Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

It would be quite wrong to suggest that December heralds the start of the party season in Brazil, as since Carnaval people have been pretty much in the swing of things. The Christmas period merely increases the frequency, volume and festivity of knees-ups. Show's septuagenarian aunt (who, incidentally, has recently been crowned Miss Senior Citizen both for our town and for the state of São Paulo, with the Miss Senior Citizen Brazil contest taking place in Natal early next year) organised the first of what will inevitably be many parties on Saturday night, a typical affair which followed the usual pattern - everybody standing around eating with relish , everybody standing around drinking in moderation , then everybody dancing with total abandon . To be honest, I wasn't really in a party mood (something Show was quick to point out to me from between clenched teeth ), but I have to admit that my back's still giving me jip from my entry into the collective hysteria into...

Of all the soul-wearying débâcles that TEFL thrusts upon its traipsing minions, the School Christmas Party has to be near the top of the flammable fake plastic tree . I suspect swept along by the nincompoopery we serve up daily as “Business English” , the school owner decided to “ strengthen our brand ” by delivering a festive “ Happy Hour ” for our gibbering charges last Friday, the fate-tempting title of the event practically guaranteeing a diametrically opposite result. Brands are only strengthened when companies offer something that their customers actually want , I have always imagined. School Christmas Parties in Britain are one thing. There, the students are essentially trapped , as they normally have little or no social life outside the boundaries of their surrogate college – therefore, they are all too happy to turn up and participate, however half-baked and forced the occasion may turn out to be . With our students being sent to study English by their bloodsucking companies...

My favourite quotation about Brazil: "Brazil is not for beginners." Tom Jobim, co-inventor of Bossa Nova My second favourite quotation about Brazil: "Brazil has over four thousand kilometres of beaches. It's full of foxy women. Why struggle to be a superpower?" Pablo Santucci , Market Leader Intermediate, Group 3A

As I came up for air yesterday from my pail of rice and beans , I recalled that I never completed my diatribe on crafty Europeans entitled Cheating Foreigners , the first part of which I published back in mid-August to wide acclaim from No Good Boyo . It isn't much of a story, really, but it was an experience that instilled in me a wild and lasting distrust of all things pan-European . After leaving University clutching a handwritten, gravy-stained bachelor's degree in Special Italian (the most unfortunate of titles, you must agree), I lost no time in pondering my hugely narrowed career options . I had by then resolved that I could never live in Italy again (though I did later for three months in Verona, until I could stand it no more), and even working in close proximity to them would have me gnawing things at regular intervals . I have nothing against the nation as a race, but they are just so entirely different from us that I could never fit into their way of doing things...

Oh, the rain. Falling on my head like a new emotion, it overwhelms everything in its path, including the fragile “drainage” systems. Cats and toddlers float by in the gutters. Thirty-nine more days and nights of this, and we'll be boarding the animals. So yesterday there's this huge storm, just as I'm leaving for my half-hour drive to work. Water's entering our living room through the light fittings, the doorbell, the electrical sockets . The walls are stained like the front of a cachaceiro's unwashed strides after a two-for-the-price-of-one all-day session. I have to go and teach English to people I know won't bother to venture out. I feel bilious and curse the day I learned to read and write . Ten minutes down the road I get this garbled phone call from the school, which I struggle to understand against the thunder of raindrops on my windscreen. “...don't have to come...” the secretary bellows, at which, needing to hear no more, I make a graceful han...

According to behindthename.com, the Welsh name Idris means "ardent lord" , and nothing could be more appropriate. Though I never met him personally on his trail-blazing summer passage through sunny Bournemouth, his all-to-brief career left its mark on many, including rope marks in many cases. The Ardent Lord's speciality was putting Scandinavian teenagers to the sword , "with ropes and everything", as he used to slobber on the many mornings after. Always displaying an unpredictable fashion sense, Idris was evenually fired for turning up to a Business English class with a group of inevitably disapproving German executives in full Arsenal kit . We can only assume that the school owner was a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.

The splendid Gyppo Byard has kindly requested that I write six random things about myself. I note that the adjective "interesting" didn't feature, thankfully, so here goes: According to my late father's genealogical rummaging, I am (very) distantly related to Sir Francis Drake (or Sir Walter Raleigh , I forget which); I've suffered two bouts of severe clinical depression (the last 17 years ago) and used to suffer panic attacks. I regained my fragile sanity without recourse to professional help or drugs, partly by reading Free to Be Human by David Edwards, a personal friend with whom I have shared many a beery night over the years. In fact, it may have been the beery nights that cured me, who knows?; When I was a baby I used to hum songs from the hit parade in my cot, way before I could talk, leading my father to predict that I was some kind of musical genius . Later attempts to learn the violin at primary school proved his optimism spectacularly unfounded ; De...

