Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Should you ever apply for a job in Brazil, or have any contact with enterprises with more than a couple of employees, learn to take with a large, high-blood-pressure-inducing pinch of salt their promises to call you. There’s no need to wait up anxiously by the phone, or rush out to buy a mobile in case they call when you’re out. When they say they’ll contact you, they’re just being nice - or trying to get rid of you. I’ve just looked in my diary. On 19 June 2007 at oh nine hundred hours I went to a language school in nearby Sorocaba that I’d applied to for a teaching job, to do a test of English grammar and comprehension. This is supposed to be the school that offers the best pay and conditions available anywhere in the region. I had to sign a paper agreeing to go through the whole recruitment rigmarole, the test, followed by an interview and finally a battery of psychometric evaluations (I bet those results make interesting reading. I imagine many a mental TEFL teacher stumbles a...

I’m not a great aficionado of football, but my hearty congratulations go out to the Brazilian women’s team who have today reached the World Cup final, beating the USA for the first time by a score of 4-0. The standard of play from both teams was at times breathtaking, showing that even in football, women are stealing a march on us menfolk. There was little diving and rolling around as if caught in crossfire in a bank robbery, with both teams exhibiting a workwomanlike dedication, individual flair providing moments of exquisite drama. I personally will be following the scandalously overlooked women’s game more closely in future. The men’s game has long since lost its soul to seven-figure salaries, with players apparently preferring a career in modelling, sportswear marketing or professional celebrity to actually playing the game they are fortunate enough to be richly talented at. Football is now officially my second favourite women's sport, after beach volleyball (amateur or pr...

The handsome brute in the picture is Moby, my beloved mongrel. I found him abandoned in a car park with his siblings, aged one month, and I adopted him. Who needs breeding? Just look at the noble lines, the aristocratic bearing. Even his legs are in proportion with his body, a comparative rarity for a dog of dubious parentage. Moby is the canine equivalent of a Kray twin - I’m not sure which one, I always get my psychotic thugs confused – the one ex-Spandau Ballet star Gary Kemp most convincingly portrayed in the film (I bet that casting director never worked in movies again – he’s probably a TEFL teacher in Ulan Bator.) Walking the streets with Moby is like going on a pub crawl with a distant Irish cousin who hasn’t been sober since Live Aid. I spend the entire time engaged in conflict resolution, dragging him out of fights and helping him intimidate aggressive strays – not that he needs any help, normally. Even cocky Pit Bulls start hyperventilating as he approaches. Stran...

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...

Looking back on my arrival in Brazil over five years ago, I recognise now that I was carrying some pretty hefty cultural baggage. I was expecting things to be like in Britain, only slightly more half-baked and with more fresh fruit juices. I was counting on a reliable postal service, an adequate banking system and reasonable public services. In fact, I spent the first few months here in a state of perpetual malhumour, interspersed by unpredictable bouts of seething, railing, fuming and frothing. The source of my ire was the blithering, and ongoing, idiocy of Brazilian bureaucracy. The difference now is that I have gone so far native that I patiently view my burlesque encounters with collective public enterprise with a sentimental, heart-softening whimsy. This acceptance of the unacceptable is why the unacceptable becomes acceptable – nobody can be arsed to make a decent case for change, let alone organise, protest, start a petition, etc. After all, why get all stiff-jawed when there ar...

Just as video killed the radio star, professionalism killed rugby union. The early games in the 2007 Rugby World Cup have been uniformly unedifying spectacles, as a sport that used to promote flair, courage and audacity has descended into a turgid, predictable waste of human energy. Watching the sport’s giants crush the so-called minnows is like witnessing the psychotic school bully deliver a sickening beating to the eccentric school swot, try after unstoppable try like a litany of original and devilishly cruel methods of breaking somebody’s arm. Rugby used to be a game for those not blessed with any particular sporting talent. Fatso could comfortably pack down with titch, and the team would be none the worse for it. Welsh rugby legends such as Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett weren’t large buggers at all, the latter being informed as a child that he’d never be big enough to play rugby (I’ve read his autobiography, “Everywhere for Wales”.) Edwards played a record 53 consecutive gam...

PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED. YOU HAVE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE. The eagle-eyed will notice that I've changed the template, font and colours of my blog (I've always been a huge fan of Trebuchet MS.) This is a feature of my seemingly bottomless capacity for procrastination. The almost infinite formatting options offered by an Excel spreadsheet will keep me amused into the small hours, like an infant in a sandpit. In fact, I had a sandpit when I was an infant, perhaps that's the root of my procrastination... Anyway, get used to it, it's just what I do.

In my final week of being misleadingly described as Social Organiser, I had reached a serene state in which I was past caring about pleasing the terminally sullen, making small talk to the genetically petulant or trying to seduce the unrelentingly critical. As far as I was concerned, the experiment had failed, the shop had held its closing down sale, and after seeing out the week, I would never again be foolish enough to volunteer to be a poorly remunerated stand-in for a Butlins redcoat. Being nice to foreign students is no way to make a living, I had concluded. The very last event I concocted that summer was a boat trip, to be held on the last Friday evening in August, which would be my last night with the students, most of whom would be going their various ways over the weekend. The voyage would start from a local quay, head out across the harbour and up a river to a small historical market town. Then, after an hour, we would gently chug back. The way things were going I was fully p...

The summer’s social programme had limped unspectacularly along with my having gained a reputation for an innate inability to organise a drink in a brewery. It was, I resolved, time to show some devil may care panache. Eager to take advantage of the glorious local coastline, I’d recently taken a group of students for an unexpectedly arduous beach walk which could have comfortably comprised a special forces training exercise due to my gross underestimation of distance / time relationships. What I had imagined would last a couple of hours at most had actually taken over five, most students arriving home disorientated by the darkness that had already fallen. In true British fashion, all the cafés en route were closed by that time of night, and the buses had long since stopped running. Looking back along the seafront at the bedraggled survivors was like watching dehydrated runners at the end of a marathon, their brains having long since lost touch with their wildly elastic lower limbs. I wa...

Anxious to make amends for the sausage shortfall fiasco, for my next trick I decided to arrange a stately evening of wine tasting, whose sophisticated appeal I fancied would regain some of my recently barbecued credibility. Such a refined affair had proven popular in previous years, particularly with the Business English contingent of the school’s population, and it was this body of the crowd to whom I was shamelessly playing. For my part, the logistics were eminently manageable. All I had to do was buy and cut into cubes a few lumps of cheese and invite the local off-licence to send a representative, who would bring a selection of wines for the students’ delectation and give a brief talk on them, in return for a small per-head fee to cover costs. No sausages, no chicken and absolutely no beefburgers would be involved. My best-laid plans started to go tits uppermost when the off-licence returned my call just hours before the event was due to begin. Rather than confirm arrangements, the...

The first murmurings of what was to become known as The Summer of Discontent were evident at a school barbecue early in my tenure as Social Organiser. As I was busily stoking up the fires and unpacking the meat products, I noticed a group of mainly German-speaking students had gathered in a huddle on the far side of the school gardens, like torch-bearing villagers on a secretive witch-hunt. The whiff of discord was stronger than the stink of white-hot charcoal. Seconds later, my pulse started racing as I noticed a messenger from the group approaching. “We will not eat beefburgers,” he informed me curtly, “because of the mad cows.” I smiled on the inside, having already foreseen just such a reaction to concerns that had recently been raised over links between eating British beef and the human form of BSE. Concerns that I myself shared, in fact. “Don’t worry,” I said calmly, “I have plenty of chicken and sausages.” The messenger nodded, turned on his heel and left to report b...

In theory, the TEFL-specific position of Social Organiser definitely has its charms, an obvious one being a fully financed social life at somebody else’s expense. When I first started teaching, the individual who at the time occupied the post glided skilfully around all summer like a sequined Come Dancing natural, alternately the master of ceremonies, the life and soul of the various parties he organised, and the subject of seemingly constant infatuations involving as wide a variety of the female species as it is possible to cram into a busy seaside language school in the middle of a British summer. These factors combined, it took little to convince me that I was a Social Organiser in waiting. One day, I fantasised, I would return triumphant and, like a Pied Piper without the period costume and the tin whistle, I would lead my students on a merry dance in my vacant hours, perhaps even emulating the near-fatal attraction that my colleague unmistakably exercised over virtually every memb...

