Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

As in most spheres of human activity, TEFL is swimming with competent, bottom-rung classroom staff doing their best whilst managed by high flying buffoons. When working abroad, we often find that school owners don’t have the remotest idea about the realities of language teaching - indeed the majority doesn’t even speak English. In Spain I was kept under the tight-fisted cosh of a slippery accountant with whom I struggled to explain my absences in an awkward sign language; here in Brazil I was just this week interviewed for an English teaching job in Portuguese. If I didn’t speak the language, I suspect that, despite my unquestionable staying power, I would not even have been called, for reasons of practicality. Franchises are deeply popular here and have, in my opinion, an unwarranted reputation for excellence. Their names don’t exactly conjure instantly recognisable mental images related to the learning of the world’s lingua franca – Wizard, Yazigi and the psychedelic Pink an...

I feel compelled by my first, and hopefully only, road traffic accident on Brazilian tarmac to spit vitriol about motoring in the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Said collision wasn’t a death-defying forty-vehicle pileup so popular in these parts, it was one of those maddeningly petty knocks that drives the front-seat passenger into a simmering, understated and very British rage that steams up the car windows, whilst the Latin-blooded driver directs language that would be more fitting at a prison uprising at the gap-toothed agricultural labourer cum lorry driver who braked his jalopy using the rear of our stationary hatchback. One of those ball-achingly unnecessary incidents that leaves just enough damage to need costly professional repair, whilst not achieving a level of violence sufficient to merit an insurance claim. The success of motor racing icons such as Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet and Ayrton Senna may have given their countrymen much to cheer about, but ...

" Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called " On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual ," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that, when they occurred, had seemed accidental and of little moment, turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. " ( Quoted The Power of Myth , Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers ) It is indeed a fascinating theory, though one not altogether backed up by my own floundering experience. When I look back on my life, I see less the consistent plot of a novel and more the outline of an episode of the BBC’s early-nineties soap opera fiasco, Eldorado . Most of my big life decisions have been made on a whim, guided by a desire to achieve the most pleasurable and pain-free result. Whilst my contemporaries were carefully choosing their higher education su...

I mentioned in my profile that I once reached the semi-finals of a BBC Talent comedy writing competition. If this sounds grand, perhaps I should add an important caveat, for fear of being classed a fibber. I did, in fact, reach a stage that “less than 10% of the entries got to”, but as the finalists were chosen from this filtered down group, I prefer to describe it as the semi-final, probably a little flatteringly. And the mild feelings of achievement generated by my having been selected within the top 10% are dependent on the assumption that there weren’t 2.4 million entries. Whilst I was initially thrilled by my relative success in the competition, this elation soon became smothered by the clammy palms of regret, as my unbending tendency towards directionless procrastination had yet again brought me down just outside the box. I imagine the other entrants must have beavered away at their manuscripts for months, poring over every word and punctuation mark, carefully crafting a watertig...

It's official. Consider this extract I was asked to quickly skim over for mistakes: ...the Brazilian legislation doesn't establish that the manufacturing companies of nutritious goods are forced to collect and to give destination final, environmental appropriate, although this for the norm ISO 22000 is requested. Now a company qualified powder an official organ of the environment is responsible for the discard of ******** Brazil 's products. Cost of u$ 142/60 boxes... It's like a linguistic car accident. Wanted: a job, any job, that doesn't make my brain hurt into the early hours.

TEFL courses tend to ignore the possibility of students spontaneously bursting into tears during lessons, and those of us who have experienced such troubling spectacles are thus left with few guidelines as to how to handle sensitively scenes of sudden and inexplicable emotional meltdown. Barely three months into my TEFL wanderings, I managed to make 66.67% of a class weep in under two hours, setting a personal best that stands until today. And before you jump to the perfectly understandable conclusion that I was teaching children of primary school age, I wasn’t - they were fully grown up Japanese Local Government Officers . In the class there were three students, the Group Leader, a squat, wide, inscrutable blade whose only facial expressions were an occasional stiff smirk and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes, and two twenty-something women from different Japanese Prefectures. It was my first lesson with them, and I’d chosen an exercise that remains one of my fa...

I've always assumed that the lyrics of the song below are satirical. Apparently this man doesn't. (Depending on how much you value your current job, this song could easily be adapted into an entertaining jigsaw listening). GOLDIE LOOKIN CHAIN - BAD BOY LIMP If you wanna make money then you’ve gotta think fast, Phone Claims Direct cos there’s a nail in yer arse, It’s very simple this is one step of two, First hurt yourself, then claim you wanna sue Venereal gash, or is it just whiplash? Call it what you want, just get the fukkin cash. Cash or cheque, trip or fall, You gets over a grand if you rips off yer balls, Can I get a witness? You got a cut or a bruise, Now yer talking business, Oh son put yer face in the fire, If you lose both eyes then the price goes higher, I went to the doctors cos I felt funny, now Claims Direct, they’re giving me money, Pick up the phone, the number is free, remember kids, No win no fee! Chorus- Ring ...

