Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

The young wench in the picture is Madeleine Albright (name changed to protect her identity). I first met her in late 1995 in a flat in Madrid (for she hails from the Iberian Peninsula) when I was on a lone Inter-railing holiday, a form of excursion not to be recommended, by the way – rather than being feted in bars like an itinerant troubadour with Moleskine and quill in hand, I sat alone feeling deeply miserable and wondering why I hadn’t just gone to Ibiza for a fraction of the cost and tried recreational drugs or something. I was in the Spanish capital returning from Málaga, where I had been staying with my friend Lawtey and his then girlfriend, now lovely wife, Macarena. (Incidentally, should you ever meet her, don’t mention the song – if you do, she’s likely to slash you with any available sharp object). Fellow TEFL hostage Ticket had kindly offered to put me up for the night before my trawl back up to Paris the next day, and Madeleine Albright arrived home in the early ev...

As most of Brazil seems to have been winding down for Christmas since around mid-October, here is my contribution to the festive season, based on my blog logo: Who is Student A? Who is Student B? Which poem do the closing lines, "Time held me green and dying, Though I sang in my chains like the sea" come from, and who wrote it? Which font is "Notes From The TEFL Graveyard" written in? (For readers with Asperger's Syndrome.) If you include your address, the prize will be a postcard with a picture of the local railway station, the first reinforced concrete building to be constructed in Latin America (postage not included). Good luck!

As in most spheres of human activity, TEFL is swimming with competent, bottom-rung classroom staff doing their best whilst managed by high flying buffoons. When working abroad, we often find that school owners don’t have the remotest idea about the realities of language teaching - indeed the majority doesn’t even speak English. In Spain I was kept under the tight-fisted cosh of a slippery accountant with whom I struggled to explain my absences in an awkward sign language; here in Brazil I was just this week interviewed for an English teaching job in Portuguese. If I didn’t speak the language, I suspect that, despite my unquestionable staying power, I would not even have been called, for reasons of practicality. Franchises are deeply popular here and have, in my opinion, an unwarranted reputation for excellence. Their names don’t exactly conjure instantly recognisable mental images related to the learning of the world’s lingua franca – Wizard, Yazigi and the psychedelic Pink an...

Most TEFL teachers have at some point at least entertained the idea of coming hither with the foreign students they are charged with enlightening, and those who deny fostering such designs are liars, fools, or both – it is the only perk. The flames of our duplicitous tendencies are often inexplicably fanned by the fact that a majority of English-seeking visitors to our mountains green seem to lose all sense of discernment when confronted with an otherwise average Joe with a face puffy with drink, a whiteboard marker and hazardously dated fashion sense. Let me come clean now and say that my experience of this kind of horseplay is relatively limited - TEFL philanderers have always provoked in me a profound mistrust. No sooner have they waved off some damp-eyed maiden at Heathrow Terminal 3, than they’re hovering around the Information Desk posing as a taxi driver ready to whisk off, and get some sober groundwork in with, another perfumed delight eager to be hoisted off the TEFL bagg...

The TEFL Graveyard Poll has now closed, with a staggering seven votes, two of which I made from different computers in a misguided attempt to get the ball rolling. In answer to the question, “ If I could teach English to anybody living or dead, my choice would be... ”, the results, in reverse order, are as follows: Mother Teresa (Albanian nun) – 0 votes (0 %) – Perhaps unsurprising this one. Selfless acts of altruism need no translation. Marcel Marceau (French mime) – 0 votes (0%) – Given that Monsieur Marceau spent his life communicating in his own unique form of sign language, it can only be assumed that he didn’t even speak French, perhaps due to having no roof to his mouth or summat. Bit of a trick option that one. Tabatha Cash (French liberal) – 1 vote (14%) – Although she has sadly now retired, I became an admirer of Ms Cash’s work as a socially inept adolescent. I’ve always wondered about her opinions on the future of European Union integration and whether the Maastricht Trea...

"In order to activate your account, please reply to this message with the following information: First Name: Last Name: Username on Forum: Address: Phone Number: Info about yourself, and a detailed explanation for joining:" All I wanted to do was take a quick look at Mr D Sperling's jobs forum. We are all aware of the post-9/11 scenario, but isn't this a little excessive? And no, I am not, have never been and never intend to be a member of the TEFL Liberation Front. The second part of the last item seems a little redundant, considering it's a jobs forum, where, presumably, the principle objective is finding employment. What does he keep in there that requires such clandestine information gathering...?

