EX-SOLDIERS DON'T MAKE GOOD TEFL TEACHERS

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 voice that appeared to be some kind of attempt at an imitation. Few found this irresistible and many found it intensely aggravating, as far as I could tell as a captivated bystander. The thing was, he wouldn’t just do it once or twice in a conversation as some form of manic ice-breaker, he’d insist on incessantly repeating every answer, over and over again. (In fact, it never passed two or three phrases, as the focus of his amorous intentions had normally walked away, or at least turned her back on him, by then.) But you couldn’t help but admire his determination and self-discipline, he simply refused to yield to the obvious.

L’s professional fall from grace was as spectacular as it was sudden. No sooner had he arrived and joined our jaundiced ranks than within a fortnight he appeared in the Principal’s office accused of gross misconduct. He had been teaching grammar to a group of Pre-Intermediate students and, perhaps not entirely acquainted with the realities of “super-intensive” English courses, had tested the class and insisted they re-do a chapter due to their widespread and abject failure.

“Super-intensive” English courses are, in reality, all about covering as much material in class as possible, however superficially, giving copious handouts and padding out students’ files so that they can contentedly look at the tome later and say, with a misplaced sense of achievement, “I learned all that on the super-intensive English course.” L, no doubt following the principles of his military training in refusing to cut corners, repudiated the class’s attempts at subterfuge and expressed his determination to see justice done to the chapter. It was to prove a fateful error of judgement.

There was a middle-aged German woman in the group (my colleague E later used her story as kindling for his smouldering anti-German delusions – see YOU, SIR, ARE A DEMENTED BIGOT for more on this), and she proved to be more than a match for L’s pugnacious inflexibility. Her response to his plan to revise the last chapter was an implacable, “Nein”. As is a common tactic among disgruntled students, she made her personal opinions appear collective by using the pronoun “we” instead of “I”, thus compelling L to feel like a Christian going solo in the Colloseum, encircled by some not insubtantial mousers. Under such duress, as L himself later recounted, “a red mist just descended”. His voice rising an octave, he shrieked histrionically, “If you were a bloke, I’d punch the sh*t out of you!”

Judging by the conspicuously frosty atmosphere when I later entered the room to teach the same class, despite not yet having covered the Second Conditional (If + past simple + would), everyone had caught the drift of L’s somewhat infelicitous example. L himself saw out the rest of that week, then disppeared as quickly as he had arrived - missing in action, presumed red-carded.