Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Based on my ongoing research, here is a list of the main differences between a British and a Brazilian Christmas: 1) Alcohol consumption – whereas Christmas Day for many in the United Kingdom starts with a mother of all hangovers, Brazilian boozing is of the “aperitif, anyone?” or the “whoops I must stop now, my nose is tingling” variety, not the headlong dash towards oblivion so popular in northern climes; 2) Family gatherings – unlike many British Christmases, Brazilian family gatherings are generally warm, joyous occasions, with plenty of unisex hugging, kissing and arm squeezing going on throughout proceedings, accompanied by lots of shouting and generalised chaos. Distant uncles from the north of the country don’t tend to get wiped on whisky and challenge the other male members of the family to a fight, whilst keenly expressing the opinion that they are, quote unquote, “the hardest bastard in this family.” Distant uncles from the posh side of the family, that is; 3) Christmas Ev...

Show is dragging me away from the computer and stacking furniture against the door for the festive season, so I hope you both have a good holiday, and here is a beautiful piece of Christmas music, which I and my male voice choir are battering into a rough-hewn masterpiece on Wednesday evenings - goosebumps optional.

Today was one of those rare occasions when I had a light feeling in my chest that intimated a genuine relief at being a TEFL teacher. These sentiments seem to coincide with a caffeine rush, and tend to pass quickly, so I have decided to register my glee despite the late hour. It started with a lesson which surpassed all expectations. I had been warned that I would be giving a class in-company to one of the owners of a small rubber factory (they make rubber products - the factory is made of steel, concrete, etc) and, given that his level was, as a colleague of mine used to groan, “pond life”, I was expecting the usual struggle to maintain even the most basic level of communication for a full hour and a half whilst maintaining a suitably Business English, collared shirt air about things. I had been provided with a couple of sheets with exercises, but to my delight, the affable stick launched into an animated, if barely comprehensible, ‘Allo ‘Allo -style presentation of his “fuctory”...

It has been several generations since a Ward has been able to raise this blood-curdling cry to riff raff, armed only with a flintlock blunderbuss and a baker’s dozen ravening hounds, but it seems this branch of the family’s fortunes may be on the turn after years in the urban wilderness. Our unjust exodus from the country, involving a gentleman-farmer ancestor who drove our clan from the Berkshire Downs with a heady mixture of an ignorance of contraceptive methods, excessive port consumption and an insistence on the employment of a coach and four even for short family trips to public floggings (despite the elevated costs of stabling), may soon be righted, if on an entirely different continent. Show recently went to town ( São Paulo ) with her credit card firmly clamped between her teeth in search of Christmas bargains at a bazar , a place where well-known retailers of haberdashery, drapery and the like offer their wares at knockdown prices, whilst I spent a frustrating afternoon o...

Should you ever be in these parts and happen upon a desperate soul on the parapet of a bridge or a high building intent on plunging to an untidy end, possibly the phrase least likely to dissuade them from seeing it through would be something along the lines of, “Think about all the great television you’ll miss, like Big Brother Brasil…” Yes, against all the precepts of rationality, and as proof that civilization as we know it is truly on the ebb, Big Brother Brasil is back in January for its eighth series, and I for one shall be neither tuning in, nor switching on, but dropping out. I must admit to having watched the program on occasions, when it still had some vestige of interest as a psychological experiment. The first British series was intriguingly puritanical, with participants being forbidden to discuss the voting and having to complete tasks in order to receive food - now that’s a show. The Brazilian version is so watered down and stacked full of product placements and unre...

I know you can't wait any longer. Here are the answers: Who is Student A? - Edgar Allan Poe Who is Student B? - H L Mencken 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? - Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas Which font is "Notes From The TEFL Graveyard" written in? (For readers with Asperger's Syndrome.) - Impact Neither of the entrants got all the questions right, but No Good Boyo takes the biscuit with a sterling 50% pass rate. Just brush up on your Windows fonts and your future is bright. As promised, here is a picture postcard of the local railway station, the first reinforced concrete building to be constructed in Latin America, designed and built by the French arquitect Dubugras in 1906. Its art-deco style is based on an upturned table. Congratulations, No Good Boyo, and thanks for humouring me.

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!

