmer would be dismissed as a boring, troublemaking, anti-social Asperger’s Syndrome sufferer. It was tragi-comic, E’s whole identity was affirmed or thrown into question by ticks on a pink form.

I rarely looked at the forms, but sometimes when I was in earshot E would stop on one and say, “Oh dear!”, just loudly enough for me to hear, look at me and leave a heavily pregnant silence. In fact, I was rarely classed as “Bad” and equally rarely adjudged “Very good”. I was the John Smith of TEFL teaching, the average Joe. I liked to think I was following the wisdom of Aristotle’s moderation in choosing neither of two extremes, or the Buddha’s Middle Way, but I suspect that, as much as I tried not to care, a deep fear of rejection drove me not to verify my customers’ feedback very often.