This is the first of an occasional series highlighting famous people who worked in TEFL. It will be interesting to see if a history of extreme poverty, mental illness, alcohol or substance abuse, or other psychological trauma can be detected as a feature common to their biographies. Please feel free to contribute names to the list of prospective TEFL Graveyard Spectres. To get the ball rolling, here is a revealing excerpt from Wikipedia on Irish literary legend, James Joyce. A century on, it appears little has changed in the often murky underworld of Teaching English as a Foreign Language... “... Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his alcoholic binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries. “... Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first ...

One of the most successful DVD releases in recent years, at least here in Brazil, has been The Secret (2006), a film purporting to show a link between positive thinking and material wealth. (I apologise if this is an over-simplification, but time is money... especially if you think positively about it, apparently.) Using the “Law of Attraction” as a guiding principle, the film claims (without presenting concrete evidence, it must be noted) that some of the most successful figures in human history knew about and used “The Secret” (ie the “Law of Attraction”) in order to fulfill their often momentous ambitions. The film, partly a series of dramatisations, partly interviews with various supposed present day beneficiaries of the phenomenon, reports extraordinary advances in material wealth and career prospects after the featured individuals got wind of the previously classified formula. Well into the second half of 2007, the related book is still at the top of the best-sellers list here i...

Brazilians, a popular saying goes, are descendants of Italians trying to be Americans; Argentines are descendants of Italians trying to be British. I’m unilaterally willing to grant UK citizenship to the lads in a rather effeminate blue and white after they put Les Bleus to the sword at the Stade de France yesterday in the opening tie of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Their win passed without event here in the Brazilian countryside, due to a confused apathy surrounding the sport of rugby union, coupled with a pandemic antipathy towards Brazil’s southern neighbours. During the last football World Cup, more fireworks were ecstatically discharged, more beer quaffed and more samba feverishly improvised after Argentina’s elimination than after all Brazilian victories put together. If Ireland can survive the group of death with Argentina, Wales’ path to the Cup is assured. (Humour me...)

Something happens to many British males in late adolescence that I haven’t identified to the same degree in any of the other cultures with which I have come into contact. We begin to regard the consumption of alcohol not as a complementary side dish to the plat du jour of our social life, but as a bargain bucket main course from Chicken Delight , to be dispatched without regard for the often disconcerting consequences. My heroes in my late teens were all drunks. I admired Hemingway and Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski and Doors frontman Jim Morrison , winos to a man. To me, tales of Oliver Reed’s legendary piss-artistry weren’t the lachrymose testimony to a wasted acting talent, they were cause for an undeserved Oscar nomination . Despite never having written anything of note, except rambling poems composed after a night out on a bender, and to which I’d spend the next day trying to attribute meaning other than a latent bisexuality , I considered myself a writer, and imbibed accor...

One of the many things I love about Brazil is the copious use of nicknames, which are often creative and humorous and help to forge informal bonds of friendship, even affection. A couple of years ago, during an all-too-brief interlude, I actually worked doing something other than teaching English (before my cover was blown and I was unceremoniously defrocked – more about this another time.) I had muddled my way into the Human Resources department of a large Brazilian metallurgical company, immediately receiving the sobriquet, “Chuck Norris”, due to the surly, if not exactly intimidating, photo on my company id badge. Every large Brazilian company has to have an Internal Committee for the Prevention of Accidents, or CIPA, whose members are elected by co-workers. When the list of candidates circulated the factory it was a positive orgy of name-calling. As virtually nobody in the factory was known by the name they were christened with, the list had to include the contender’s real nam...

If recent experience is anything to go by, I would strongly suggest that those responsible for advising retiring soldiers on future career options cross TEFL off the list of possible alternatives. The wisdom of advocating a career requiring sometimes superhuman patience in dealing with foreigners to somebody who has spent a number of years being trained and armed to kill them is certainly questionable. L, a former member of the Parachute Regiment, provided ample evidence in his brief, incendiary career of the challenges involved in keeping a lid on conditioned aggression in the TEFL boiler room. L was a curious character, something of a loner, probably because he had come to B to work and had no roots in the area. This meant that he tended to socialise with teaching colleagues, and by association foreign students, with regularity. He had an odd technique of coming on to women which basically involved him asking them a question, then repeating their answer in a fatuous, high-pitched...