Despite being a self-confessed skeptic of The Secret and its rumblings, I have to admit that starting this blog has had a strangely positive effect on my life. Opportunities have appeared where I wasn’t expecting them, and I’m in the unfamiliar position of having to decide between several work options, a couple of them only distant cousins of TEFL. The only cloud on the horizon is my overpowering proclivity towards procrastination, and the very real danger that my blog turn into just another, slightly more sophisticated form of frenetic dilly dallying. With this fear at the back of my mind, I have resolved to remove most of the third-party functionality and widgets from the Graveyard, the searching out and finding of which have already cost me too many precious hours of my finite lifespan, and which I feel are the principal risk to my new-found productivity. Also banished is Google Adsense, which frankly made no sense. When resolving to include advertising, I was only too aw...

This week I’ve been fairly quiet blogwise as I’ve been bludgeoning my way through a turgid English to Portuguese translation on the telecommunications industry, for which I brilliantly underestimated the time necessary to complete it, and left it all to the last minute anyway, just to make it truly hellish and stressful. Below is a graph showing the Procrastination Algorithm that afflicts me. Any normal, mature adult would have divided the 50 files to be translated into the number of days available and worked steadily and with discipline to complete a reasonable number per day. But not I, for that would break the habit ingrained for at least the past twenty years or so. The fact that the number of files tails off on the last day belies the fact that I left the longest and most densely mindbending to last, showing a breathtaking lack of foresight. Another point of interest has been the Google searches that have brought people here to the TEFL resting place. A peek at Sig...

The Brazilian word “vara” has multiple meanings, including "fishing rod", or, when used in its ribald slang form, "male sexual organ". So avoid having to give awkward explanations, and/or pay expensive legal bills, and/or avoid eye-contact with your father-in-law for several weeks by remembering never to casually offer to show another man your fishing rod when using a public convenience.

I'd just like to say an intercontinental Nice One to my dear friend Lawtey, who was born 38 years ago on this very day. He is in TEFL in Málaga, on the Costa del Sol, Spain, where he wears a beard despite the elevated temperatures, and writes precociously. Lawtey is also author of one of the most fascinating comments on TEFL I've ever heard. It is, he has reasoned, like sitting in a stationary railway carriage in a station when another stationary train is alongside, and when one of the trains starts moving, one doesn't know which it is... I'm not quite sure what he means, yet I am - that's the genius of his observation. He has been known to pop in from time to time and stalk me, and if that's he case, this tiny effort won't have been wasted. Parabéns para você Nesta data querida Muitas felicidades Muitos anos* de vida! (*) - In Brazilian, "anos" doesn't mean "anuses" like it does in Spanish, incidentally.

Tonight my students were listening to a recording and answering comprehension questions on it. As I patrolled the room looking at their answers over their shoulders, one student’s response to question two particularly caught my eye. The fellow had written intriguingly, “colon power”. The strange thing was, he wasn’t replying to the question, “Which of your personal attributes would you describe as a double-edged sword?”, but “Who was the US Secretary of State before Condoleezza Rice?”

Five people again voted, as my stubborn attempts to canvas opinion on vital TEFL issues continues apace. In answer to the, some may say indelicately incomplete, statement, "My TEFL salary is:", the following responses were registered, after a recount: ... none of your bloody business - 0 votes (0%) ... enough to keep the wolf from the door - 1 vote (20%) ... enough to keep the wife from the door - 3 votes (60%) ... enough to keep me in snuff and monogrammed handkerchiefs - 1 vote (20%) ... sub-Saharan - 0 votes (0%) One foppish respondant shares my predeliction for stylishly whistle-clean air intakes, one person believes their income enough to keep wild animals at bay, whilst fully 60% regard their pay as enough to keep their spouse from departing. So there you have it - a TEFL salary won't lose you a wife, but it probably won't gain you one either. There again, it might, depending on whether she's studied numbers in English yet or not. Probably best not to m...

My Army days, all five of them in total, were nearly coming to an anti-climactic end. All that remained was to attend an interview with another stiffly uniformed soul-reaver, then it was the Mess Dinner later in the evening and some kind of farewell race programmed despicably early the next morning. Of course, this was the Machiavellian brainchild of another warped mind, clearly concocted to prod at the perfectly human temptation to indulge in some Rabelaisian hell-raising at the Mess Dinner after the three days of being led through the circles of Dante’s Inferno. It was a trap I was aware of, but one into which I fell headfirst nonetheless. At the interview I was informed that I had come first out of all the candidates in both the Military and General Knowledge tests. This, I felt ambivalently, could count as a plus for me, as when invading the next Third World country, not only would I be able to identify enemy armour and artillery batteries from blurred reconnaissance photos, b...

Today is Finados, or the Day of the Dead. Brazilians visit graveyards and mope, or spend half a day in a traffic jam to the coast, and mope. I, personally, shall be staying here on the coffee plantation to make sure none of the children try to bunk off work early. There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs here in the sugar-cane-alcohol-fuelled Latin American economy, which is "véspera de feriado", or "public holiday eve". The night before the officially-sanctioned day off, people cancel all non-life threatening engagements in preparation for some intense relaxation - two of my three classes were no shows last night, and I suspect the students will begin to wander back around next Wednesday. One of my private students, who's under pressure from her company to learn Inglês asap, recently cancelled her two-hour Saturday morning lessons until January, due to the barbecue season (similar to the shooting season, but without the Labrador Retrievers) and Christmas ...