Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

My new best friend, Number 24, the blunt Yorkshireman, really came into his own during the leadership tests. These comprised a variety of apparatus including scaffolding towers, planks and ropes, and unwieldy objects such as oil drums and ammunition boxes to be transported across gaping voids, all without touching the ground. Each of us in turn was taken aside from the group, briefed on the task to be performed, then ordered to gather our company together, pass the instructions succinctly on to them and lead them through to a successful conclusion. That was the theory, at least. Two Majors were in charge of this part of the proceedings, one an impatient, elongated ghoul and the other a frightfully well-spoken middle-aged gym mistress. The latter kept us jogging on the spot (there’s an awful lot of that going on in the Army) as we waited to be summoned to tackle the next asinine challenge. She also made each of us complete a verbal assignment whilst we were idling. Number 24 was in...

If I can blame anybody but myself for my failure to enroll at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in September 1995, it would have to be Number 21. (In order to strip us of our humanity during the Regular Commissions Board (RCB), each of our six-member unit was given a number from 20 to 25, and we were ordered around using these digits rather than our names.) I had taken an instant dislike to Number 21 when I had failed in a polite attempt to make small talk as we awaited the Scottish Sergeant-Major’s dressing down. He was the sour fruit of the county of Essex, and struck me as a charmless Thatcherite “there is no such thing as society, only individuals” acolyte. He was selfish, truculent and had mean little piggy eyes and a wayward conviction that he would be getting through the forthcoming tests despite, rather than with the help of, his fellow team members. Several times over the next couple of days his obnoxious ignorance provoked in me a strong urge just to seize him wordlessl...

Eighteen months is a long time, even for an accomplished procrastinator. I suspect the inordinate length of time that elapses between expressing an interest in an Army career and actually getting to the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury is all part of the cunningly devised system, a conceit designed to evaluate whether procrastination’s evil step-sister, self-doubt, is going to rear her ugly biscuit and separate some wheat from the chaff. I must admit that, by the time I arrived at the forbidding, barbed-wire encircled compound in rural Wiltshire, the officerly wind in my sails had diminished to a gentle zephyr, having peaked at gale force eight during the trial run in Beaconsfield three months previously. After that brush with the spontaneously combusting Colonel, I had suffered a motivational relapse and was simply going through the motions, driven only by a determination to show that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t a capricious bottler who gave up on things as ...

With the momentous decision to try to become an Army officer made, the eighteen-month escalator whirred into life and, for a time, I became a single-minded Sport Billy. I jogged daily, mountain biked, walked everywhere with a hefty backpack on like a total arse, gamely doggy-paddled the width of the local swimming baths - all based on Robin Eggar’s Royal Marines Fitness Course book, which allegedly duplicates the psychopathic regime employed when “beasting” potential Commandos on the inhospitable Devon moors. Of the five levels of intensity, I reached level three and decided to stay there – a man has his limits, and I have mine, too. (Incidentally, seven years on, I had to undergo back surgery to treat a herniated disc, something I still haven’t ruled out demanding MOD compensation for.) Then it was on to Beaconsfield, the Regimental HQ of the Adjutant General’s Corps, for a mock-up of the real officer recruitment tests. We were greeted by a Colonel and his bouncy young female Captain ...

I'm going to be lying low for a while, at least until all this has blown over. I was just lucky that Volkswagen Beetle was there to whisk me off to an undisclosed location. It's peaceful out here, I'm well hidden from the lupine corporate bankers. Show and Moby should join me soon, when it's safe to travel. Should you notice anyone snooping around here, I'm a blonde deaf mute with big tits who goes by the name of Barbara. More when I can. Meanwhile, please partake of the new poll at the bottom of the page.

I have been reduced by the fragile Brazilian electrical energy infrastructure to writing this in a Cyber Café. An entertaining Sunday evening's in-house pyrotechnics ended with a burnt-out PC, exploding lightbulbs (and I wasn't even singing), six hours of darkness and Show fleeing into a frightful panic and manning the lifeboats far too early. Tomorrow I have to don a suit and tie and head for São Paulo to take part as a Brazilian - English interpreter in a two-hour video conference meeting on high finance. I've never done this before, but have been compelled to make an attempt by economic necessity, natural vanity and a taste for some linguistic Russian Roulette. If I can pull it off, the TEFL chains could be loosening, if not, I could be arrested and end up on the chain gang. If it's the latter, I appreciate your support over the past few months and I will be writing an interesting blog from an inhumanly overcrowded cell in a São Paulo penitentiary, whilst offering En...

