11 REASONS TO SUCK TEFL AND SEE

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)

1. Most, if not all, jobs are worse in some way;


2. 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;


3. 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, which is the root of all happiness, according to various enlightened beings;


4. You will get to meet the occasional fascinating student, such as the middle-aged German artist I once taught who scrawled new vocabulary all over her body in black pen (cue Frankie Howerd, "Oooh, no, not down there!", etc, etc), or the Icelandic carpenter who instilled in me an ongoing urge to experience central heating in Reykjavik;


5. You will get to meet and work closely with unnervingly engaging colleagues who'd give Frank Zappa a box-set-of-albums-worth of new songwriting material;


6. When you are in the classroom, you will be the sitting tenant on your own private fiefdom, albeit a deeply pathetic one;


7. Your bosses may be arses, but they are generally harmless eccentrics at heart, driven to behave as they do by spending their lives doing exactly what you're doing. They know that if they push you too far, you'll be off without even wiping;


8. Dreams of fabulous riches will never keep you awake at night, which is probably a good thing, for as the Japanese saying goes, "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." It probably tickles language school owners the world over too;


9. You will meet and develop a passion for overwhelmingly attractive and impossibly complicated foreigners, and may, by some atomic miracle, David Blaine them into marrying you. The rest of your life will then, with tragi-comic irony, become one long TEFL class, only with more sex and/or arguments;


10. You will learn to enjoy the grim but heart-warming "Dunkirk Spirit", common only to TEFL staffrooms and regions under a state of emergency;


11. You won't waste time on unrealistic fantasies of a life beyond making inane chat with generally sufferable, often decent, eggs.