REVISION IS WORSE THAN TRANSLATION

It's official. Consider this extract I was asked to quickly skim over for mistakes:

...the Brazilian legislation doesn't establish that the manufacturing companies of nutritious goods are forced to collect and to give destination final, environmental appropriate, although this for the norm ISO 22000 is requested. Now a company qualified powder an official organ of the environment is responsible for the discard of ******** Brazil's products. Cost of u$ 142/60 boxes...

It's like a linguistic car accident.

Wanted: a job, any job, that doesn't make my brain hurt into the early hours.

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 7

My Army days, all five of them in total, were nearly coming to an anti-climactic end. All that remained was to attend an interview with another stiffly uniformed soul-reaver, then it was the Mess Dinner later in the evening and some kind of farewell race programmed despicably early the next morning. Of course, this was the Machiavellian brainchild of another warped mind, clearly concocted to prod at the perfectly human temptation to indulge in some Rabelaisian hell-raising at the Mess Dinner after the three days of being led through the circles of Dante’s Inferno. It was a trap I was aware of, but one into which I fell headfirst nonetheless.

At the interview I was informed that I had come first out of all the candidates in both the Military and General Knowledge tests. This, I felt ambivalently, could count as a plus for me, as when invading the next Third World country, not only would I be able to identify enemy armour and artillery batteries from blurred reconnaissance photos, but I would also be on hand to give relevant information on the population density of the main urban centres, the mainstay of each region’s economy, as well as what kind of wildfowl one may expect to find on local waterways. All, I imagined, from a fortified underground bunker with a working lavatory and a well-stocked drinks cabinet a safe distance from the front line.

“So how do you measure success in your current job?” the galloping Major enquired, fixing me with hooded, deathly eyes. “In millennia,” I almost replied, but thought better of it. “Well, we have these pink questionnaires that students fill out at the end of the course…” I began, instantly regretting having mentioned the colour. The officer’s face screwed up like his hiatus hernia had just caused him to regurgitate something uniquely sour, and through tightly clenched teeth he managed to mutter sarcastically, “Yes, well, soldiers don’t fill out pink questionnaires, do they?” He didn’t add, “They tend to shoot you in the back instead,” but I was sure he wanted to. The rest was damage limitation and half-hearted attempts to convince us both that I was the right man for the jodhpurs.

The Mess Dinner was the best, and at the same time the worst, part of the whole shebang. We were waited upon by the non-commissioned officers (including the detonative Scottish Sergeant Major), and, as Chairman of the Mess, I got to sit at the head of a long table with a gavel. We had been assured that this wasn’t part of the testing process, that we were free to enjoy the evening as much as we cared to, but that was disingenuous bunkum – they wanted to see which of us would get steamed on the free booze and forget the next morning’s pointless race to carry something awkward over something irritating in the least possible time.

In the event, I made little use of my gavel except for when I looked up at the end of the meal and saw the port decanter on the table. This was something the Scottish Sergeant-Major had briefed me about – the pedantic tradition that the port must be passed around the table without touching its surface. I tapped meekly to call everybody’s attention to the scandal that was unfolding at the far end of the dining table. “Who put the port on the table?” I enquired. A hubbub ensued, but the blackguard remained faceless. I knocked again and repeated my question, feeling empowered by the respectful silence that met my persistent pounding, and the Cabernet Sauvignon that was gently starting to disable my faculties. Still nobody owned up. I swatted the table again with grape-induced relish and cried, “WHO PUT THE PORT ON THE TABLE?” The cad was upstanding and I passed sentence – he was to buy a bottle of brandy in the bar afterwards, to be shared by all and sundry. Looking back, it wasn’t the wisest of punishments, but I was past caring. There followed a toast that I vaguely remember someone proposing, then the Royal Military Policeman asked me for “permission to speak” - I loved that. He pointed out that the proposer of said toast hadn’t faced the portrait of the Queen when making it – I hadn’t realised one should, but by that time, anything went. “Then he shall buy a bottle of brandy too!” I brayed triumphantly, amid whoops and slaps on the back and constantly topped up brandy glasses. I have a feeling they even gave me three cheers…

We came last in the race out of the three teams. I came in last in our team, after falling off one of the rain-dampened obstacles and having to go back and start it all again. I don’t know why they insist on using those senseless climbing nets – the only place you'll ever find them is on Army assault courses, so it’s not like they’re training you for anything in the real world.

