Skip to main content

SITTING ON A HORSE FACING BACKWARDS

Today I had a spiritless Hancock’s Half Hour* of a class with a student of mine. The theme of the lesson was “At the Restaurant”. I had made up thirty situations in a restaurant that the student had to complain about, things like, “A diner on a neighbouring table has started smoking, and you are sitting in a non-smoking area. Wound him with intent,” and “The waiter accidentally brushed up against your / your partner’s ample bosom when serving the wine. File a sexual harrassment complaint with the maitre d’.” You know, everyday situations.

I patiently barnstormed virtually every possible known English structure for making complaints since the Great Vowel Shift and wrote them on the board. This student has been studying English for ALMOST TEN YEARS (though, in my defence, I have been awkwardly bound to her in the linguistic equivalent of a three-legged race for only six months.) The relevant language was ON THE BOARD. She has a “good job” in an AMERICAN MULTINATIONAL COMPANY. This is how she thought she could summon the manager of the despicable pigpen of an eatery:

“I would like him to the manager please.”

The best part of a decade. Where do you fricking start? If I’d been better able to disguise my disillusionment I would have regaled her with an explanation about verbs being “doing” words, and that most sentences need at least one in order to convey “meaning”, which, after all, is the purpose of our emitting these peculiar grunting noises. But I just couldn’t face it. I let it slip by without so much as a wince or an overexcited belly laugh. This is what is happening all over the world, twenty-four hours a day. English students are talking gibberish and teachers are letting it go, whilst both are respecting an unspoken pact in pretending that there’s some serious schooling going on. In any other profession we’d be exposed and clapped in irons by nightfall.

I've been trying to think of a parallel. Imagine if you paid for your daughter to have horseriding lessons for ten years. One day, you decided to go and watch her compete in a dressage competition for the first time, and she climbed on the horse facing backwards. You’d want some pretty good answers from the stable owner, wouldn’t you? Yet this is what TEFL is, it's the Emperor's New Clothes. We all want to be deceived. Teachers want to hang stubbornly on to the belief that they’re not wasting their precious lives completely, and students want to be able to proudly tell friends, relatives and employers that they’re “doing English”, like infants sporting their “I am five” badge.

A sobering final word from Dorothy Parker: "Time doth flit; oh shit."


* - Hancock’s Half Hour was a British radio and TV comedy series starring the somewhat morose deadpan comedian Tony Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968). Hancock committed suicide in a hotel room in Sydney, Australia after battling for years with alcoholism and depression. One of his suicide notes read, “Things just went wrong too many times.” Another read, “It’s this or TEFL.”


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FOOLING WITH SCHOOLING

One of the commonest figures to be found within TEFL is the aspiring administrator. This is a teacher who, often drained by years of repetitive, poorly remunerated clowning around in the classroom, seeks a position managing other teachers, such as Director of Studies (aptly and attractively known as "Doss"), from which they can sit in an imaginary TEFL director’s chair smoking a cigar, bellowing, “CUT!” and enjoying not having to pull a linguistic rabbit out of a hat twelve times a day, five days a week. I include myself within this TEFL subgenre, although my past experiences of administration have left me with an odd yearning to get back into the classroom and be king of my own modest sandcastle. In 2005, whilst I was working in HR at a local factory, my Brazilian friend Bert and I decided to start our own school. I had recently managed to wriggle out of a honey trap I’d set for myself, when I offered to give a free English course to my colleagues in the factory’s Training a...
19 comments
Read more

NO MORE A-CUSSIN'

In an effort to rid himself of the habit of using foul language at the slightest provocation , a Facebook chum recently asked for suggestions for harmless expressions he could use in front of his Gran and her bingo clique during moments of high stress, astonishment and/or extreme disappointment. I weighed in with, " Crikey! " and, " Great Scott! " Please feel free to add your suggestions, and help to make the world a tiny bit less like a trucker's stopover in Eindhoven .
12 comments
Read more

TEFL ANTHEMS VOL. I

An interesting debate over at ELT World in answer to the question, Are your students learning anything? has got me all reflective. Many rock songs are claimed by religious maniacs to include subliminal messages when played backwards or by missing every sixth word or summat, but others are more easily deciphered. As TEFL anthems go, perhaps one of the most memorably haunting has to be Dave Gilmour/Roger Waters' bitterly ironic collaboration reflecting on TEFL one-to-one classes being taught abroad , Wish You Were Here : How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. As TEFL mongers we often feel like we're in a fish bowl, year after year , not least because the majority of our students exhibit the retention capacities of the goldfish. After painstakingly explaining that we use the preposition to after various verbs, the ...
14 comments
Read more