Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Experience has shown me that TEFL is populated by a rich patchwork of humanity, from driven, career-seeking go-getters to odd misfits who seem happy to let normal life go on around them. An ex-colleague of mine had a running joke with his students that we were all taking part in a vast hoax, teachers were pretending they were teaching and students were feigning being students, but, unbeknownst to us all, we were in fact inmates in some form of mental institution. It was a popular joke at which most people laughed, some rather more uncomfortably than others. Looking back now, the warning signs were there on my month-long TEFL Certificate course in B, where in a rainy November I spent four weeks in the company of as big a cross-section of mental health as can be imagined. As with everything TEFL, the course involved a lot of pairwork, and I became aware of a fellow TEFL graveyard aspirant, hereby known as D, who would virtually run into the room to sit next to me when classes began....

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 ...