Shortly after my release, my Spanish gypsy girl went back to her bohemian lifestyle on the Costa del Sol and moved in with her boyfriend, which was a move I hadn’t entirely foreseen her making. I suspect that once she knew she’d never get her hands on a generous MOD Widow’s Pension, she lost interest.

And so came to a pacific end my undistinguished military career.

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 6

My new best friend, Number 24, the blunt Yorkshireman, really came into his own during the leadership tests. These comprised a variety of apparatus including scaffolding towers, planks and ropes, and unwieldy objects such as oil drums and ammunition boxes to be transported across gaping voids, all without touching the ground. Each of us in turn was taken aside from the group, briefed on the task to be performed, then ordered to gather our company together, pass the instructions succinctly on to them and lead them through to a successful conclusion. That was the theory, at least.

Two Majors were in charge of this part of the proceedings, one an impatient, elongated ghoul and the other a frightfully well-spoken middle-aged gym mistress. The latter kept us jogging on the spot (there’s an awful lot of that going on in the Army) as we waited to be summoned to tackle the next asinine challenge. She also made each of us complete a verbal assignment whilst we were idling. Number 24 was invited to tell a joke. This was going to be good, I thought to myself, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Given the circumstances, an obedient drudge eager to please the aristocratic Major might have resolved to tell an innocuous “Knock, Knock” joke, or a cheeky, “Doctor, Doctor” pun – something involving the words, “bonkers”, “old Etonian”, or maybe “tally-ho”. Number 24 blazed a trail with, if not the funniest, certainly the most magnificently inappropriate gag imaginable. Here is his contribution, verbatim, to be read in a Yorkshire accent.

Little Red Riding Hood’s walking through the forest, and she sees a wolf in the bushes. She goes, “My, Mister Wolf, what great big, bulging eyes you’ve got!”, and the wolf replies, “Piss off, I’m having a shit.”

It was one of those moments where you feel you’ve been sat on by a prop forward and a sound you didn’t think you were capable of producing involuntarily roars from the depths of your belly. I wanted to buy Number 24 a drink, simply as a reward for his audacity and splendid sense of the ridiculous. Instead I acted like a spineless scullion, and when asked frostily what I thought of Number 24’s improvised stand-up, I mendaciously labeled it, “A bit of a poor show, Major.”

It was all downhill from there on. I briefed the group on my task with such haste and lack of clarity that anyone watching the frantic pandemonium that broke out on the apparatus might have thought we were workers in a Chinese fireworks factory where a sneaky attempt to break the no-smoking rule had resulted in a tragic industrial accident of shocking, yet uncommonly entertaining, proportions.

By the time we came to the planning exercise, I was already fighting Custer’s Last Stand. The scene of carnage presented to us was this: we were one of three crew members aboard a yacht in a round-the-world race, and an unexplained explosion on board during a storm had apparently blown both the engine and the Captain to smithereens, and hideously maimed the 17-stone salad-dodger of a boatswain. There was a motorised dinghy aboard, but only with x amount of fuel and a top speed of y. The current was pushing the yacht towards a nearby island to the east (where there was a telephone) at z knots, and the other boats in the race were n nautical miles behind, traveling at s knots. There was also another archipelago nearby to the west, but to reach it we’d have to fight against swirling tides, represented by the variable t. A distant lighthouse had a broken radio. The question was: which course of action did we have to take in order to save the boatswain’s life, considering that he would bleed to death if untreated within the next hour?

The logical approach was to calculate speed-time-distance relationships, eliminate the unfeasible options and get the boatswain safely airlifted to casualty. After an hour and a half of mental tumult, the only conclusion I’d arrived at was that I’d be sheepishly avoiding eye contact with the boatswain’s widow at his funeral.

