11 REASONS NOT TO STUMBLE UPON TEFL

Continuing my public-spirited series of Free TEFL Tips, here is a little list I tossed off last night when none of my students turned up. (Don't worry, I've learned not to take it personally.)

This list is totally personal and does not represent the opinions of any person, real or fictional, except myself.

11 REASONS NOT TO STUMBLE UPON TEFL (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER):

You will receive a starting salary well below that of fellow undergraduates and it will remain largely unchanged for the rest of the century. Your Gran's earnings will easily outpace your own;

You will be expected to be witty, bouncy and enthusiastic at all times, even if your house has just been repossessed or a favourite pet maimed in a freak glass blowing accident;

You will start seeing caravaning as an economic holidaying alternative;

You will find yourself joining calls for more bicycle lanes;

You will be expected to relentlessly suffer gibbering incognates very gladly indeed;

You will be expected to ditch all opinions that may be construed as individual or offensive to the arms dealers and/or corporate fanatics you are tutoring;

To have any chance of professional progress, you will be expected to fork out large sums of your hard-earned salary on cash cow qualifications that few seem to pass first time;

You will escape to foreign climes only to find that, while, if you're lucky, you're marginally better off financially, the job is exactly the same, only with all the complications that come from living abroad;

Every time you take a day off sick, an effigy of you will be burned by both the teacher who had to replace you and/or the Director of Studies/school owner, who will feel vindicated in their belief that you are a recovering alcoholic who has plunged from the wagon;

You will develop a passion for overwhelmingly desirable and impossibly complicated foreigners, and pine away into an emotional sack thing when they inevitably leave you for somebody real;

You will spend your days feeling like a hamster on a wheel. A hamster on a wheel of a heavy goods vehicle.

Before I am accused of negativity, I shall soon be scraping together a list of reasons to suck TEFL and see.

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...

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 .

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 ...

Gadjo Dilo said…

Ouch, again. I'm convinced that some managable form of insanity is the only way to survive such employments. Being a fruitcake gives one mystique and makes one somehow impervious to the inevitable illogicalities of ones function.

I remain curious to hear how you sell the positive side of TEFL, but I'm glad you're going to try.

26 July 2008 at 00:45

Anonymous said…

I added two more to the list on my blog.

26 July 2008 at 04:20

Well-lighted Shadows said…

I must say it's number nine which is getting me at the moment - not only do I receive a joke like wage, but I can't even take a day off.

I asked for some days off so I could work for the government on a polling place test this week. Work finally confirmed they could give me the days of on Friday afternoon - now the govt probably doesn't want me because I've been saying maybe...er maybe.

SCREAM

26 July 2008 at 05:18

No Good Boyo said…

One way of getting back is to teach your students some infra dig accent, like Brummie or Carlisle. This way people would know they were idiots without having to wait for them to say much. You'd be doing everyone a favour.

28 July 2008 at 08:26

The more I think about it, it's Number 6 that's worries me most: I'd naively thought one could pretend to oneself that one was teaching future Joseph Conrads and Vladimir Nabokovs.

30 July 2008 at 03:08

M C Ward said…

All wiser comments/suggestions than what I am capable of producing innit.

30 July 2008 at 08:39

The TEFL Tradesman said…

That number three gets me, it does. Caravanning is the ONLY way to holiday, I reckon! The kids like it, and the wife doesn't mind being cooped up in a tin can for a fortnight or two. Beats slumming it in a B&B anytime!!

6 August 2008 at 10:20

No good boyo - 'Carlisle' is not an accent. Cumbrian is.

Just saying.

6 August 2008 at 15:18

Tefl Tradesman - reminds me of Ricky Gervais' comments on caravanning on Room 101 - childhood memories of waking up hearing his gran relieving herself into a bucket...

7 August 2008 at 15:18

That list could well be enscribed on my gravestone.

21 August 2008 at 12:03

Troy said…

I disagree with number 1...Particularly if you're teaching here in Spain.

Not only with you remain at your starting wage but when you take into account inflation, 5 years later you will see yourself collecting cigarette butts off of street corners just to make it to the end of the month.

3 September 2008 at 05:20

Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

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