Today’s Brazilian Grand Prix has got me a-thinking. Being an amateur anthropologist, one thing I like doing when abroad is attending sporting events, even if I have little or no interest in the spectacle itself. It is a splendid opportunity to observe the natives en masse and forumlate some overly simplistic generalisations that may help a little in understanding what makes them tick. Formula One is a sport populated by multi-millionaires who take driving much too seriously. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to watch a whole race except when monstrously hungover, when lying sweating and watching the bright colours go round and round has a strangely soothing effect. I attended the Brazilian GP in 2003, around six months after touching down here, and the crowd’s social interaction was fascinating. Firstly, the grandstand provided the perfect setting for some hierarchy-building. Those Alpha males who arrived early (we’re talking around 6am for a 2pm race) took position at the top...

Most TEFL teachers have at some point at least entertained the idea of coming hither with the foreign students they are charged with enlightening, and those who deny fostering such designs are liars, fools, or both – it is the only perk. The flames of our duplicitous tendencies are often inexplicably fanned by the fact that a majority of English-seeking visitors to our mountains green seem to lose all sense of discernment when confronted with an otherwise average Joe with a face puffy with drink, a whiteboard marker and hazardously dated fashion sense. Let me come clean now and say that my experience of this kind of horseplay is relatively limited - TEFL philanderers have always provoked in me a profound mistrust. No sooner have they waved off some damp-eyed maiden at Heathrow Terminal 3, than they’re hovering around the Information Desk posing as a taxi driver ready to whisk off, and get some sober groundwork in with, another perfumed delight eager to be hoisted off the TEFL bagg...

Another generally successful TEFL Graveyard poll has now closed, with a grand total of five votes registered. As the last election was marred by a vote-rigging scandal in which two of the seven votes were cast from two different computers by the same lonely person with too much time on his hands (I believe they call them “hackers”), I can only assume that the same five citizens have voted again. I salute you, pollsters, you are the manure that helps the rose of democracy shamelessly blossom. This time, four readers said that they prefer my humble burial ground to Dave’s ESL Café (no need to shoot myself in the head just yet, then), whilst one visionary prognosticator shares my conviction that I’ll be famous one day, and wants to be able to bask in some reflected glory. The only lingering doubt is whether I’ll achieve notoriety for doing something brilliant, or whether my name will be carved forever in TEFL infamy as the first known perpetrator of a Reverse School Massacre. This is wher...

If those nice people at Sitemeter are to be believed, a BBC insider is regularly visiting my fun-packed long barrow. It reckon it must be the Head of TV Sitcoms, who found me after a Google Search on "BBC Talent Sitcom Entrants We Wrongly Rejected At The Semi-Final Stage". Let him weep into his vodka and tonic! Remember Decca Records executive Dick Rowe's classic? "Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein."

As some of you already know, today I went to São Paulo to do a voice test for a video production company. To be frank, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Firstly, they told me there was no need to do my tap dancing routine. Then, barely three bars into “You’re All I Need To Get By” (the moving Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duet), the woman, in a tone of voice I didn’t take to one little bit, demanded that I, “Just read the text we gave you, please” – some turgid piece about an electrical engineering firm. I was almost expecting her to shout, “Bring on the hook!” halfway through, such was her offhand attitude to my artistry. I read it, but had had so little time to get into character that I wasn’t at all satisfied with the result. Then came the feedback. I have an exquisite voice, apparently, but I need to “put more energy into my performances”. I explained that I’m into my second decade as a TEFL teacher. She crossed herself and suggested I practise at home. Shoddy, that’s how I’d ...

After my dalliance with the nation’s seaborne defence force, the rest of my university career progressed without further incident, except for an abortive attempt to join the Hong Kong Police. I think my problem was uniforms. Whereas most men spent their energies on trying to persuade sexual partners to dress up as policewomen, maids, nuclear plant workers, etc, I would cut out the middle man and amuse myself for hours in a matching set of khaki fatigues and a pith helmet (see picture – please note, this is not me). My colleague E, the demented bigot , was probably the one person who, more than anybody else, persuaded me that a career in The Army would be a step forward. A year into my TEFL adventure, he was displaying such spectacular symptoms of mental meltdown, accompanied by a raging self-loathing apparently based on the fact that his salary hadn’t risen significantly for about fifteen years, that I felt compelled to leave the burning deck before I too became accustomed to the idea ...

bluebird there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you. there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there. there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe? there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our sec...

Being commissioned into The Army is not an obvious career move for a TEFL teacher, but it is a measure of my desperation to scale the wall of the TEFL Graveyard and bolt that, for a time, I considered it the most propitious. In a life replete with many a poorly planned venture, this was, by several furlongs, the most gloriously preposterous. Fortunately for the defence of the realm, the assembled officers at the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury concurred wholeheartedly. Indeed, I suspect that, twelve years on, more than a few of them are still dining out on my laughably limp performance during the gruelling three-day selection process. My unhealthy obsession with all things military started when I was a child. Whilst my contemporaries were into Marvel comics, 2000 AD and superheroes, I used to read Warlord, which was full of Second World War battles and other assorted slaughter. I also spent vast amounts of time and money on the quite pointless hobby of military modelling. By the...