We've just had to change our car, something that younger men in baseball hats tend to get misty-eyed about , but a situation I find somewhat galling. Cars are simply a drain on one's meagre income in my view, nowhere more so than in Brazil, where prices are inflated to ridiculous levels by government taxes, which go towards funding wealthy lifestyles for politicians and their huge extended families . One thing that has slightly reduced the financial abyss into which changing our vehicle has plunged us is the fact that our new motor runs on both petrol (gasoline (US)) and alcohol . At last I've found a use for the bottles of local "wine" I've received over the years. A litre of alcohol is 45% the price of a litre of petrol , so we'll definitely economise. However, engines use more alcohol than petrol to cover the same distance, meaning that we're filling up every two days, instead of every four as before . Normally I fill up at night after my classes, a...

Sunday finally saw the municipal elections put to bed for another four years, and frankly, not before time. I can now enjoy the sound of adolscents screaming on their way home from school, people being knocked off their motorcycles on the dangerous crossroads in front of our house and other assorted sounds of vibrant Brazilian culture without some nasty jingle insulting what passes for my intelligence and driving me, ears bleeding, towards the abyss. "More health! More education! More employment!" they warbled, "Vote with the heart!" - the last thing Brazil needs. Voting with the head would surely be more appropriate. The results were predictable - our man narrowly avoided election and the same old song continues. Ugly scenes were witnessed one evening last week when some of the winning candidate's thugs turned up at one of his rival's election rallies in the town square and started making threats and throwing beer over his supporters, one even trying to phy...

My heart has felt the warmth that is sympathetic joy this past few days after I got back in touch with ex-TEFL cellmate Crappers, (aka Scream, a moniker derived from his passing resemblance to the subject of Edvard Munch's masterpiece, due to his despairing state of mind, which I suspect was largely TEFL-induced), whom I was delighted to discover has wed, procreated twice, producing two enchanting offspring, and is now living it large up London. It was he that rescued me from the bouncer's bed and watched with a mixture of horror and amusement as I ate a mini pizza that I'd recently dropped on my shoe . Judging by his showreel , if his name isn't in lights yet, they're certainly ordering a gross of bulbs . I last saw him in the late nineties, when he suddenly broke ranks and left to do some kind of degree in arty stuff - and look where he is now. Clearly it helps to be lavishly talented , but even so. Living proof that there is life beyond TEFL. I've surmised t...

Special Brewman has enquired how the singing Poles are getting on with the brasileiras . Whilst I haven’t received word, I did prepare a list of travel tips for them before they moved on, with a view to helping the travelling minstrels avoid problems on their tuneful odyssey. To make them easy to memorize, you will note that I cunningly crafted them into rhyming couplets : IF THERE’S A GUN POINTING AT YOU, ACT LIKE A STATUE. Rio de Janeiro may be the Cidade Maravilha , but it plays host to the largest number of armed juveniles in the world outside a war zone, beating areas of conflict such as the Occupied Territories . Tragic but true. IF HE’S GOT A KNIFE, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. Disclaimer: Tourists should be circumspect when using this advice near travelling circuses, as knife-throwing acts are still popular in Latin American big tops. IF SHE’S GOT PECS , BEWARE THE SEX. It’s easy to make this mistake – sometimes you jus...

That's queer as in strange, before we get started. There are moments when I suspect that the person who invited me to join my male voice choir wasn't a musical conductor at all, but an undercover psychiatrist from a shadowy government agency , and that all this singing is just therapy designed to keep us harmless . Such a suspicion grew on me over last weekend, when we had the pleasure of receiving our Polish friends, who organised the festival we sang at in May, into our collective bosom, as they took a detour on their way to Cabo Frio in Rio de Janeiro state to swing by our neck of the rainforest. Firstly, they were greeted on Thursday on their whistle-stop tour by the penetrating stare of the bipolar paediatrician in our midst. Ironically for somebody who participates in a choir, he seems incapable of accepting group decisions, resolving to do everything his own way, even if it means separating three of the anxious Poles from their brethren on some madcap jaunt he's inv...

