Skip to main content

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 4

Eighteen months is a long time, even for an accomplished procrastinator. I suspect the inordinate length of time that elapses between expressing an interest in an Army career and actually getting to the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury is all part of the cunningly devised system, a conceit designed to evaluate whether procrastination’s evil step-sister, self-doubt, is going to rear her ugly biscuit and separate some wheat from the chaff. I must admit that, by the time I arrived at the forbidding, barbed-wire encircled compound in rural Wiltshire, the officerly wind in my sails had diminished to a gentle zephyr, having peaked at gale force eight during the trial run in Beaconsfield three months previously. After that brush with the spontaneously combusting Colonel, I had suffered a motivational relapse and was simply going through the motions, driven only by a determination to show that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t a capricious bottler who gave up on things as soon as the first altocumulus undulatus began to form in an otherwise cloudless sky.

It didn’t help that I’d recently become entangled with an untamable Andalucian gypsy girl who had unaccountably resolved to train her amorous flamethrower upon my unsuspecting person and, more than once, made me lose all sense of time and direction. The thought of being awoken at 2am not by her affectionate longings but by some mustachioed, criminally insane Sergeant Major eager to aggressively harass me into wading across a swollen river inside the next fifteen minutes filled me not with an overpowering urge to sing Jerusalem, but an unwholesome, morbid dread. But stand and fight I must, lest my reputation be forever sullied.

If Beaconsfield had revealed a snapshot of a state school triumph of hope over plausibility, Westbury wasn’t any more convincing. The Sergeant Major charged with administering us presumably came from one of the Scottish regiments, judging by the ill-fitting tam o’shanter that perched atop his balding pate. When he started talking I thought it judicious to listen, if only out of an antiquated proneness towards politeness, but the rest of the motley gaggle of state school delusionists exhibited a healthy distrust of authority, and continued chatting obliviously as if still attending morning lectures in the Student Union bar. Only when the Sa’rnt Major started braying and turning crimson did he receive the full attention of the gathered cross-section of redbrick intelligentsia, even then receiving resentful glares from several parties there present clearly unaccustomed to being told what to do.

The news that I was, at 25, the oldest candidate, and therefore the “Chairman of the Mess”, filled me with a pathetic pride mixed with a nagging anxiety. Whilst I would get to be in command during the last evening’s “mess dinner” (with the right to use a gavel and everything), a certain spotlight would be projected onto me that I wasn’t altogether sure I was going to relish. My suspicions were confirmed over the next three and a half days - I was singled out for relentless and severe scrutiny every step of the way, and under such duress, I have to admit I cracked. A couple of weeks after my soulless display, I received a pithy rejection letter full of simmering resentment signed personally in heavy ink by the Colonel in Beaconsfield. Looking back, it isn’t difficult to pinpoint the reasons for my botched misadventure.


PART FIVE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY…
Labels:

Comments

No Good Boyo said…
Did you downfall involve "The Mess Pudding"? To some, a rice-based condiment. To others, a fearsome rite of passage.
30 October 2007 at 08:15
M C Ward said…
If it had, I certainly wouldn't be up to writing about it.
30 October 2007 at 11:55
M. le Prof d'Anglais said…
Four years in Andalusia taught me that the woman there aren't so much "untamed" as unhinged.
31 October 2007 at 06:23
M C Ward said…
Untamed, unhinged, it's all a question of nuance. I think it's all that sun. You're right though, mine could've been sectioned at the drop of a hat.
31 October 2007 at 11:16
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

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

I AM OFFICIALLY A TIT

Show recently extracted the wind from my sails with typically well-intentioned down-to-earthism. Armed with several diagrams and a kitchen knife , she extolled her opinion that I should concentrate on doing what I can do and stop fannying around trying to learn how to do things I can’t , in yet another feeble-minded attempt to divorce myself from TEFL. Yet again, I believe her to be right. It all started back in May, when I went to Poland with my male voice choir and on the plane to Frankfurt found myself sitting next to Jetro, one of our second tenors. I’d never really spoken to him before, but during the trip I discovered that he ran a small yet growing Internet company , an online system through which owners of used car dealerships could manage their businesses. He explained how previously he’d been something of a factotum, working around the country in various jobs and starting various businesses, until he discovered that he could neither work for somebody nor manage others –...
16 comments
Read more