Keen to ramp up the intellectual rigour of this blog, not least due to the fine scholarship of englishteacher365 and no good boyo’s ongoing treatise “ On Eastern Bloc Surrealism and Being a Welsh ”, I am happy to inaugurate my own meek fare of Brazilian Lexical Semiotics – The Basics. If you are a TEFL teacher, please feel free to cut out, paste, crayon, laminate, make a board game out of, do a jigsaw reading with, put to music, divide into Student A and Student B, or fashion a paper hat out of this material – I only ask in return that you click on the advertising on my blog at least one hundred times a day for the next three years and introduce ten new customers each to my smorgasbord well-intentioned, and increasingly erudite, emissions. The aim of the course is to examine the meaning of common Brazilian expressions and their English equivalents, and to see if any cultural nuances can be detected in the process. I feel somewhat qualified to set forth on this subject, as at Univ...

Some call it Customer Relationship Management... Vote now, only six days left! (UPDATE: The poll is now at the bottom of the page)

For those who worry about me, I have some good news - my jailer might have dropped my cell key, and by bending a coathanger, I may just be able to pull it under the door. I've been asked to go to São Paulo next week to do a voice test to be a narrator for a video production company. Further down the line, this could be my long-awaited passport into vaudeville. I have to choose a text, roughly a page of A4 long, to recite during said dry run. My shortlist currently comprises: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - an opportunity for a crude Richard Burton rip-off; The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope - in my humble opinion, the greatest, and longest, poem ever written in any language about hair; Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett - this strident monologue may better exhibit my full range; This is just an instinctive first draft - please feel free to add your suggestions.

My dear old Pop would have been 77 today. He was one of the most naturally funny people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, not in a “ba-boom, I thang you” kind of way, but in an incredibly witty, dry, understated manner. He was the best storyteller I’ve ever known – he’d use just the right number of words, never too many nor too few, and always left his enchanted audience wanting more. I’m not sure he dreamed that his son would one day become a TEFL teacher, but amid my overlong career as a unbearably vainglorious adolescent upstart he never questioned my right to make my own choices, that often later proved to be mistakes. He used to tell me about a writer he loved, who in his opinion was one of the greatest of the English language. I never paid much attention. One day, years later, I asked him if he’d ever read H L Mencken. To my shame, he replied yes, and repeated his opinion that he was one of the greatest writers of the English language. Mark Twain summed it up: “Whe...

The TEFL Graveyard Poll has now closed, with a staggering seven votes, two of which I made from different computers in a misguided attempt to get the ball rolling. In answer to the question, “ If I could teach English to anybody living or dead, my choice would be... ”, the results, in reverse order, are as follows: Mother Teresa (Albanian nun) – 0 votes (0 %) – Perhaps unsurprising this one. Selfless acts of altruism need no translation. Marcel Marceau (French mime) – 0 votes (0%) – Given that Monsieur Marceau spent his life communicating in his own unique form of sign language, it can only be assumed that he didn’t even speak French, perhaps due to having no roof to his mouth or summat. Bit of a trick option that one. Tabatha Cash (French liberal) – 1 vote (14%) – Although she has sadly now retired, I became an admirer of Ms Cash’s work as a socially inept adolescent. I’ve always wondered about her opinions on the future of European Union integration and whether the Maastricht Trea...

Those of us EFL teachers who ply our trade in non-English-speaking countries often fancy that a step left into translation may allow a little daylight to be peeked through the bars of our cell windows. Having been in Brazil for five years now, just such a cunning scheme recently filled me with muted enthusiasm, which was soon tempered by various aggravating factors. Firstly, there is the vastly complex correlation between the intimacy of social bonds and the likelihood of actually receiving monetary payment for your work. Brazilians are instinctively herd animals, and once you have penetrated somebody’s inner group an unspoken regimen comes into play based on the exchange of favours. It is almost unthinkable for somebody to charge a friend anything for services rendered - it goes without saying that brotherly sentiments be expressed through toll-free gestures of kindness and fraternity. This, as I have found to my cost, also extends to friends of friends. Last month a playmat...

My daily walk with Moby almost ended in tragedy earlier today thanks to a boneshaker-mounted loon. Judging by the fixed-eyed concentration it was taking to keep his baroque means of locomotion safely progressing the wrong way down the dual-carriageway (four-lane highway for North American motorists), he was almost certainly whacked on Thunderbird, or some such homemade local equivalent. His sloppy beard and Fidel Castro hat added a rakish revolutionary gait to his thrill-seeking antics. In order to warn speeding automobilists of his imminent rasping of their offside paintwork, the lovable simpleton was insistently honking his horn, or rather, squeaking his toy. Unlike any sound belched before by bicycle-mounted early warning systems, the apparatus he doggedly pumped emitted a sound familiar to all hounds fortunate enough to have been entertained with a collection of chewable novelties in their youth. A sudden canine flashback, an unexpected lurch and our man from Havana was very nearl...

