Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Whilst recently perusing a list of Dos and Don’ts for teachers at the TEFL Tips blog , one item particularly caught my attention: “ DON’T - Wear weekend clothes to class. Jogging pants, jeans or shorts aren’t acceptable… Men should wear dress pants and a dress shirt with a collar.” (My emphasis) Ignoring the fact that the author of this tip has used the wrong word “pants” for the correct one, “trousers”, this, to me, is sound advice. I got through my Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults in Bournemouth in 1993 thanks, in no little part, to my TEFL Trousers. Fresh out of University, electing to do a TEFL course was perhaps a strange choice, as I too was subject to the world’s most widely-held phobia, that of speaking in public. The closest I’d come in my four-year degree in Italian to standing in front of a group of people to give important information was revealing incoherently to my drinking brethren that, if they really expected me to dow...

Having recently tracked me down over a longstanding debt, when a long lost school chum learned I was living way down south, he opined, “When I think of Brazil , I think of scantily clad women in feathers and stuff.” “So do I”, I quipped back, ducking instinctively. But there’s much more to Carnaval than simply food for socks-and-sandal-wearing northern European men to get overemotional about – it’s not just the best use humankind has yet found for drums, sequins and G-strings (or fio dental – dental floss). Oh no. Hardly has the smoke cleared from the New Year’s fireworks than the annual saturnalia of flesh, samba and more flesh is upon us, when largely conservative Catholic Brazil lapses collectively into up to a fortnight of hedonistic tumult, making you wonder if there hasn’t been some kind of countrywide mix-up involving mushrooms. The Rio de Janeiro carnival is, of course, the most famous for its lavishness, followed by poor cousin São Paulo , but other regions of Br...

Brazilians are a friendly bunch. This is a fact. If you don’t watch out, complete strangers will strike up conversation in public places, which is something that tends to unnerve the average reserved Briton and make him want to start running. Having overcome this urge by sheer force of repetition, I now throw myself into social congress with anybody sufficiently slow-moving. Whilst standing on an odour-filled bus recently lamenting the absurd state of public transport with a senior citizen who couldn’t get away, I was reminded of a rather arresting incident that occurred early in my foraging for a living here in the Republica Federativa do Brasil . I was exercising my hound, as is my daily routine, when I noted a strikingly tall blonde with dark glasses tottering towards me on an unruly pair of high heels. As she passed, she hissed something to me out of the side of her crimson-traced mouth. Back then, I was subject to the second-and-a-half time delay that kicks in when spoken to ...

One of my many TEFL escape attempts, which ended, like all the others, only with my nose pressed up against the glass accompanied by some desperate clawing, involved the abstruse realm of computer programming, forward slash, web development. Computers have always held something of a fascination for me, more for the entertainment value they offer than the associated careers, it has to be said, and over the years I have made various abortive, procrastination-laden attempts to enter the Gordian profession of computer programming. I fancied that, as I like studying human languages (though I’m no Cardinal Mezzofanti , sadly), learning computer languages should be a logical and certainly more lucrative progression. The initial stimulus came from a colleague who left school at eighteen and within a couple of years was traveling the world working as a programmer in C++. When I met him one Christmas he’d just spent six months in India, having whooped it up for the previous six in Holland, ...

As we are all well aware, the Internet is stacked high with pornography - you simply can’t avoid it, no matter how hard you try. Who hasn’t been startled by images of a mustachioed Dane being attended to by a young extrovert sporting only undergarments and a shaggy perm after inadvertently appending an “n” instead of a “t” on the end a Google search for “vintage port”? How many of us have been confronted by a hangarful of large-chested exhibitionists during research into “large mistakes”, due to our mistaken employment of the ambiguous search term “big boobs”? Erotica is big business, but there’s also a lot of free stuff around if you put in the hours looking for it. Apparently. Another rapidly growing area is that of the Internet Sage. In common with the filthmongers, they are in the business of selling fantasies. I often wonder if my blog would be rewarding me financially if visitors were greeted by a picture of me looking wise next to a tree or something, my visionary gaze clap...

If the first couple of weeks of January are anything to go by, 2008 will be a year of unprecedented industry in the Ward tent. I am also planning to resurrect my first film script, which has been on hold due to the difficulty I experience in writing in Portuguese. But then I think of Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, let it be remembered) and I feel young again. For some reason I woke up today thinking about Margarida . Here is a compilation of his finest moments, which comprise the only reason to purchase a football ticket, in my opinion. ---------------- Now playing: Gnarles Barkley - Crazy via FoxyTunes

The previous tale of Madeleine Albright has brought to mind another strange sequence of events related to me by my ex-colleague Crockers. We were thrown together when our two companies were merged, and we spent a large proportion of our time exchanging knee-slappers by email, normally topical jibes about the big-top-inspired events going on around us. Many such commentaries involved the dapper Andrea, a neat, likeable Italian taken to wearing three-piece suits and arriving for work at six in the morning, a full three hours before the rest of us ambled in. When the two companies had been combined, Andrea, sensing the opportunity of his vita , had arranged a visit to our office, then moved like lightning to ask for a personal meeting with the owner to utterly pan our half of the organisation and offer himself humbly as the answer to the aghast boss’s hastily improvised prayers. In all the time he worked with us as Office Manager, I can honestly remember only one measure he took that...

The young wench in the picture is Madeleine Albright (name changed to protect her identity). I first met her in late 1995 in a flat in Madrid (for she hails from the Iberian Peninsula) when I was on a lone Inter-railing holiday, a form of excursion not to be recommended, by the way – rather than being feted in bars like an itinerant troubadour with Moleskine and quill in hand, I sat alone feeling deeply miserable and wondering why I hadn’t just gone to Ibiza for a fraction of the cost and tried recreational drugs or something. I was in the Spanish capital returning from Málaga, where I had been staying with my friend Lawtey and his then girlfriend, now lovely wife, Macarena. (Incidentally, should you ever meet her, don’t mention the song – if you do, she’s likely to slash you with any available sharp object). Fellow TEFL hostage Ticket had kindly offered to put me up for the night before my trawl back up to Paris the next day, and Madeleine Albright arrived home in the early ev...