Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

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 ...

Ten years ago I used to tailspin into a cold sweat at witnessing my students' lack of participation, such was my desperation to win their collective approval , but a decade of having my best intentions quashed on a daily basis has brought me to where I is at today - a comfortable place where I couldn't give a macaco's danglers what they do. If they want to act like catatonic extras in an unambitious remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , they can knock themselves out, as Americans are wont to opine. It's like this - we all troop to the school, we read/write/listen/speak a bit, I'm nice to them and occasionally make them laugh (usually in Portuguese, because life's too short to try joking in English), then we all go home to rest. That's all they can expect, and all I am willing to deliver. They're all thirsty in the middle of the limitless desert of language learning, and as their camel, I am all too aware that the oasis that is fluent English ...

I was first introduced to the concept of inner bollocks by my dear friend D, whose cousin had used the term in reference to a fruitless night he'd spent trying to seduce an attractive companion by feigning a sensitive, New Man kind of approachability . "What did you talk to her about?" D had asked earnestly the next morning. "Oh, you know," his cousin had muttered cynically, "inner bollocks." The meaning of the term now having widened, it has come to represent not only what women refer to as feelings , but also any kind of mental labour, or philosophising . Having recently acquired a copy of Julian Baggini's The Pig That Wants to be Eaten , a volume that includes some inner bollocks of the highest order, I have been inspired to add my own thought experiment to his list of 99 "mind-boggling tales from the outer limit of thought" ( The Guardian ). Should we feel sympathy for the victims of bar violence? A short time ago, a new bar/nightclu...

Last night I found myself collapsed on the sofa post-class with a glass of Burgundy Wood Finish Glenmorangie with ice in my hand, from which I periodically sipped. This may not be considered strange, except that: Some of my most embarrassing faux pas / wretched attempts to entice the ladies / chilling near-death experiences have involved the copious abuse of this distilled venom, leading to a repeated vow never to indulge in its intoxicating effects again for as long as I'm buying; The last time I drank whisky was when I was inexplicably trying to impress a student of mine while posing as a scotch connoisseur , and ended up having to take the next day off work with a fever . I had decided to talk him through a tasting of the sublime single malt Cardhu , whose distillery I visited with a rather bemused Show whilst on honeymoon in Scotland (I'd had to find a subtle manner in which to stop my shaking without her becoming suspicious). My subsequent incapacitation speaks for itse...

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 ...