As it turned out, none of us had managed to solve the problem adequately, which was to let the yacht drift east on the tide to the island and call 999 using the telephone. Each of us was required to stand up in random order and present our answers. Of course, I was again last to be called upon. “Right, Number 25,” the elongated Major snapped, “stand up and tell us the correct answer.” Had I been paying close attention, I may have perceived from the other incorrect answers the key to solving the conundrum, but I’d drifted off to a sunny beach with my bikini-clad Andalucian flamenco dancer. “Firstly, I’d put the boatswain in the dinghy,” I started, only to be rudely shouted down by the Major. “We’ve already said that’s impossible!” he bellowed, reaching instinctively for an imaginary sidearm, “you’re in the middle of a storm and the boatswain weighs 17 stones!”. His vehemence forced me to think quickly on my feet. “I’d roll the boatswain into the dinghy on deck,” I ventured meagerly, “then launch the dinghy with him already in it.” I knew it was harebrained, but if I admitted I didn’t know the answer, I felt I’d be following the boatswain down to a watery locker belonging to a certain Davy Jones.

“Sit down, Number 25,” the Major sighed, as if the boatswain’s last moments on this Earth really were ebbing away due to my incompetence. I noticed him writing, and I suspect he was wearily scrawling the world “ARSEHOLE” in cold, black ink next to my name on his clipboard.

PART SEVEN (THE FINAL PART) TO FOLLOW SHORTLY…

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 5

If I can blame anybody but myself for my failure to enroll at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in September 1995, it would have to be Number 21. (In order to strip us of our humanity during the Regular Commissions Board (RCB), each of our six-member unit was given a number from 20 to 25, and we were ordered around using these digits rather than our names.) I had taken an instant dislike to Number 21 when I had failed in a polite attempt to make small talk as we awaited the Scottish Sergeant-Major’s dressing down. He was the sour fruit of the county of Essex, and struck me as a charmless Thatcherite “there is no such thing as society, only individuals” acolyte. He was selfish, truculent and had mean little piggy eyes and a wayward conviction that he would be getting through the forthcoming tests despite, rather than with the help of, his fellow team members. Several times over the next couple of days his obnoxious ignorance provoked in me a strong urge just to seize him wordlessly and slap him repeatedly about the head.

Making up the rest of our company was a lanky Northern Irish school leaver, another loud fish wife from the north-west (were they sisters, I wondered?), a heaving blonde with bright lipstick, a Royal Military Policeman seeking to rise through the ranks, myself and the excellent Number 24, a cynical undergraduate from Yorkshire who did little to disguise his utter lack of interest in joining Her Britannic Majesty’s Forces. Apparently his father had insisted he candidate himself for a commission in a nostalgic tribute to the good old days when press gangs roamed the taverns of Portsmouth and Southsea offering careers as Royal Navy Able Seamen.

One of the reasons given for my dishonorable discharge from the RCB was, to quote the wrung out Colonel’s missive, “a lack of physical courage”. This insinuation wounds me deeply, and I would like to take this opportunity to defend my soiled reputation.

As expected, the officer recruitment tests featured an assault course. It wasn’t a particularly lengthy or taxing one, but it was fiendishly located on a significant down slope, meaning that, on exiting several of the obstacles, you couldn’t help but build up an undesirable head of steam when approaching the next. One of said impediments to be negotiated was a bar to be leapt over. Having just crawled under an annoyingly low construction, as I scrambled to my feet, it became clear I was never going to manage to high hurdle the awkwardly placed stick, given my accelerated velocity and the short distances involved. I therefore deemed it wise to run past the obstacle, decelerate, jog back up the hill, and calmly complete the task under more controlled conditions. Evidently, this was wrong – even if it meant knocking the bar flying, I should have blundered through the task at breakneck speed, like some rampaging lunatic devoid of basic motor skills. If I’d known in advance that this kind of raising Cain was what they were after, I wouldn’t have scaled the seven-foot wall, I’d have run straight into it in a brave, but ultimately futile, attempt to demolish it with my head.

Another cunning psychological ploy utilised was to herd us into a corrugated iron hut at the bottom of the slope where we would await our turn on Hamburger Hill. From this Spartan vantage point we could hear, but not see, each other panting and gasping around the course, and it was cleverly situated near enough to the seven-foot wall for us to discern the sickening thud and desperate scraping sounds that accompanied the latest hapless pretender’s attempt to overcome the unyielding wooden edifice. Our numbers were called out in random order, adding to the tense, air-raid shelter atmosphere of our cramped den. Of course, having been singled out by my advanced age for special treatment, I was last to be summoned to complete the course, and was almost certainly the least.

