Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

The following happened today. I started chuckling , then after a short time found myself openly weeping . - My Christmas text message to some of my students of English: "Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and health, wealth and happiness for 2010!" - The response from Francisco, whom I have been teaching for the last five months : "Tanks" Any way, Mery Crismas everbody!

Just back from the Christmas do at the school where I teach my last remaining English lesson of a Saturday morning. The pupils under my care sang a more or less recognisable Danny Boy (not strictly Christmas, but the only sheet music I had in English ), then we sat outside in the sickly humid night chatting until the rain came and we had to pack away all the chairs and move the keyboard indoors. I'm home now, alone apart from our Lhasa Apso, Shanti, who is lying beside me for a change, but only because I am the only other animate object in the vicinity. Show has gone to Campinas to fetch our niece, and pop-in-law is receiving an homenagem for being a founder member of the local Rotary Club . If there's one things Brazilians love, it's the homenagem - all echoey halls and people in suits that are either a size too big or a size too small for them. Incidentally, Antarctica have just released a new beer that I've felt motivated to sup on, " Sub Zero ", which, ...

It may be the fact that I'm sliding inelegantly towards 40 like a man on a dustbin liner down a rain-soaked slag heap , but a few months ago I decided to get myself definitively into shape for the first time in around 15 years. Another factor that has helped me find motivation is my brother-in-law's suggestion that the calcified herniated disc in my back may be best treated by removing an entire vertebra and connecting some metal apparatus to keep me erect , a surgical procedure that may look good on his CV, but will not have my willing, or conscious, participation if I can help it. My diet has been enriched by the serendipity of Brazilian fodder . Most fattening foods and drinks are entirely unsavoury as far as I am concerned. The beer makes me nauseous or bloated , or both, the ham is like an overly pink slab of an overweight adolecent's buttock , the bacon is 90% fat and 10% meat , but best/worst of all, all the cheeses taste exactly the same , and may be differentiated ...

I can barely control my bladder with the excitement of finding out that Rio de Janeiro will be hosting the Olympics in 2016 . That'll be a football World Cup in 2014 and an Olympics two years later, with non-stop samba in between. Big winners? Lula , who will no doubt use this as a victory for his government. Politicians and construction company owners (often the politicians' brothers-in-law) who will be already totting up just how much they can overcharge and what this amount will buy in country mansions, good snuff and bikini-clad teenagers. Pelé , who has finally got a call right, after never managing to predict the correct result of a World Cup since he last played in one. And the drug lords in Rio , who will no doubt be offered unofficial "concessions" in exchange for being good boys during the event. And, last but not least, Paulo Coelho , a somewhat unexpected inclusion in the Olympic delegation, but who may now be remembered for something other than his book...

Here is my second package of carefully hewed nuggets of potential aid to the budding translator, many of which may fall into the category "bleeding obvious". I've numbered them 1 to 5 again as I can't seem to make the list start at 6. In fact, I've numbered them 1 to 6, as I remembered another one at the end that I hadn't bargained for: Don't miss deadlines . This may seem obvious enough to make you wretch, but it is amazing how many translators apparently fail to follow this one simple rule . To help me not to forget files, I immediately save them in a folder named after the month and year, inside of which I have another folder for each client I work for, and then inside those folders I make a folder for each day that I have a file due. I can thereby see at a glance what I have to do, and I also keep an Excel spreadsheet with a list of upcoming jobs . Keep to deadlines if you want them to keep coming back for more. Learn how to search the Internet effici...

" Wardy ," people bleat, " how did you take a step sideways into translation, then? " In answer to this question, I have put together a hotch potch of ten translation tips , in no particular order of utility, which may help a budding linguist escape the TEFL control room before things start to malfunction and they get their eyebrows singed off in the ensuing catastrophic blast. I am assuming, of course, that you have sufficient fluency in your foreign language o f choice before you begin, that you love writing and that you have no problem in spending time exhausting every avenue towards finding the meaning of obscure terminology. Join proz.com . You can become a member of this site for free initially (as I did), but to access the really useful features it pays to take out an annual subscription . A kind of marketplace for freelance translators, you can check out the Blue Board for comments made by fellow translators on potential outsourcers (for example, if they...

Some months ago, I was hurrying to the high street to make some urgent purchases when I was accosted by a waif in a state of great peturbation . He proceeded to recount to me a tragic tale of how his lorry had been hijacked by armed ruffians while making a delivery to a nearby factory. "Why, that's abomnable, my man!" I cried, "We must summon the beadle forthwith!" As I strode out towards the Police Station, a shabby building that periodically bursts into flames as incarcerated delinquents make incendiary protests as to their innocence, I became aware of the poor fellow trotting along beside me, gibbering excitedly . "I've already informed the Police," he snapped, "and they're useless. It isn't worth even going there again." "Well, what are we to do then?" I enquired. "I need to get a bus to Campinas," he said, a city that lies a good two hours away by road. " Do you happen to have any money to help m...

