Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Wistful reflections, petty glories.

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Location: The House of Usher, Brazil

I'm a flailing TEFL teacher who entered the profession over a decade ago to kill some time whilst I tried to find out what I really wanted to do. I like trying to write comedy (I once got to the semi-finals of a BBC Talent competition, ironically writing a sitcom based on TEFL), whilst trying to conquer genetically inherited procrastination... I am now based in Brazil, where I live with my wife and two chins.

Monday 5 May 2008

FREE TEFL TIP - EXERCISE CAUTION AT SCHOOL PARTIES

It's been a while since I last made a fool of myself at a school shindig, thank Mary mother of Jesus. Nowadays I'm resigned to playing the native speaker monkey to the school owner's organ grinder, sipping fruit juices and repeating to each student one by one that I'm not a yank, I'm British, that I'm from a small town on the south coast, near the Isle of Wight, which is famous for staging the rock festival that turned out to be one of Jimi Hendrix's last live performances, and no, I don't live in London, though I used to... By this time their eyes have normally glazed over, so I move on to the next questioneer eager to pursue their jumbled investigations.

School parties are something of a double edged sword. Whilst they are great for promoting international harmony and inter-cultural experiences, the temptation is always there to really let loose and show the students that there's more to you than a comprehensive knowledge of non-defining relative clauses and mixed conditionals. The urge to reveal our engaging, drunken side becomes more pressing with the presence in one of our classes of an attractive Valencian wench with smirking eyes that hoarsely whisper "Olé!" I have always had a healthy obsession with Latin women, perhaps because they're everything I'm not - and that's probably a good thing.

We Britons (well me, at least) often display a compulsion to draw attention to ourselves, to shake things up, to drink ourselves off the end of the earth, to raise hell, as if we're proving some point worth making. The irony is that, in doing this, we are making ourselves a target for virtually all the other young men around us, who love nothing more than giving a hearty beating to anyone who dares to raise his voice, let alone laugh, in public. Let this be a warning to all those who plan to go to Britain and have a good time.

The last time I was dribbling drunk was at a party at the school in Bournemouth where I worked. I was twenty-six. We'd organised a national stereotypes-themed party, a whimsical event that provided the very language school-esque spectacle of Turkish belly dancers, fur hatted Russians, flamenco-dancing Spaniards all bopping away to the latest sounds, with me staggering around as a historically accurate English football hooligan. Draped in a Union Jack, with an Alan Shearer T-shirt and theatrical blood streaming from an imaginary head wound, I terrorised as much as I amused, and looking back it was perhaps the least appropriate disguise in which to attempt to beguile a pretty Spanish girl.

I was also still in the throes of my adolescent literary infatuation with Charles Bukowski, and had taken to carrying a bottle of cheap whisky around with me, from which I would regularly swig irreverantly in memory of the crude old dipso. By the end of the evening I'd knocked back about half the contents and was in no position to do anything but drool. My friend D later informed me that I'd spent the last moments of the evening swaying and staring at the Valencian girl, as if trying to hypnotise her at a distance. Clearly unable to think rationally, let alone talk, I'd eventually been manhandled into a colleague's car and driven home. When I'd got out, I'd tripped over a parked car in the driveway and lain on the ground for an inordinate time, during which my colleague had briefly thought about getting out to help me, but as he himself was dressed as Charles II, he thought better of it and drove off into the night, leaving me to my ruin.

When I awoke the next morning, I wondered from whom I had received the frenzied knife attack. It felt like I had a dagger in my head, and there was red blood all over my pillow, which of course was the theatrical blood I'd been using for added authenticity. I phoned in sick and lay down again, mastigating the aftertaste of whisky in my mouth and wishing for a quick death. My friend D, who is probably the friend I most respect for a variety of reasons, asked me later that night in the pub, as I gingerly sipped some hair of the dog, why I had behaved as I had the previous night. I mouthed a response, but no sound came out, as it dawned on me that there was nothing I could say at that moment that wouldn't make me sound pathetic.

And that was the most chilling intimation I'd ever received of my own absurdity, though it certainly wasn't the last.

9 Comments:

Blogger Gadjo Dilo said...

A "national stereotypes-themed party" sounds like an opportunity for a lot of dangerous fun. Maybe the students should just have been told to watch the (ahem) late great ITV comedy show Mind Your Language and to take it from there. (Oh, it occurs to me that you must have been painfully aware of this during your endeavours to write a TEFL-based sitcom.)

Congratulations on learning from your mistakes with the Valenciana and your consequent success with Latin women!

6 May 2008 at 02:10  
Blogger No Good Boyo said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

6 May 2008 at 04:02  
Blogger No Good Boyo said...

Is it Mind Your Language that made normal people want to take up TEFL? Live in a sitcom - live the dream.

I find that marriage has brought on regular intimations of my own absurdity. They still have the power to chill, though.

I know what you mean about Latin ladies. They leave their own special mark on the most mundane of festivals:

http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2005/12/colombian-girl-santas.html

6 May 2008 at 04:03  
Blogger Well-lighted Shadows said...

hahaha...excellent, the school I'm teaching at is full of latinas - and so I half crave, half fear a school party, an opportunity to show these natural extroverts the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic party animal(read guy with glasses downing all the booze in the corner, leading to brief incoherent exhibitionism and extremely sheepish look on Monday morning).

6 May 2008 at 08:34  
Blogger M C Ward said...

GD - Can you believe I've never seen Mind Your Language - I'm just too youthful I think, or maybe it was on at the same time as It's a Knockout. As for my success with Show, it is one of my proudest achievements, but that says little.

NGB - all I can say is, you ain't seen nothing yet.

SBM - I knew I'd ring a few bells among my TEFL cellmates. After all, what else is there to keep us going? I think having Welsh mothers may be the common link to explain our desperate behaviour, despite the goegraphical distance between us.

6 May 2008 at 15:26  
Blogger Gadjo Dilo said...

Actually, MC, I've never seen it either! Though I'm sure I've seen excerpts from it, probably on snide BBC comedy programmes called things like "Why the 70s was Naff, Especially on ITV".

6 May 2008 at 15:45  
Blogger No Good Boyo said...

Gadjo, a nice flavour of Mind Your Language, complete with "I'm an idiot but they paid me anyway" apologia by the author, on precisely the typeof arch TV clip show you mentioned (Arabella Weir, check...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKHs7ACUxks

7 May 2008 at 06:02  
Blogger Gadjo Dilo said...

Oh my....... It was even worse than I thought! And the author says, and I quote: They weren't charicatures, they were real geniune ethnic characters. You couldn't make that up.

9 May 2008 at 02:47  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My last drunken TEFL letching experience was also in the UK- I think it's an entirely rational response to the question "What the hell am I getting out of this job at the moment?? I'm not even travelling!!"

14 May 2008 at 18:30  

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