Yesterday I received an email from the translation agency that sends me work with the subject "Client's complaint." Eager to find out more, I read on. "I much admire the typing mistakes," the bolshy shagsack whined, I suspect sarcastically, "it should be shopping mall and not shopping centre , specially and not especially and industrialization and not industrialisation ." Teeth champing at an imaginary bit, I responded that the words in question were (and indeed are) correct in British English, though they were quite at liberty to change them to the stateside spelling if it were going to make them feel suitably made up - though why they'd want to is a mystery, as the text was a script to be used for narrating a video anyway. This is a common practice among Brazilian professionals, I have found - sending disgraceful, disrespectful comments questioning peoples' English, just because they've been to Disney and feel buoyed by their managing...

In celebration of fully 10 years of wedded bliss with my first wife, Show , I strategically suggested we spend a day at a spa as reward for her forebearance, despite my being steadfastly heterosexual. So it was that last Friday morning we packed our rucksack with bathing costumes, flip flops and towelling robes and sped off towards Grande São Paulo. Driving in the metropolis is always stressful, as no matter how early you leave, you're always guaranteed to arrive at least half an hour late, as the traffic chaos in the state capital reaches near gridlock, despite vague attempts to limit the number of cars on the road by the introduction of a rotation system according to the last digit of car number plates. Indeed, predictions have been made that, with 200,000 new cars coming onto the streets per annum, within five years traffic will simply grind to a complete halt. Without a functioning rail system and possessing a paltry metro, travelling around the city looks destined to become ev...

The excellent Gadjo Dilo has come up with a festival of films that should be/should have been made. Clambering onto the bandwagon, here are my entries: MISSISSIPPI GURNING Hardboiled cop Gene Hackman and idealistic sidekick Willem Dafoe head to the deep south to tackle inherent ugliness in the redneck population. Hackman's unorthodox methods include intimidation and grabbing people by the clangers under tables, much to the by-the-book Dafoe's chagrin. The masked people with pointy hats turn out not to be Klu Klux Klanners but a fringe and highly dangerous band of gurning competition organisers, and webmasters at mingers.com . FROM BEER TO MATERNITY What really happened to Deborah Kerr after that roll on the beach with Burt Lancaster - unemployment, a council house in Wooton Bassett and liver disease brought on by drinking alcopops. Could be used in schools in teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns, if I were paid loads of money for the rights. MY LEFT FOOT M.P. The ultimate b...

"Take that dog turd home with you!" my elderly, mentally unstable neighbour screeched at me yesterday from the roof of her garage after my hound c ompleted his toileting on the grass verge in front of her house , "or I'll call the Municipal Guard!" Her husband helped out by jumping up and down and wildly gesticulating for me to head further up the road, as if clearing the area in the face of a garbled threat of a car bomb . When my father-in-law heard about the incident, he recommended that I greet the deranged couple with obscene gestures , but in fact I calmly went home, got a plastic bag, returned to the scene of the carnival, collected my hound's deposits and gracefully returned them to my abode, as recommended by the flipped-out partnership. Having already poisoned another dog in the neighbourhood to death, I am keen not to provoke the wild-haired old loon further, and by maintaining a sense of dignity in the face of verbal assault , I came out of the i...

I forgot to pass on the 12 films for 12 nights challenge. I hereby invite, nay compel, the following to spout forth: Special Brewman Mrs Pouncer Mme de Boyo Rotus Let's see what the ladies make of it. (That wasn't a backhanded insult Special Brewman / Rotus)

CRASH – Paul Haggis, 2004 A recent Oscar winner, this movie provided one of the strangest filmgoing experiences I’ve ever had. Essentially a study of racial prejudice in all its forms, I hated the first half and almost stopped watching, as it just seemed a series of depressing stories about bigoted people dissing each other . But I held on, and was glad I did. Gradually the script masterfully intertwines the disparate tales and shows each character passing through an epiphany that makes them question their own attitudes and beliefs. For a mainstream film, I thought it remarkably subtle and clever. Favourite line: It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something. AMERICAN BEAUTY – Sam Mendes, 1999 Utterly predictable, but I have to include it as one of my ...

DIVA – Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981 Like many of my generation, my bedroom wall at University featured a poster of big-knockered French actress Beatrice Dalle in the film Betty Blue , the cult student classic of the early nineties. The same director debuted with this film in 1981, and for me it is far superior. I first watched it after reading in Smash Hits magazine that it was Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes’ favourite film, as a confused fifteen-year-old . Despite being French, it’s the epitome of the stylish thriller, and actually manages to make opera cool. The story of a Parisian postman who inadvertently gets into trouble with two different underworld organisations at the same time, it’s beautifully shot and has a surprisingly classy script. Beatrice Dalle doesn’t feature, but to be honest, this movie does very well without knockers, big or otherwise. Favourite line: Quelque chose artistique et francaise. LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA – Crint Eastwood, 2006 Another unashamedly mainstr...