In a previous dirge , I have commented on the widespread tendency amongst Brazilian businesses to make unfulfilled promises to return phone calls. It is ironic, then, that the very school to which I was referring in that regard apparently found my number recently on a scrap of paper stuck to the bottom of somebody’s shoe and decided to call me to invite me to a “group dynamic” in São Paulo . Driven by a childish resentment, my first reaction was to berate them for taking six months to communicate with me, making clear my intolerance of such slapdash practices, and to hang up triumphantly, but my diminishing bank balance, coupled with my wife Show’s eroding peninsular of patience, persuaded me to agree to their demands. On the Sunday before Monday’s group session, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of not wanting to go. I sometimes have these strange and inexplicable intimations of misfortune, but it is hard to tell if they are genuine, or just the result of an idleness-based wishful t...

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...

I feel compelled by my first, and hopefully only, road traffic accident on Brazilian tarmac to spit vitriol about motoring in the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Said collision wasn’t a death-defying forty-vehicle pileup so popular in these parts, it was one of those maddeningly petty knocks that drives the front-seat passenger into a simmering, understated and very British rage that steams up the car windows, whilst the Latin-blooded driver directs language that would be more fitting at a prison uprising at the gap-toothed agricultural labourer cum lorry driver who braked his jalopy using the rear of our stationary hatchback. One of those ball-achingly unnecessary incidents that leaves just enough damage to need costly professional repair, whilst not achieving a level of violence sufficient to merit an insurance claim. The success of motor racing icons such as Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna may have given their countrymen much to cheer about, but ...

" Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called " On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual ," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that, when they occurred, had seemed accidental and of little moment, turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. " ( Quoted The Power of Myth , Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers ) It is indeed a fascinating theory, though one not altogether backed up by my own floundering experience. When I look back on my life, I see less the consistent plot of a novel and more the outline of an episode of the BBC’s early-nineties soap opera fiasco, Eldorado . Most of my big life decisions have been made on a whim, guided by a desire to achieve the most pleasurable and pain-free result. Whilst my contemporaries were carefully choosing their higher education su...

I mentioned in my profile that I once reached the semi-finals of a BBC Talent comedy writing competition. If this sounds grand, perhaps I should add an important caveat, for fear of being classed a fibber. I did, in fact, reach a stage that “less than 10% of the entries got to”, but as the finalists were chosen from this filtered down group, I prefer to describe it as the semi-final, probably a little flatteringly. And the mild feelings of achievement generated by my having been selected within the top 10% are dependent on the assumption that there weren’t 2.4 million entries. Whilst I was initially thrilled by my relative success in the competition, this elation soon became smothered by the clammy palms of regret, as my unbending tendency towards directionless procrastination had yet again brought me down just outside the box. I imagine the other entrants must have beavered away at their manuscripts for months, poring over every word and punctuation mark, carefully crafting a watertig...

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.

TEFL courses tend to ignore the possibility of students spontaneously bursting into tears during lessons, and those of us who have experienced such troubling spectacles are thus left with few guidelines as to how to handle sensitively scenes of sudden and inexplicable emotional meltdown. Barely three months into my TEFL wanderings, I managed to make 66.67% of a class weep in under two hours, setting a personal best that stands until today. And before you jump to the perfectly understandable conclusion that I was teaching children of primary school age, I wasn’t - they were fully grown up Japanese Local Government Officers . In the class there were three students, the Group Leader, a squat, wide, inscrutable blade whose only facial expressions were an occasional stiff smirk and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes, and two twenty-something women from different Japanese Prefectures. It was my first lesson with them, and I’d chosen an exercise that remains one of my fa...

I've always assumed that the lyrics of the song below are satirical. Apparently this man doesn't. (Depending on how much you value your current job, this song could easily be adapted into an entertaining jigsaw listening). GOLDIE LOOKIN CHAIN - BAD BOY LIMP If you wanna make money then you’ve gotta think fast, Phone Claims Direct cos there’s a nail in yer arse, It’s very simple this is one step of two, First hurt yourself, then claim you wanna sue Venereal gash, or is it just whiplash? Call it what you want, just get the fukkin cash. Cash or cheque, trip or fall, You gets over a grand if you rips off yer balls, Can I get a witness? You got a cut or a bruise, Now yer talking business, Oh son put yer face in the fire, If you lose both eyes then the price goes higher, I went to the doctors cos I felt funny, now Claims Direct, they’re giving me money, Pick up the phone, the number is free, remember kids, No win no fee! Chorus- Ring ...

