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, they bluntly informed me that they were no longer willing to do wine tasting functions, as the previous year they had lugged crates of wine to the school in the expectation of a successful entry into the wine export market, only to achieve disappointing first quarter sales – the students had purchased absolutely nothing. I protested that they were already paying a fee for the evening, and that therefore the off-licence wasn’t set to lose anything, but the woman was as surly as she was adamant. Business definitely came before pleasure, not just in the dictionary.
Given this unexpected twist to the plot, I was facing another challenging evening, intimated by a familiar sinking feeling. Thinking on my feet, I remembered that a local pub was having a quiz evening, and I made a snap decision that several teams from the school would be entering. I dashed around the classes to convey this last-minute change of plans, and judging by the raised eyebrows and rueful shaking of heads that greeted the news, my disordered clowning wasn’t universally winning me admirers.
Something strange happens when groups of foreign students go to British pubs. We would perhaps expect them to spend the evening animatedly exchanging opinions and cultural experiences, making comparisons between their native countries and traditions, but in reality, the majority sit around tables in big groups in deathly silence, as if they have awkwardly stumbled into the wrong wedding reception, or perhaps the wrong funeral. I have never been able to pinpoint exactly why this should be. Maybe it’s the tumultuous volume at which many pubs insist on playing music (if I’d wanted to go to a disco, I’d have gone to a disco), or the increasingly intrusive presence of televisions (if I’d wanted to watch TV, I’d have stayed in), which, however hard we try, can’t help but attract our captivated attention, like somebody on a neighbouring table in a restaurant making a loud complaint about finding a foreign body in their food. I suspect globalisation has had a hand in things, as most young peoples’ values are now so intimately tied to those of Nike, Adidas and The Gap that looking at foreign students it is impossible to guess by their appearance from whence they hail. It’s as if they’ve all just come off the same, culture-free production line.
Another truism is that pub quizmasters are invariably egocentric bores who use the evening to perform their artless stand-up comedy routine, which they believe still has some mileage in it, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Instead of simply asking the questions in a clear, articulate voice, they become a poor man’s Ronnie Corbett, sitting in his black leather chair on The Two Ronnies telling waffling shaggy dog stories.
The combination of these two factors gave me a strong urge to put a brick through the off-licence window on my way home. After a couple of incomprehensible questions, the frustrated students reverted to the sullen group silence routine, downing pens and sitting back from their tables, their body langauge much easier to interpret than the quizmaster’s inane burbling. Understanding possibly one word in every ten, I fancied they were wondering if they shouldn’t just jack in the English course and go home, the bewildering evening’s events only going to confirm their utter lack of progress in the English language. I thought about trying to run from group to group to explain the questions in easy-to-grasp sentences, but I’d probably be accused of cheating and banned for life from all pub quizzes in the region. In the end, I decided to buy several more pints of Guinness and sip my way into a numbed, disinterested place where I briefly believed nobody could inconvenience me ever again.
Part Four to follow shortly...
One of the commonest figures to be found within TEFL is the aspiring administrator. This is a teacher who, often drained by years of repetitive, poorly remunerated clowning around in the classroom, seeks a position managing other teachers, such as Director of Studies (aptly and attractively known as "Doss"), from which they can sit in an imaginary TEFL director’s chair smoking a cigar, bellowing, “CUT!” and enjoying not having to pull a linguistic rabbit out of a hat twelve times a day, five days a week. I include myself within this TEFL subgenre, although my past experiences of administration have left me with an odd yearning to get back into the classroom and be king of my own modest sandcastle. In 2005, whilst I was working in HR at a local factory, my Brazilian friend Bert and I decided to start our own school. I had recently managed to wriggle out of a honey trap I’d set for myself, when I offered to give a free English course to my colleagues in the factory’s Training a...
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but I guess this is all useless discussion now.