Taking up No Good Boyo's challenge, here are some motion pictures I consider worth watching. As I have indicated before, I often can't remember films minutes after I've watched them, so I'm going to struggle to come up with twelve, but here's my first four: HUD - Martin Ritt, 1963 I challenge any thirty-something man to watch this film and not feel an urge to get into shape and start swaggering around in a white vest, as Newman's towering performance as the cynical, womanising drunkard, Hud, bewitches us all. One of his lesser-known roles, the blue-eyed wonder dominates every scene, as he battles with his idealistic father for his share of the family cattle farm. Apart from a few dodgy moments of acting drunk, his rasping, bullish performance is surely one of his best. Favourite line: How many honest men you know? You take the sinners away from the saints, you're lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln! HANNAH AND HER SISTERS - Woody Allen, 1986 My father-in-l...

Can anybody name another country, apart from Brazil, where one of their Olympic competitors has a nickname deriving from a children's TV character emblazoned on the back of her shirt , rather than her real name, due to some vague-to-unidentifiable resemblance? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Fofão (Big Softy/Cutie, right), and a Brazilian ladies volleyball player, real name unknown (left).

The British, for those who love simplistic generalisations, can be broadly divided into two camps - the pro-Europeans , and the more or less xenophobic . The former can be found sitting outside cafés around Britain in sub-zero temperatures sipping a latte macchiato and moaning about the cold in a forlorn attempt to recreate a recent camping holiday in Riccione , where they sat outside seafront cafés and moaned about the heat. They use a GB sticker on their car with the European Union stars on it , and enjoy using the Euro as something far simpler than dealing with tens of thousands of lire. They are the kind of people who become Host Families for foreign students (at least until the henpecked husband starts developing a muted but rather obvious crush on the latest Russian madame ). The latter, on the other hand, demonstrate a love for tweed and Barbour jackets , shooting things, Land Rovers and an almost erotic relationship with the pound sterling . Both groups are driven largely by ...

It's taken me a while, but being a man of my word, I've come up with a list of eleven reasons to suck TEFL and see. I also dashed this one off during a student-free evening, which, if it hadn't been for the 30-minute drive each way through a raging thunderstorm to get there and back, would have warmed my cockles greatly. So, here they are, my list of vaguely reasonable reasons why TEFL isn't as bad as I moan about it being. The opinions expressed below do not represent the opinions of anybody, living or dead or the living dead in TEFL, except my good self. 11 REASONS TO SUCK TEFL AND SEE (IN RANDOM ORDER) Most, if not all, jobs are worse in some way ; You will have the opportunity to travel and make a living , either to avoid impending legal proceedings or for a simple love of the open road; You will have the opportunity to develop the patience of a saint , which, we are informed, is a virtue. Alternatively, you can see your work as an opportunity to show kindness , whi...

I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft We have constructed pyramids in honour of our escaping ... So opined the Lizard King himself, in one of his weed-induced attempts at shamanistic incoherence , shortly before spinning around the stage wailing and flashing local bobbies, no doubt. But I dig his meaning, for once. My blog is a thin raft and the fact is, since I launched myself into my auto-induced sabbatical, I've found that I miss my friends (I hope I can call you friends) that have gathered here. The bit about the pyramids we can ignore. I awake wondering if Gyppo Byard is going to reveal more about his father , the left-handed engineer. I pine for more about life as a nimble ex-stutterer in Romania , I wonder what Mrs Pouncer is chattering on about now , I'm eager to keep up with the Boyos , as part of their one- / two-handed readership. Special Brewman's series entitled Bums I Have Known (sadly/fortunately using the American meaning of the wor...

As I glide towards 40 like a drunken, partially-naked man down a freshly polished bannister , I am resolved to get myself out of TEFL once and for all. She's a siren that has drawn me onto the rocks once too often, and if I don't send her packing with true resolve, I shall be hunched and nervous in the midst of a lengthy midlife crisis. For this I need to concentrate, and so I have decided to leave the blogalaxy for a while to focus my efforts on regaining some self-esteem through hard labour. I've always fancied the idea of a sabbatical, something totally impossible in TEFL unless you're an eccentric millionaire just in it to chase perfumed foreigners . This time I cannot, and will not fail, according to my wife, Show. I apologise for not commenting on your blogs recently, but I'm trying to wean myself off spending hours a day reading other peoples' largely brilliant writing, which is something most people do while taking a break from work, rather than instea...

