MY FUTURE'S IN RUBBER BALLS

I’ve had a pretty good week. Nothing great has happened, but those little frustrations that normally boil over into an unseemly ire have passed me by like water off a duck going straight over my head. This turning problems into happiness stuff looks pretty righteous to me.

I even managed to get through my eight elementary classes yesterday without feeling like somebody had wheel-clamped my heart. I would usually shuffle into the first class like a dead man walking, but after finding some inspiration from an unlikely source, I would describe my entrance as, if not a strut, certainly nearer a gambol than a lope.

English Teacher X’s Teacher Tips is a mini-site packed with useful clues as to how to survive teaching. I’ve always found his accompanying blog about his misadventures teaching English in Russia by turns hilarious, harrowing and somewhat bleak, but with his teacher tips he hits the bull right between the eyes. His advice that buying a ball is the best investment a TEFL teacher can make, for example, is pure genius.

Armed with this new recommendation, before yesterday’s class I stopped off at the local pet shop. Unfortunately they didn’t have any squeaky balls, which would have really set the classroom on fire, I have no doubt, so I bought a plain blue rubber dog sphere. Just as things were flagging in my first class, I drew the toy from my bag and suddenly there was a new light burning in the students’ eyes. “Let’s do the alphabet! A!” I cried, lobbing the ball to student P. “D!” he cried, tossing the orb to student M. It took a while to get through all the letters in a generally acceptable order, but suddenly we were alive and childlike and innocent again, back to the days when nuns rode bicycles on village greens and summer came on a lollipop stick with a joke on it…

The thing about TEFL tips is that they have to be based on the real world and not some idealised publishers’ fantasy island. Too many create activities that are great in theory, provided that you have uncompromisingly cooperative, motivated and easily-pleased students, a utopia I, personally, have yet to stumble upon.

The only blemish on an otherwise splendid week was an unexpected turn of events regarding my male voice choir’s trip to Poland. One of the baritones tried to drum up support this week for an audacious plan to have our conductor sectioned. His removal to a secure psychiatric unit would be justified, according to the baritone, due to the fact that (1) our choir hasn’t been enrolled in the Polish festival at all, (2) the sponsors of the trip have pulled out / are on the verge of pulling out, thus rendering our voyage financially unviable, and (3) the conductor owes him money.

Whether there is any truth in any of this is as yet unproven, despite tales of damning intercepted email messages, but it does add spice to the prospect of an odyssey to Eastern Europe with two screaming loons on board.

If only they could turn their problems into happiness…