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 is how she thought she could summon the manager of the despicable pigpen of an eatery:
“I would like him to the manager please.”
The best part of a decade. Where do you fricking start? If I’d been better able to disguise my disillusionment I would have regaled her with an explanation about verbs being “doing” words, and that most sentences need at least one in order to convey “meaning”, which, after all, is the purpose of our emitting these peculiar grunting noises. But I just couldn’t face it. I let it slip by without so much as a wince or an overexcited belly laugh. This is what is happening all over the world, twenty-four hours a day. English students are talking gibberish and teachers are letting it go, whilst both are respecting an unspoken pact in pretending that there’s some serious schooling going on. In any other profession we’d be exposed and clapped in irons by nightfall.
I've been trying to think of a parallel. Imagine if you paid for your daughter to have horseriding lessons for ten years. One day, you decided to go and watch her compete in a dressage competition for the first time, and she climbed on the horse facing backwards. You’d want some pretty good answers from the stable owner, wouldn’t you? Yet this is what TEFL is, it's the Emperor's New Clothes. We all want to be deceived. Teachers want to hang stubbornly on to the belief that they’re not wasting their precious lives completely, and students want to be able to proudly tell friends, relatives and employers that they’re “doing English”, like infants sporting their “I am five” badge.
A sobering final word from Dorothy Parker: "Time doth flit; oh shit."
* - Hancock’s Half Hour was a British radio and TV comedy series starring the somewhat morose deadpan comedian Tony Hancock (12 May 1924 – 24 June 1968). Hancock committed suicide in a hotel room in Sydney, Australia after battling for years with alcoholism and depression. One of his suicide notes read, “Things just went wrong too many times.” Another read, “It’s this or TEFL.”
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