I, for one, secretly warmed towards feckless Yorkshireman Number 24 as we heard his quickening, flat-footed lope approaching and winced in unison at his loud collision with the wall. There followed an undignified grunting and scrabbling, then a sudden silence, broken seconds later by the unmistakable sound of some immoderate dry heaving as his flaccid, unconditioned body spectacularly betrayed him. The man had a certain cavalier, devil-may-care panache - I comforted myself that I would be in good company as it became increasingly clear that neither of us would be passing out in the conventional military sense.

PART SIX TO FOLLOW SHORTLY…

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…

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 3

With the momentous decision to try to become an Army officer made, the eighteen-month escalator whirred into life and, for a time, I became a single-minded Sport Billy. I jogged daily, mountain biked, walked everywhere with a hefty backpack on like a total arse, gamely doggy-paddled the width of the local swimming baths - all based on Robin Eggar’s Royal Marines Fitness Course book, which allegedly duplicates the psychopathic regime employed when “beasting” potential Commandos on the inhospitable Devon moors. Of the five levels of intensity, I reached level three and decided to stay there – a man has his limits, and I have mine, too. (Incidentally, seven years on, I had to undergo back surgery to treat a herniated disc, something I still haven’t ruled out demanding MOD compensation for.)

Then it was on to Beaconsfield, the Regimental HQ of the Adjutant General’s Corps, for a mock-up of the real officer recruitment tests. We were greeted by a Colonel and his bouncy young female Captain sidekick. The former was an angular, reedy man with a post-traumatic glare that suggested he’d been not one, but several bridges too far. His manner was tart, and the suspicion grew over the following two days that he was edging ever closer to resigning his commission and emigrating in disgust at the quantum lack of decent officer material the country was capable of producing. Looking at the rabble of which I formed an integral part, I couldn’t fault his misanthropic logic. Whilst the glamorous regiments such as the Coldstream Guards and the King's Royal Hussars vacuumed up most of the decent public school candidates, our Col. was left with people like us, TEFL misfits and state school teachers with unachievable delusions of grandeur.

Comprising our inglorious company there was a five-foot policeman, a whiney harridan from the north-west, a spindly Intelligence Corps aspirant, an airbrushed aerobics teacher, a rather large young lady whom I could only assume was there to win a bet, and myself, a desperate TEFL escapologist. If I was determined to act like an officer and a gentleman and at least show some decorum, it was a resolution apparently not widely adopted by my brethren. As we were receiving the Col.’s briefing, the whiney harridan abruptly piped up, “I think I need a wee”, stunning even the camp commandant into a narrow-eyed, smouldering silence.

I was glad I’d put in the physical training. After a lavish breakfast of scrambled eggs, tea, cereals and croissants (this was getting better and better), we were ordered to get into PT gear and follow our leader on a damp stumble around the camp perimeter and down into a natural valley behind some trees. There we were put into pairs (being a TEFL teacher, this part was a cakewalk) and told to give each other a piggy-back up the slope ahead of us. I had been paired with a big-boned pit pony of a school-leaver, which was fine when I had the reins, but nearly had me lobbing the continental contents of my stomach up and over my new, Army-issue pumps when commanded to return the favour. On our way back to HQ, the large girl was found projecting her insides into the brambles, but the Col. ordered us to merely hurdle her and drive on regardless. This was the kind of tough decision Army officers have to make every day, I reflected ruefully.

One of the things that hinders any possibility of TEFL teachers making a success of themselves in a real job is the fact that we are not encouraged to hold opinions. Teacher trainers drone on endlessly about cutting down “Teacher Talking Time”, as if we are all supposed to behave like some shadowy mime in the classroom, simply “facilitating” the mumbo-jumbo that students talk to each other because they haven’t heard enough correct language to be able to express themselves in any meaningful way. Debates never involve interesting, controversial opinions for fear of offending someone, so we end up discussing inane, plastic subjects nobody has anything to say about whatsoever that a literate child hasn’t already pondered and dismissed as inherently without significance.

So when we sat in a group and were asked by the bouncy Captain to discuss America’s influence in the world, I found myself deferring politely to everyone else’s opinion, instead of shouting down my contemporaries with confident assertions that we should “demand UN sanctions, and definitely not rule out the military option.” If I was to sail through the Regular Commissions Board, I was going to have to ramp up my assertiveness by several warp factors.

PART FOUR TO FOLLOW SHORTLY...

