PARABENS PARA VOCÊ!

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.

Comments

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...

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 ...

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 .

Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

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