VIZ COMICS AND THE TEFL CLASSROOM - STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?

Thinking about it, I suspect tales of madness will be a prominent theme of this blog. It is difficult to tell if a propensity towards lunacy leads people into the profession of EFL teaching or whether years of inane chats about holidays and food with people who are barely able to chat back eventually wear down even the brightest and the best, grey-matter-wise. (I'm not sure if I should have hyphenated there – years of TEFL and it’s still a grey area for me...)

P was one of those itinerant colleagues who’d turn up every summer, each time slightly more sagging and crumpled than the last. The first summer I met him he boasted to me that he’d been to the 1994 World Cup in the USA and had “almost interviewed Maradonna”. I thought it a strange claim to fame, like me saying I “almost slept with Angeline Jolie” because she happened to visit England once.

One of the things we learn on TEFL courses is that we should teach language that’ll be useful for who’s learning it. P was unfettered by such concerns, regularly smuggling a copy of Viz into the classroom and teaching bemused and/or grossly offended foreigners about the Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist and Buster Gonad and His Unfeasibly Large Testicles. Cockney Rhyming Slang was another of his specialities. A group of Japanese Local Government Officers left after their five-week course unable to order food in a restaurant but with terms such as Saucepan Lids (kids), Apple and Pears (stairs) and Rub a Dub Dub (pub) on the tips of their tongues.

Then suddenly P's status as Reliable Summer Teacher came to an abrupt, if unofficial, end. He ran himself a bath of steaming hot water when a young Thai student inadvertantly used the term, “I sell myself”, whilst trying to explain that she was a saleswoman. No doubt influenced by another of his favourite Viz characters, Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres, P started guffawing at her entirely innocent admission to prostitution. Apparently seeking to terminate his career at that particular educational establishment with a flourish, he didn’t stop there. Clearly expecting her to find the whole episode as hilarious as he did, he proceeded to explain her mistake to the whole class, leading to her running tearfully from the room and the ensuing hoohah almost sparking a diplomatic incident between our two countries. The lesson to be learned there was that not all Thai girls are as open-minded as some Internet sites would have us believe.

As misguided as his actions may have been, I have to admit the guy had flair. He flatly refused to churn out the pap that was in the textbook for the umpteenth time, preferring instead to mix things up a bit with some solid British seaside-postcard humour - and for that I raise the knotted hankie on my head to his memory.

As far as I know, P hasn’t been heard of since, and as far as I can tell at the time of writing, he hasn't yet managed to pen that Maradonna exclusive.