GARBLED MESSAGE

I'm going to be lying low for a while, at least until all this has blown over. I was just lucky that Volkswagen Beetle was there to whisk me off to an undisclosed location. It's peaceful out here, I'm well hidden from the lupine corporate bankers. Show and Moby should join me soon, when it's safe to travel.

Should you notice anyone snooping around here, I'm a blonde deaf mute with big tits who goes by the name of Barbara.

More when I can. Meanwhile, please partake of the new poll at the bottom of the page.

HE'S GETTING ALL "SIMULTANEOUS" ON US

I have been reduced by the fragile Brazilian electrical energy infrastructure to writing this in a Cyber Café. An entertaining Sunday evening's in-house pyrotechnics ended with a burnt-out PC, exploding lightbulbs (and I wasn't even singing), six hours of darkness and Show fleeing into a frightful panic and manning the lifeboats far too early.

Tomorrow I have to don a suit and tie and head for São Paulo to take part as a Brazilian - English interpreter in a two-hour video conference meeting on high finance. I've never done this before, but have been compelled to make an attempt by economic necessity, natural vanity and a taste for some linguistic Russian Roulette.

If I can pull it off, the TEFL chains could be loosening, if not, I could be arrested and end up on the chain gang. If it's the latter, I appreciate your support over the past few months and I will be writing an interesting blog from an inhumanly overcrowded cell in a São Paulo penitentiary, whilst offering English classes to fellow inmates in return for a guarantee of sexual abstinence. Being a stout, pale blonde in Brazil has its disadvantages, too, you know - it's not all kissy lips and fancy trainers...

JOBSEARCH UPDATE!

As some of you already know, today I went to São Paulo to do a voice test for a video production company. To be frank, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

Firstly, they told me there was no need to do my tap dancing routine. Then, barely three bars into “You’re All I Need To Get By” (the moving Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duet), the woman, in a tone of voice I didn’t take to one little bit, demanded that I, “Just read the text we gave you, please” – some turgid piece about an electrical engineering firm. I was almost expecting her to shout, “Bring on the hook!” halfway through, such was her offhand attitude to my artistry. I read it, but had had so little time to get into character that I wasn’t at all satisfied with the result.

Then came the feedback. I have an exquisite voice, apparently, but I need to “put more energy into my performances”. I explained that I’m into my second decade as a TEFL teacher. She crossed herself and suggested I practise at home.

Shoddy, that’s how I’d describe it. If these are the depths to which the search for new talent has plunged, soon we’ll be back to the days when Little and Large was considered prime-time Saturday night entertainment. Then don’t come running to me.

POST SCRIPT!
Show has just informed me that the word "esquisito" in Brazilian is a falso amigo - it doesn't mean "exquisite", it means "strange" or "odd". That's good news, then.

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 2

After my dalliance with the nation’s seaborne defence force, the rest of my university career progressed without further incident, except for an abortive attempt to join the Hong Kong Police. I think my problem was uniforms. Whereas most men spent their energies on trying to persuade sexual partners to dress up as policewomen, maids, nuclear plant workers, etc, I would cut out the middle man and amuse myself for hours in a matching set of khaki fatigues and a pith helmet (see picture – please note, this is not me).

My colleague E, the demented bigot, was probably the one person who, more than anybody else, persuaded me that a career in The Army would be a step forward. A year into my TEFL adventure, he was displaying such spectacular symptoms of mental meltdown, accompanied by a raging self-loathing apparently based on the fact that his salary hadn’t risen significantly for about fifteen years, that I felt compelled to leave the burning deck before I too became accustomed to the idea of caravaning as an economic holiday option.

One Monday morning I was walking along a corridor in the school, when a classroom door burst open and a hysterical Swiss woman spilled out, wailing in an advanced state of agitation. “Is he mad?” she screeched, “is he mad?”, as she half-ran, half-staggered into the school garden like a victim escaping a sudden building collapse. I poked my head around the door and, sure enough, a pair of deranged, paranoid eyes glared back at me as if belonging to the most junior private at Rourke’s Drift who’d just heard the Zulu drums for the first time. They prompted me into a judicious silence, but it turned out later that E had been burgled for about the eleventh time the day before, and his revenge, exacted upon the innocent Swiss lawyer, had been as swift as it had been without logical foundation. In the interview to discern her level of spoken English, E had peevishly destroyed her obviously imperfect conjugation of verbs, together with her self-confidence, and left her, along with the rest of us, questioning his suitability for living in the community.