Despite being a self-confessed skeptic of The Secret and its rumblings, I have to admit that starting this blog has had a strangely positive effect on my life. Opportunities have appeared where I wasn’t expecting them, and I’m in the unfamiliar position of having to decide between several work options, a couple of them only distant cousins of TEFL. The only cloud on the horizon is my overpowering proclivity towards procrastination, and the very real danger that my blog turn into just another, slightly more sophisticated form of frenetic dilly dallying. With this fear at the back of my mind, I have resolved to remove most of the third-party functionality and widgets from the Graveyard, the searching out and finding of which have already cost me too many precious hours of my finite lifespan, and which I feel are the principal risk to my new-found productivity. Also banished is Google Adsense, which frankly made no sense. When resolving to include advertising, I was only too aw...

This week I’ve been fairly quiet blogwise as I’ve been bludgeoning my way through a turgid English to Portuguese translation on the telecommunications industry, for which I brilliantly underestimated the time necessary to complete it, and left it all to the last minute anyway, just to make it truly hellish and stressful. Below is a graph showing the Procrastination Algorithm that afflicts me. Any normal, mature adult would have divided the 50 files to be translated into the number of days available and worked steadily and with discipline to complete a reasonable number per day. But not I, for that would break the habit ingrained for at least the past twenty years or so. The fact that the number of files tails off on the last day belies the fact that I left the longest and most densely mindbending to last, showing a breathtaking lack of foresight. Another point of interest has been the Google searches that have brought people here to the TEFL resting place. A peek at Sig...

The Brazilian word “vara” has multiple meanings, including "fishing rod", or, when used in its ribald slang form, "male sexual organ". So avoid having to give awkward explanations, and/or pay expensive legal bills, and/or avoid eye-contact with your father-in-law for several weeks by remembering never to casually offer to show another man your fishing rod when using a public convenience.

I'd just like to say an intercontinental Nice One to my dear friend Lawtey, who was born 38 years ago on this very day. He is in TEFL in Málaga, on the Costa del Sol, Spain, where he wears a beard despite the elevated temperatures, and writes precociously. Lawtey is also author of one of the most fascinating comments on TEFL I've ever heard. It is, he has reasoned, like sitting in a stationary railway carriage in a station when another stationary train is alongside, and when one of the trains starts moving, one doesn't know which it is... I'm not quite sure what he means, yet I am - that's the genius of his observation. He has been known to pop in from time to time and stalk me, and if that's he case, this tiny effort won't have been wasted. Parabéns para você Nesta data querida Muitas felicidades Muitos anos* de vida! (*) - In Brazilian, "anos" doesn't mean "anuses" like it does in Spanish, incidentally.

Tonight my students were listening to a recording and answering comprehension questions on it. As I patrolled the room looking at their answers over their shoulders, one student’s response to question two particularly caught my eye. The fellow had written intriguingly, “colon power”. The strange thing was, he wasn’t replying to the question, “Which of your personal attributes would you describe as a double-edged sword?”, but “Who was the US Secretary of State before Condoleezza Rice?”

Five people again voted, as my stubborn attempts to canvas opinion on vital TEFL issues continues apace. In answer to the, some may say indelicately incomplete, statement, "My TEFL salary is:", the following responses were registered, after a recount: ... none of your bloody business - 0 votes (0%) ... enough to keep the wolf from the door - 1 vote (20%) ... enough to keep the wife from the door - 3 votes (60%) ... enough to keep me in snuff and monogrammed handkerchiefs - 1 vote (20%) ... sub-Saharan - 0 votes (0%) One foppish respondant shares my predeliction for stylishly whistle-clean air intakes, one person believes their income enough to keep wild animals at bay, whilst fully 60% regard their pay as enough to keep their spouse from departing. So there you have it - a TEFL salary won't lose you a wife, but it probably won't gain you one either. There again, it might, depending on whether she's studied numbers in English yet or not. Probably best not to m...

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, b...

Today is Finados, or the Day of the Dead. Brazilians visit graveyards and mope, or spend half a day in a traffic jam to the coast, and mope. I, personally, shall be staying here on the coffee plantation to make sure none of the children try to bunk off work early. There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs here in the sugar-cane-alcohol-fuelled Latin American economy, which is "véspera de feriado", or "public holiday eve". The night before the officially-sanctioned day off, people cancel all non-life threatening engagements in preparation for some intense relaxation - two of my three classes were no shows last night, and I suspect the students will begin to wander back around next Wednesday. One of my private students, who's under pressure from her company to learn Inglês asap, recently cancelled her two-hour Saturday morning lessons until January, due to the barbecue season (similar to the shooting season, but without the Labrador Retrievers) and Christmas ...

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 in...