Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Every TEFL teacher experiences awkward classroom moments. It may be an unanswerable question exposing knowledge gaps, or unkind comments directed by one student towards another, or even unsubtle criticism aimed at the teacher (I once heard of a student who remarked, “You are very boring today!” after the teacher yawned in class. “Bored,” the teacher corrected him, “You mean bored. Boring means I am boring you – you are bored by me.” “I know,” the student replied flatly, “that’s exactly what I mean.”) Students using foul language is a constant source of discomfort in many a TEFL classroom. It’s not that we are particularly prudish or that we never swear ourselves, but there’s always an unsmiling student peering malevolently over ridiculously-shaped spectacles who you know is just itching to report any deviation from what she thinks a language class should be to your superiors and demand a refund, plus compensation for emotional damage suffered. There is also at least one larie smart ars...

Before ending this opulent trilogy, let us return to the hotel that hosted the weekend’s farcical events that were laughably described as, “more than English - business communication.” Having received the morning’s materials, I spent the remaining ten minutes before class skimming over their contents. To my dismay, the signs weren’t auspicious. What masqueraded as carefully devised course content was, in fact, material scanned from various business English textbooks and printed on the school’s headed paper, thus giving the illusion of studied professionalism whilst at the same time hiding highly illegal copyright infringement. I counted the pages in my bundle. It didn’t take long - there were five. Only then did it dawn on me that I was about to enter a five-hour class armed with five pages, some of which comprised a couple of ten-minute exercises. “A page an hour,” a resigned colleague wearily observed, noting my sudden loss of the will to live. Lacking any means of escape, I gamely t...

Before continuing, perhaps I should expand a little on the inglorious outfit that offered said immersion programs. A cursory visit to their website certainly gives the impression that the company is a market leader in immersion courses. “More than English,” their motto breezes, “business communication”. An animated Flash intro to their site uses punchy buzzwords, such as “Global Business Adaptation” and “Executive Education”, enough to give any visitor the urge to slip into a sharp suit and find somebody with whom to start negotiating. Unfortunately, it is the customary hands-down (to hyphenate or not to hyphenate...?) victory of style over substance. Anyone can think up clever slogans. Delivering a product that actually teaches people English efficiently is the real challenge, and to them this, their rightful responsibility, was regarded as a mere distraction, as I and my browbeaten colleagues discovered to our mental torment. The timetable was punishing. Classes started at eigh...

In my opinion, immersion courses are officially a Great Idea. For students without the resources to study in an English-speaking country, what could be a better alternative than spending the whole day, over a period of several days, being exposed to comprehensible input, to coin a term familiar to Stephen Krashen acolytes? Unfortunately, having experienced immersion courses run by shysters and charlatans, many preferable alternatives come to mind, from banging one’s head repeatedly against a firm surface, to watching adult DVDs dubbed into English from the original German and with subtitles in English switched on (actually, a variation on how I learned Spanish...*) My first contact with the concept of immersion courses came here in Brazil, when I was offered a job with a company teaching Business English to groups of employees from various large companies. Their client list was imposing: Sony, Gradiente (a Brazilian electronics manufacturer), Petrobras (a Brazilian BP), insuran...

I' m delighted to report that an ex-colleague has been in touch regarding this blog. Delighted because it means at least one person outside my immediate family has actually read what I'm scribbling. She kindly pointed out a number of factual inaccuracies regarding A, star of the previous post, "From Russia With Gloves". Being lazy, rather than rewrite the story, I am happy to put the record straight as follows: "...I would like to correct some of the stuff about that the girl who dyed her hair and went for the short skirts. She was actually from Azerbaijan and for me the funniest thing (oh no, not the funniest - there were so many moments) was when she came with her Dad - and looked all sweet and innocent - sitting in the chair with her knees together and her hands clasped - in an outfit that resembled Alice in Wonderland (hair band and all)... Dad sat there explaining about his daughter - I am not sure what he was really saying but obviously stuff about ...

Whilst it is wrong to generalise about cultures, it must be said that Russian students are relentlessly intriguing. Perhaps it is something to do with growing up during the Cold War, when all we saw of Russians were intimidating Soviet women shotputters and grim communist march-pasts in Red Square. By the early-to-mid nineties the trickle of students into England from the former Soviet republics became steady, as did the resulting frequency of bizarre interludes. Firstly, there was G, a huge, twenty-one-year-old bear of a Muscovite and avid boxer who excelled at telling macabre stories that invariably involved him fighting his brother, a lot of blood being shed and without exception ended with jolly descriptions of his distraught mother helpless to intervene to stop the carnage. Such tales were regularly recounted whatever the subject of the lesson, and any gaps in his vocabulary were filled by him standing up and reconstructing the conflict, swinging wild punches and viciously kne...

The reasons why people study English at a language school in a foreign country are many and various, and they don’t always have a whole lot to do with improving language skills. Parents send daughters abroad to try to separate them from unsuitable suitors, children are hastily dispatched in the unlikely hope that the experience may cure psychological disturbances, couples imagine that a crumbling marriage may be saved by that long-dreamed-of holiday abroad. Seldom are these artifices successful, and sometimes the results can be alarming, sometimes plain absurd. At a certain school where I worked there was a small cottage in the grounds surrounded by a walled courtyard with a gate, which was kept locked for security reasons when the building wasn’t in use as a secluded, executive classroom for one-to-one Business English students. One evening at a school barbecue, staff became alarmed by cries for help emanating from behind the wall, and on trying to open the gate, as expected, th...

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...

Truth, as the old cliché goes, is often stranger than fiction. Everyone remembers the classic Fawlty Towers episode, “The Germans”, where John Cleese’s eponymous character, Basil, receives a bang on the head and, suffering from concussion, proceeds to insult a visiting group of German tourists by making relentless reference to the Second World War. It is as much a comment on British obsession with the conflict as it is about German sensitivities. We laugh because the situation is so extreme, and we accept Basil’s ranting due to the bandages wrapped around his head. Sadly, my ex-colleague, E, had no such mitigating appendages. E didn’t so much behave as if he didn’t know the war was over, he acted as if he wouldn’t be satisfied until the next one had begun. Like a deranged Basil Fawlty, the subject of his ire was everything German, the country, the people, the language. Even the German-speaking Swiss were condemned by association. The supreme irony was that E had in fact chosen to s...

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 .

Thinking about it, I suspect tales of madness will be a prominent theme of this blog. It is difficult to tell if a propensity towards lunacy leads people into the profession of EFL teaching or whether years of inane chats about holidays and food with people who are barely able to chat back eventually wear down even the brightest and the best, grey-matter-wise. (I'm not sure if I should have hyphenated there – years of TEFL and it’s still a grey area for me...) P was one of those itinerant colleagues who’d turn up every summer, each time slightly more sagging and crumpled than the last. The first summer I met him he boasted to me that he’d been to the 1994 World Cup in the USA and had “almost interviewed Maradonna”. I thought it a strange claim to fame, like me saying I “almost slept with Angeline Jolie” because she happened to visit England once. One of the things we learn on TEFL courses is that we should teach language that’ll be useful for who’s learning it. P was unfe...