Sometimes we are in situations where it is inadvisable to let out a crass, reflexive guffaw when something strikes us as particularly jocular or ludicrous, and the TEFL classroom is often just such a setting. We know it’s wrong to show reactions of mirth when students make mistakes or inadvertently utter balderdash, but sometimes the undisguisable absurdity of their declarations simply overwhelms us. I recently taught two young ladies who I assumed were a pair of rollicking wenches studying English just for the sheer, unbridled revelry it bestowed, given their collapse into initially charming bouts of adolescent giggling every time I asked them a question in English. After several rounds of blushing and tittering in response to my attempts at addressing them with simple questions, I reverted to chatting to them in Portuguese. “So, what do you do?” I asked them. “We’re teachers,” they replied, stifling a chuckle. “Really? That’s interesting,” I responded, “what do you teach?” “Engl...

Today I had a spiritless Hancock’s Half Hour* of a class with a student of mine. The theme of the lesson was “At the Restaurant”. I had made up thirty situations in a restaurant that the student had to complain about, things like, “A diner on a neighbouring table has started smoking, and you are sitting in a non-smoking area. Wound him with intent,” and “The waiter accidentally brushed up against your / your partner’s ample bosom when serving the wine. File a sexual harrassment complaint with the maitre d’.” You know, everyday situations. I patiently barnstormed virtually every possible known English structure for making complaints since the Great Vowel Shift and wrote them on the board. This student has been studying English for ALMOST TEN YEARS (though, in my defence, I have been awkwardly bound to her in the linguistic equivalent of a three-legged race for only six months.) The relevant language was ON THE BOARD . She has a “good job” in an AMERICAN MULTINATIONAL COMPANY . This...

I suspect all TEFL teachers start off eager to apply the lessons they learned on their month-long Certificate course. They carefully choose how to Present, Practise and Produce or Test, Teach, Test, formulating their lesson plans with a genuine concern that the subject matter be interesting, clear and relevant, some even staying up into the early hours crayoning and cutting and pasting until they have achieved something approximating the perfect lesson. Sadly, rarely in my experience do students share the same enthusiasm for elaborately decorated or cunningly crafted classroom materials, however pedagogically sound and well-intentioned. We all soon learn that, by having a two-minute read through of the textbook in the break before lesson starts and winging it, we not only avoid a lot of extra work and save a fortune on craft materials, but we also gain the time to have something resembling a life. There is one facial expression that is commonly identifiable in all new TEFL classes....

Some conceal it better than others, but all TEFL teachers desperately want to be liked. This may coincidentally stem from a generalised and chronic lack of self-esteem (perhaps the subject of a future post), but may have more to do with professional (used in the loosest possible sense of the word) survival. My own bête noir was the pink forms that used to sit on the Principal’s desk every Friday, mocking us with their pale pastel pigment. Where I worked students had to complete a questionnaire at the end of the course, and one question in particular drew morbid visions of Judge Jeffries donning the black cloth before pronouncing sentence. It read, “Please write the name of your teacher and choose one of the options that follow: Very Good, Good, Satisfactory or Bad.” One particular colleague of mine, E, used to neurotically grab the pile of forms at the end of every week and read through them avidly with the expression of a man dreading he’s been written out of a millionaire relat...

If we indulge in a little idle wordplay, even the acronym TEFL (pronounced “teffle” for the uninitiated) has peculiar onomatopoeic connotations. It sounds a little like “piffle” or “sniffle”, or perhaps most fittingly, “skiffle”. TEFL is the skiffle of the educational world, a little faded and outdated, populated by eccentric, tweedy people, the poor cousin of state school teaching, the bastard nephew of university lecturing. Just as TEFL teachers spend a large portion of their free time cutting and pasting to make their own materials, in much the same way skiffle artistes entertain themselves by making their own madcap musical instruments. If there is ever a blockbuster movie made about TEFL, the soundtrack will simply have to feature the Doghouse Skiffle Group .

If the title of this blog sounds melodramatic, even Poe-esque, that's kind of the idea. Metaphor plays to the right side of the brain, the creative side. My main point is that, once in one, a graveyard is a hard place to get out of, and so it is with Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I should know, I stumbled into the TEFL graveyard a baker's dozen years ago at a time when my contemporaries were chasing their dreams and hatching their lifeplans. Rather than swim off in search of adventure and distant, unimaginable horizons, I made the unconscious decision to tread some water for a decade or two. Recently I have come to the conclusion that it's easier to leave organised crime than it is to leave TEFL. Once a TEFL teacher always a TEFL teacher, give me a man and I'll show you the TEFL teacher. But there is hope. Buddhists say the art of living is to totally accept suffering. Drowning isn't supposed to be half as bad if you stop struggling (yeah, like the person ...