Skip to main content

BLOG REVAMP

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 aware of the possibility that, as the ads are tailored to the content of the blog, the kind of tongue-in-cheek brickbats I set forth on TEFL are unlikely to persuade many visitors to do one of the TEFL courses that I am wont to advertise. Added to that, many of the ads are for funeral services and online tributes to the deceased which a computer algorithm might find relevant to my content, but I do not, with no disrespect to online embalmers or virtual funeral parlours and their ilk. I must confess that I was a victim of greed, having read a post by Personal Development guru Steve Pavlina, who claims that his blog earns him a thousand US dollars a day. That supposes that you have something marketable to say, I guess. So far, in just over three months, the TEFL Graveyard has generated income of $1.68, a figure that crushes my early enthusiasm that blogging could be a fun alternative to TEFL.

Recently, in an expletive-strewn pep talk, my wife Show made an interesting observation, the gist of which was that if I spent a fraction of the time and energy that I spend on fool-headed attempts to escape TEFL on actually dedicating myself to it, I might actually manage to earn a decent salary and thus start moving from our paw-to-kisser existence living with her parents to a life any newly-married nineteen year olds would expect as the minimum so as not to divorce within six months. This time, I think she’s serious - and dare I say it, right.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FOOLING WITH SCHOOLING

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...
19 comments
Read more

TEFL ANTHEMS VOL. I

An interesting debate over at ELT World in answer to the question, Are your students learning anything? has got me all reflective. Many rock songs are claimed by religious maniacs to include subliminal messages when played backwards or by missing every sixth word or summat, but others are more easily deciphered. As TEFL anthems go, perhaps one of the most memorably haunting has to be Dave Gilmour/Roger Waters' bitterly ironic collaboration reflecting on TEFL one-to-one classes being taught abroad , Wish You Were Here : How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. As TEFL mongers we often feel like we're in a fish bowl, year after year , not least because the majority of our students exhibit the retention capacities of the goldfish. After painstakingly explaining that we use the preposition to after various verbs, the ...
14 comments
Read more

NO MORE A-CUSSIN'

In an effort to rid himself of the habit of using foul language at the slightest provocation , a Facebook chum recently asked for suggestions for harmless expressions he could use in front of his Gran and her bingo clique during moments of high stress, astonishment and/or extreme disappointment. I weighed in with, " Crikey! " and, " Great Scott! " Please feel free to add your suggestions, and help to make the world a tiny bit less like a trucker's stopover in Eindhoven .
12 comments
Read more