Endless autumn: Waiting for the Waiting To cease.

I recently caused some controversy on my Facebook page when I stated that I was sitting in my room freezing with no glass in the window while working on the mother of all translations. But I stand by my assertion - I have never been so uncomfortably cold as I have in Brazil . Now, in terms of absolute temperatures, of course Brazil is not the coldest place I have been, by several packs of frozen produce. Demure debutantes have been known to swoon when gathered around my piano on hearing my tale of when I got off a superheated Soviet train in Moscow one February in the late eighties in a T-shirt, drowsily aware of a bit of a nip in the air, only for the platform display to reveal an ambient temperature hovering around a bracing -20ºC . Here, we rarely get below 10ºC, but with everything geared towards bermuda shorts, sandals and little shame, the stone floors, lack of insulation, tropical humidity and, in our case, shoddy glazing practices all lead me to recall stories of my shirtless ...

My interest in foreign tongues was first stimulated by Miss Watters , a shapely French mistress in whose classes, perhaps ironically, I never managed to fully concentrate on learning the language of Sacha Distel, such was the bewitching power of her recently-graduated beauty. Sadly, she didn’t tarry in her position, and before we knew it she’d gone, not with a bang, or even a whimper. I suspect she finally tired of all the dribbling adolescent attention , such as when the boys dropped items on the floor in her classes in the hope that she’d bend down and pick them up, thus exposing a glimpse of her ample cleavage , or the time when, on a French exchange trip, she made the unfortunate declaration on the cross-Channel ferry, “When we get to Cherbourg, I’ll head you off”, which drew the inevitable sniggers of the assembled lusty youth and the blurted riposte, “ Phwoah, yes please! ” from the rather unsubtle, not to mention unrealistically optimistic , Dave Wallace. Although I s...

When I told people during my enforced year off between school and university that I worked in “ a market in The City ”, it raised more than a few eyebrows. “Derivatives or futures?” they’d ask, pretending not to be impressed. “ Confectionary ,” I’d reply with a wink, the more enterprising immediately getting onto their brokers to make sure of they got their piece of the next rights issue from Bassets the Jelly Baby manufacturers . Nothing that I stated was false. Leadenhall Market is indeed in the City of London and is purported to be the place where Dick Whittington arrived in London (the real one, not Linda Lusardi , unfortunately). I did indeed work there in confectionary, selling chocolate from behind a tatty wooden stall in the company of a perpetually morose but likeable lad from Ewell. He had his own curious dialect, starting every sentence with “ Fackin’... ”, and appending the entirely unnecessary preposition “ up ” onto the end of almost all verbs . Apparently, his friend got...

Today is my last day at the school . It'll be a relief, not least because I've been combining it with ploughing my way through a variety of enormous translations , like a 16th-century Bandeirante hacking his way throught the Mata Atlântica, and various tribes of breakfasting indigenous peoples , with a razor sharp facão . Thanks to all who have sent their missives of advice, best wishes, and ego-eroding insults, the latter of which, the sages tell us, are the work of our greatest friends. I recently received an entertaining drive-by insult, which is the very stuff that makes the Internet such a bubbling cauldron of free speech. For those that missed it, here it is reproduced verbatim for posterity: Anonymous said... I am watching you AND your irksome architraves. Behind my veil I am LUGHING HA HA HA at your woebegone non-spark FAILURE OF EFFULGENCE. I am THE breakfast man. The spelling, the syntax, the inventive use of a moulded or ornamental band framing a rectangular openin...

I've done it . On Tuesday I finally resigned from public life as a TEFL teacher to spend more time with my family and my laptop. The owner of the school where I perform my daily masquerades tried to persuade me to stay, but, in a rare display of assertiveness, I held my ground and stated my decision was final. Now I intend to etch a better living from translation, though I'll be giving a few private classes and still teaching on Saturdays at my friend Bert's school. No more daily 60-kilometre round trips. More male voice choir singing. Less time for blogging. An urgent need to learn touch typing. Today, I was so made up about it all I got utterly arseholed on Brahma* at a birthday party in Piracicaba. And I don't even like Brahma. The end of an era. Thank fuck for that . * To avoid any confusion, Brahma is a popular Brazilian lager, noted for its bitter aftertaste. It is not a favourite steed of mine, nor a courtesan from the Indian subcontinent.

I'm tempting fate with this one, but I really am quite busy. Good luck! Move to a Third World country ; Cry yourself to sleep for the first six years as a penniless TEFL teacher ; In desperation, try to learn to become a Web Developer ; Give up trying to become a Web Developer ; Listen to your wife’s suggestion to use the skills you already have, instead of bumbling around trying to learn new ones * – then stubbornly ignore it; Try to become a Web Developer again; Give up trying to become a Web Developer again and return to point 2; Decide to use the skills you already have, instead of bumbling around trying to learn new ones – and pretend it was all your idea ; Become a translator and charge just below global market rates ; Sit back and enjoy profiting from the economic chaos that has engulfed the planet and turned exchange rates in your favour, like a Bond villain, or summat ; * Expletives removed for the sake of human decency.

