11 REASONS NOT TO STUMBLE UPON TEFL

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):

1. 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;


2. 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;


3. You will start seeing caravaning as an economic holidaying alternative;


4. You will find yourself joining calls for more bicycle lanes;


5. You will be expected to relentlessly suffer gibbering incognates very gladly indeed;


6. You will be expected to ditch all opinions that may be construed as individual or offensive to the arms dealers and/or corporate fanatics you are tutoring;


7. To have any chance of professional progress, you will be expected to fork out large sums of your hard-earned salary on cash cow qualifications that few seem to pass first time;


8. You will escape to foreign climes only to find that, while, if you're lucky, you're marginally better off financially, the job is exactly the same, only with all the complications that come from living abroad;


9. Every time you take a day off sick, an effigy of you will be burned by both the teacher who had to replace you and/or the Director of Studies/school owner, who will feel vindicated in their belief that you are a recovering alcoholic who has plunged from the wagon;


10. You will develop a passion for overwhelmingly desirable and impossibly complicated foreigners, and pine away into an emotional sack thing when they inevitably leave you for somebody real;


11. You will spend your days feeling like a hamster on a wheel. A hamster on a wheel of a heavy goods vehicle.

Before I am accused of negativity, I shall soon be scraping together a list of reasons to suck TEFL and see.