Anyone seeking a mind-bending alternative to the Sunday papers should check out this blog . The draft Kafkaesque novel Anti-Danube is set to become a post-hope classic. I think it's probably written in English, but it could well be Welsh...

"In order to activate your account, please reply to this message with the following information: First Name: Last Name: Username on Forum: Address: Phone Number: Info about yourself, and a detailed explanation for joining:" All I wanted to do was take a quick look at Mr D Sperling's jobs forum. We are all aware of the post-9/11 scenario, but isn't this a little excessive? And no, I am not, have never been and never intend to be a member of the TEFL Liberation Front. The second part of the last item seems a little redundant, considering it's a jobs forum, where, presumably, the principle objective is finding employment. What does he keep in there that requires such clandestine information gathering...?

The highlight of my week is Wednesday, not only because I have no English classes to teach, but because it’s rehearsal night for my male voice choir. Twenty-five men, strong and true, plus me, participating in a sublime act of collective solidarity. To me, singing in a choir is the apotheosis of democratic principles. Nobody is more important than anybody else in a choral ensemble – age, social class, economic conditions, sexual orientation, status – all are rendered meaningless. The prince and the pauper can stand toe to toe and neither must give ground, they are absolute equals, the differences between them becoming indistinguishable (except that the prince probably wears dandy threads and the pauper rags, and the pauper’s bodily odours probably aren’t anything to write a poem about when contrasted with the prince’s fragrant Old Spice.) One thing troubles me, however. This week we have been given seven days to complete the unenviable task of memorising two stretches of Germ...

Assuming that 50% of the readers of this blog are teachers of English, can either of you enlighten me on the following points? They are keeping me awake at night. When writing a sentence between parentheses, should one put the full stop (period for you yanks) inside the brackets, outside the brackets, or both? In the following sentence, should a question mark be placed after the word "why", or at the end of the sentence? Why is a different, trickier question When the bloody hell should one hyphenate? Does the employment of an exclamation mark enhance or neutralise the comic impact of a sentence? I look forward to your interaction.

The beguiling freak in the photo is the inimitable Mauro Shampoo, whom I suspect had just come last in a Brian May lookalike competition. Apart from being an accomplished hairdresser (hence the pseudonym, presumably), the unkempt oddity is an erstwhile footballing legend with Ibis, from Recife, the Worst Football Team in the World according to the Guinness Book of Records, this title having been bestowed due to their failure to win a game for three straight seasons. Shampoo was their attacking midfield dynamo, ending his career at the club with a remarkable record of one goal in ten seasons. Since his retirement from the beautiful game, Shampers has taken to the chat show circuit and been the subject of a documentary entitled, “Mauro Shampoo – Footballer, Hairdresser, Man”, which won the Best Short Film - Audience Award at the 2006 Rio Film Festival, amongst other accolades. I first saw him on a late night David Letterman Show clone hosted by Brazilian wit Jô Soares, and I was i...

The affable gent in the picture with the grin as wide as the brim of his hat is none other than David, tavern keeper at the rather splendid David’s English Teaching World . Judging by the vast scope and sheer ambition of his network of blogs, I imagine he lives in an extinct volcano on a remote South Pacific atoll, as the fellow clearly courts English Teaching World domination. He seems to spend a good deal of his time philanthropically promoting all TEFL-related blogs in the hemisphere, including my own humble jumble sale of shaky wisdom and myopic insights, garnered from over a decade spent wandering, with no little wondering. What is refreshing about the big man is his willingness to give equal column inches to both the determined “TEFL is a serious career” crowd and the irreverant, back seat of the bus “ TEFL is a lot like skiffle ” splinter group (of which I am the self-appointed Brown Owl.) We should, I feel in my bones, be distrustful of anybody who seeks to attach a bright...

A colleague of mine once came out of a lesson looking ashen. She had been doing an exercise with a group of Mongolians that involved her reading out a series of simple directions (turn left, go straight ahead, take the second right, etc) whilst the students diligently followed her instructions on a colourful map of a fictional town to get from A to B. Although a couple of the brighter stars in the firmament duly made it to the rendezvous in front of the imaginary school, they were in the minority. One ended up on wasteground behind the library, another was left standing precariously on the railway tracks, three found themselves in the pub car park, with the remaining two having inexplicably managed to return to where they’d started, in front of the local supermarket. Nothing odd here, we might ponder - such pandemonium is the very stuff of the “Communicative Approach”, the widely accepted and seldom questioned dogma of EFL teaching. There was, however, a sinister footnote to the bedlam...