THIS IS WORSE THAN PRISON

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 threw myself into the classes. My morning student sagged into the room with even less enthusiasm than I had mustered, quite a feat in itself. Having previously studied with another teacher on a different occasion, unlike me, he knew exactly what he was in for. He sat down so gingerly and with such a look of pain on his face that I could only assume a chronic case of haemorrhoids – either that or an overbearing desire to be anywhere else but shut in a cramped budget hotel room for the next five hours with me. In fact, this prospect immediately aroused a palpable resentment between us; it was difficult to weigh up who loathed whom the most, as if we each blamed the other for our wretched predicament.

One hour per page is perhaps an achievable pace if the student is talkative and you can manage to direct them away from the subject matter on various palaverous tangents while you sit back and drift off, all the time pretending to be listening out for their not infrequent errors. However, this student was monosyllabic. If this reticence had been caused by a lack of competence in the English language, then it would have been a fair fight, I could have launched into some very basic grammar explanations to fill in the time. But, alas, his English was reasonable, he just had no desire to use it, probably due to the undercurrent of resentment described previously. I limped to the break scheduled for the two-and-a-half-hour mark, and dashed to the co-ordinator, a smarmy character who glibly replied, “Very nice, very nice,” to everything you said and never listened to the message you were actually trying to convey.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve finished the material, the guy’s too good, he knows all this stuff.”

“What?” he retorted, “You’ve got to drag things out! That material was supposed to last all five hours!”

So it was this official incitement to filibustering that provided the final nail in the coffin for my experience with this particular group of gravediggers in the TEFL Graveyard. The next time they called me I remember having a blazing row with the co-ordinator and slamming the phone down, thus ending forever my involvement in their woeful deceptions. I haven’t lost faith in the immersion concept, I’m just going to choose my bedfellows with a lot more care in future. And I'm going to stick to teaching "Just English - not buisness communication."