But I digress. My plan now was to join The Army as an officer in the Educational and Training Services branch of the Adjutant General’s Corps, formerly the Royal Army Educational Corps. The job seemed perfect – teaching some English to foreign military officers being trained in the UK, learning and then teaching foreign languages to British officers being sent abroad, and best of all, running a course for non-commissioned officers who wanted to gain a commission by rising through the ranks. This involved taking them to the theatre, art galleries, great European cities... making them posher, in other words. I greedily filled out my application forms, sent them off to the Regimental Headquarters in Beaconsfield, and started the arduous process of getting physically fit.

PART THREE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY...

EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 1

Being commissioned into The Army is not an obvious career move for a TEFL teacher, but it is a measure of my desperation to scale the wall of the TEFL Graveyard and bolt that, for a time, I considered it the most propitious. In a life replete with many a poorly planned venture, this was, by several furlongs, the most gloriously preposterous. Fortunately for the defence of the realm, the assembled officers at the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury concurred wholeheartedly. Indeed, I suspect that, twelve years on, more than a few of them are still dining out on my laughably limp performance during the gruelling three-day selection process.

My unhealthy obsession with all things military started when I was a child. Whilst my contemporaries were into Marvel comics, 2000 AD and superheroes, I used to read Warlord, which was full of Second World War battles and other assorted slaughter. I also spent vast amounts of time and money on the quite pointless hobby of military modelling.

By the time I reached University, I hadn’t grown up any. As a Fellwalking Club stalwart, I loved nothing better than to rise early on Sundays, don a backpack, galoshes and a souwester, and wander around the north of England for four or five hours in appalling, miserable weather. Becoming a military officer seemed the obvious next step. Conveniently ignoring the fact that I could well be coming under a fatal hail of heavy machine gun fire or a lethal mortar barrage, I fancied that a career in the armed forces was nothing more than a heavily-armed form of rambling.

I never managed to convince myself one hundred per cent of my suitability for earning the Queen’s shilling, however – another case where my endearing leaning towards procrastination was given full rein. However, in an uncharateristically enterprising moment, I did once arrange an interview with the Royal Navy Careers Officer – I’d always fancied travelling around the world, and of course there was the added bonus of routinely being piped on board ship.

My interlocutor was an athletic blonde who seemed to fill the entire room, as most forces types do. I was feeling unaccustomedly buoyant.

“So, how’s the course going?” he boomed.

“Excellently,” I barked back, “to be honest, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get a two-one.” He raised an eyebrow and nodded approvingly.

“I’ve worked hard and I think I deserve it,” I added, exuding an alien self-confidence that almost, but not quite, spilled over into self-satisfaction.

“So, are you going to apply?” he bellowed as we wrapped up our no-nonsense shouting match.

“I think so,” I retorted.

We exchanged a bone crushing handshake, I took the forms he proffered, turned on my heel and marched purposefully home. When I arrived I went upstairs to my room, inexplicably put the application forms straight in the bin and had a lie down for the rest of the afternoon.

But that was far from the end of my martial ambitions.

PART TWO TO FOLLOW SHORTLY...

GETTING LOST IN TRANSLATION

Those of us EFL teachers who ply our trade in non-English-speaking countries often fancy that a step left into translation may allow a little daylight to be peeked through the bars of our cell windows. Having been in Brazil for five years now, just such a cunning scheme recently filled me with muted enthusiasm, which was soon tempered by various aggravating factors.

Firstly, there is the vastly complex correlation between the intimacy of social bonds and the likelihood of actually receiving monetary payment for your work. Brazilians are instinctively herd animals, and once you have penetrated somebody’s inner group an unspoken regimen comes into play based on the exchange of favours. It is almost unthinkable for somebody to charge a friend anything for services rendered - it goes without saying that brotherly sentiments be expressed through toll-free gestures of kindness and fraternity.

This, as I have found to my cost, also extends to friends of friends. Last month a playmate passed a six-page translation for a cosmetics fair to me that he hadn’t had time to complete for an acquaintance of his wife’s, who works for a makeup maunfacturer. They needed the text the following morning, so I spent that evening duly drafting and perfecting it, before sending it back to them before the eight o’clock deadline the next day. Until today, not only have they not paid me, but they haven’t even expressed their gratitude. If anarchists wanted to bring down corporate capitalism in Brazil, their best bet would be to circulate the theory of the “six degrees of separation”, according to which we are all linked to any other person on the planet through, at the most, six people. Given this revelation, the entire economy would grind to a halt - nobody would end up paying anybody for anything.