Continuing my public-spirited series of Free TEFL Tips , here is a little list I tossed off last night when none of my students turned up. (Don't worry, I've learned not to take it personally.) This list is totally personal and does not represent the opinions of any person, real or fictional, except myself. 11 REASONS NOT TO STUMBLE UPON TEFL (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER): You will receive a starting salary well below that of fellow undergraduates and it will remain largely unchanged for the rest of the century . Your Gran's earnings will easily outpace your own; You will be expected to be witty, bouncy and enthusiastic at all times , even if your house has just been repossessed or a favourite pet maimed in a freak glass blowing accident; You will start seeing caravaning as an economic holidaying alternative ; You will find yourself joining calls for more bicycle lanes ; You will be expected to relentlessly suffer gibbering incognates very gladly indeed; You will be expected t...

The municipal elections take place in October of this year, but campaigning has already begun. Every day, including Sunday, between the hours of 9am and 10pm , baseball-hatted clowns are driving around town belching out some of the worst electoral jingles ever scrawled on somebody's hand during a bender in Pirapora do Bom Jesus . They are uniformly degrading of the political classes (if that's possible to any greater extent than they manage themselves), and my prediction is that it could lead to an outbreak of random knifings , particularly if I don't find professional help soon. When I was a child, local elections were greeted in our leafy English suburb by a lone Ford Cortina containing a member of the ruling class meekly urging voters to, " Vote Conservative, you know it makes sense ". In a scandalous (to me then) attempt at vote-buying, the Tories once offered my mother a lift to the polling station, only for her to vote for the SDP , making it the closest she...

Recently, the local papers have been filled with the gap-toothed grins of local dignitaries posing next to piles of loose chippings, newly asphalted roads or bleak locals holding a length of soon-to-be-installed sewer pipe. The explanation for this explosion of civic progress? Why, it's election year . As we are fortunate enough to live in a bairro nobre da cidade , we have been particularly blessed by the politicians' eagerness to gain the votes of the literate . No sooner had the grass verge the length of our whole avenida been planted with 100 cherry blossom trees to mark the centenary of Japanese immigration (<little-known fact>: the largest Japanese population outside Tokyo is in São Paulo </little-known-fact>), than the sides of the same avenue are, as I type, being graced with palm trees of varying health and height. Whilst this crude vote-courting is broadly welcome, it does, as most things around here, suffer from an almost total lack of planning . An at...

Having spent the last six years bobbing about in the Sea of Unbridled Chaos that is the largest country in South America, it has been a revelation to me over the past few days that the nation still has the potential to surprise, if not delight. On Thursday I found it impossible to use my Internet connection as I received the repeated message, "Access denied: username and password not recognised." Imagining it was a temporary glitch, I resolved to try later, and again received the same succinct message. I decided to call the boobie-run, Spanish-owned Telefonica to find out why their laughably-titled Speedy service was even less so than normal. The first time I called, I was informed by a recorded message to press 8 for Speedy services. After doing that, another recording told me to dial different number, which was babbled incoherently once before the line went dead. I hastily scribbled what I thought was the number in the message, but, of course, it wasn't as I got anot...

Am cold, busy and fretful. More soon. (We were visiting the castle in Pomerania and our guide asked us to belt out a number. Most of the choir were sobbing by the end, but I remained masculine and Anglo Saxon. It's Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium , in case you don't recognise it... I'm the shadowy one with the shiny forehead.)

Whilst I have nothing against felines as a species, I do object to their ungratefulness . Recently a mangy cat fell, or was thrown, into our back yard and we had a hell of a job, that lasted over an hour, manhandling it through the house and out the front door without contracting an exotic zoonotic ailment as it struggled, scratched and bit as we approached the cauldron. Show said that the strange creature gave her the willies, it was so thin and had larger-than-necessary eyes . Not five minutes later it was back mewing in the back yard again, clearly keen for a second chance to pass Feline panleukopenia to its unsuspecting saviours. Another half an hour's struggling and it was out the front door again. Since then, there have appeared cat-style footprints on the bonnet of our white car every morning, normally leading up the windscreen and over the roof. "The scamp," we thought. Now things have escalated alarmingly. Every morning we awake to find cat's business on the ...