I have recently been dabbling in two main forms of translation. One is for undergraduates who are required to write a summary of their dissertations in English (normally not running to more than a page) and the other is dreary doctoral theses on deeply obscure economic theory that, if presented to the likes of Alan Greenspan, I imagine would have him glancing at his watch and settling his distracted gaze on the ceiling tiles.

The former, though shorter, are often morbidly impenetrable texts that, whilst written on fairly straightforward subjects, suffer from a widespread tendency towards overelaboration. Many are the times that I have spent uncomfortable minutes questioning my Portuguese as I stare at the paper utterly confounded, before passing it round the family for second, third and fourth opinions formulated through the use of dictionaries, thesauri and Internet searches. My brother-in-law, who is a brain surgeon, recently took one such summary written by a student of Nursing to his bedroom to engage in some complex codebreaking, only to return half an hour later looking disoriented and mumbling incoherently.

I normally revert to one of two courses of action – strip it down to the barest of bones and produce a text a semi-literate child might copy to practise joined-up writing, or translate it literally into something approaching an extract from Finnegans Wake. The person marking it probably hasn’t even finished Headway Pre-Intermediate (New Edition!) anyway.

Pricing is another can of worms altogether. Eager to seek compensation for the bashing my brains were about to take from another masterpiece of macroeconomic masturbation, for the last thesis I received I resolved to daringly raise my levy by one real (approximately 50 US cents) per page. A deathly, and open-ended, radio silence has since descended.

One of my favourite novelists, Paul Auster, got his big break as a writer when he was asked to translate a Mexican movie script, and was handsomely remunerated for his trouble, according to his account of the episode. I still haven’t given up hope of being contracted by a Brazilian filmmaker, but I suspect that, instead of being financially rewarded, I’d have him cleaning my windows or washing my car for the next five years as part of some kind of primitive barter agreement.

Back to preparing the lessons...

MOTORING ALONG THE SLIP ROAD SIGNPOSTED FREEDOM

Subsistence TEFL teachers are those who neither drifted into the industry on a whim nor decided that it was their calling. They are those enchanted, enviable souls who use TEFL as an easy-going means to earn a living whilst they concentrate on keeping their real passions a-bubbling in the foreground. I fancied myself as something of a subsistence TEFL teacher in the beginning and at various points over my stuttering career, but being a serial procrastinator with an unflinching tendency to do anything but what I should be doing, my attempts have been fruit-free up to now. (You don’t know what it means to me to have managed to start this blog and contribute regularly to it...)

Subsistence TEFL teachers are a fascinating breed, almost as riveting in their driving passions as the oddballs who make of TEFL their own private Idaho. Over the years there have been writers, musicians, artists and, perhaps most admirably of all, a flamenco dancer. Imagine being English and dedicating a couple of decades of your life to learning the uncompromisingly Spanish art of flamenco dancing, eventually getting so good at it that you can teach it to the similarly fixated. Not just teach it, but teach it to Spaniards. In Andalucia. Now that takes cojones, not to mention various pairs of sturdy stomping shoes.

The sad thing about subsistence TEFL teachers is that, just as Joseph Campbell predicted when he recommended that we all “follow our bliss”, the best get so good at what they love that they end up escaping and making something of themselves in their respective fields. This leaves the rest of us a little the lesser, ruing their departure through the dust they kicked up whilst trying not to let out a primal scream when our latest one-to-one student describes his house as being “near from the hospital”, yet again, despite a fortnight of mainly patient correction.

One such subsistence TEFL teacher has gone all the way and turned a passion for dissent into a truly remarkable phenomenon. My good friend D has created a media watchdog called Media Lens that is so respected (and equally despised, which shows they’re on the right track) that he’s been able to find an exit from the TEFL roundabout and is currently motoring along the slip road signposted "Freedom", living from donations alone and having just co-written his third book, “The Guardians of Power”. They are so good, in fact, that they’ve just been awarded the Gandhi Foundation’s International Peace Award for 2007. Their web address is http://www.medialens.org/.

Now that’s as near from a fairytale as TEFL can get...