I have to admit that, over the years, I have developed a robust loathing of banks , perhaps because my late father, and his late brother, both worked for one, neither of them ever having a good word to say about them. Towards the end of my father’s career, bank employees went from being administrators of customers’ finances to being salespeople , something he simply couldn’t abide. Elderly customers always sought him out for his wisdom, patience and genuine credibility, and this relationship of trust was totally undermined by his being expected to sell them something at every opportunity, he felt. His exasperation grew as he neared retirement, to the point that, in one of those horrible motivational meetings only the David Ickes of this world can possibly find uplifting , the manager goaded staff that they simply weren’t selling enough insurance. “ [Name of high-street bank] makes enough bloody profit as it is!” my father protested, taking the stand that I think I still most admire h...

The Internet is something of a double-edged sword, I meekly opine. There are times that I fret that it’s turning a whole generation of pasty, furtive boys into daylight intolerant hunchbacks with an overly strong handshake whose only real ambition is to find the address of THAT nightclub where THOSE kinds of parties take place with the SHAME-FREE CZECH AND HUNGARIAN GIRLS . Teenage girls tend to use the web to jabber with their mates (with whom they’ve just spent the whole school day jabbering, but still manage to find something they haven’t yet jabbered about), and finding older men to become obsessed with , be seduced by and eventually meet when visiting them during a spell spent at Her Majesty’s Pleasure , all while secretly conspiring to marry the baby-faced one out of the latest boy band at the drop of a hat . Then there is the descent of English into a kind of impenetrable code written by monkeys with typewriters in the throes of a protracted work to rule. As far as social n...

In an idle moment while supposed to be preparing classes, I came across this . I received it by email back in about 2001 and it remains one of my all-time favourites. Some people just have too much time on their hands. Like me.

Whereas Idris was a TEFL waster in the drunken, lecherous, hapless sense we British seem to profoundly admire, Pete was an altogether different animal. He was The Man With No Shadow . As far as anyone knew, he was a Liverpudlian living in Málaga through marriage to an Andalucian. Despite repeated attempts to engage him in social discourse over the nine months I worked with him, he showed himself to be uninterested to the bone in communicating with the outside world. He would arrive and stand around with his hands in his pockets gazing at the ground until it was time to teach, then would silently slope off to his classroom, a term that could only be loosely applied to the six-foot by six-foot cubicles that had been cheaply constructed in the vast office space using paper thin partitions. It was one of those highly successful schools that do nothing to warrant their popularity. They had totally cornered the pre-teen market . The teaching faculty, of which I formed a...

Regular readers of this weblog, the longest resignation letter in history, may sometimes wonder, "If that M C Ward character doesn't like TEFL so much, look, why doesn't he do something about it , instead of carrying on doing it, like, and moaning about it? Know what I mean? He’s beginning to give me the right…” etc, etc. This is, in fact, a question that baffles all three of us. But I may have found an answer to this conundrum - I am officially a spanner . Last time I visited the salty shores of my island brethren I stole a book from my sister called, " The Mind Gym " - subtitle, "Wake up your mind" (Time Warner Books, London, 2005 - RRP £ 12.99). I claimed at the time that I'd been reading it and had accidentally put it into my bag, a half-truth she has kindly forgotten about. The book is classified in the Self-Development / Business category, and is packed with little reflections on How to Have Better Being a Person Skills , o...

Having taken lunch at the shopping today, I am doing what I often do when alone in that cathedral of consumerism that Brazilians have embraced with typical gusto – I am silently observing teenage girls . Before I am accused of being oh so British, I must clarify that my interest in the young delights is purely anthropological . I am a student of the human condition in all its beauty and tragedy, so anyone who confuses me with a perv can frankly bugger off . I am still bemused and intrigued by how adolescents in this country manage to be such generally fine, warm human beings . A healthy fifteen-year-old boy in a recent class moved not a hair when his mother, who studies with him, spontaneously grabbed him in a prolonged, affectionate embrace . Do that in Anglo-Saxon environments and you risk an outbreak of arson . While studying in Italy I met a New Yorker whose teenage brother had set fire to their penthouse apartment after a tiff with his parents, then had had the g...

Show recently extracted the wind from my sails with typically well-intentioned down-to-earthism. Armed with several diagrams and a kitchen knife , she extolled her opinion that I should concentrate on doing what I can do and stop fannying around trying to learn how to do things I can’t , in yet another feeble-minded attempt to divorce myself from TEFL. Yet again, I believe her to be right. It all started back in May, when I went to Poland with my male voice choir and on the plane to Frankfurt found myself sitting next to Jetro, one of our second tenors. I’d never really spoken to him before, but during the trip I discovered that he ran a small yet growing Internet company , an online system through which owners of used car dealerships could manage their businesses. He explained how previously he’d been something of a factotum, working around the country in various jobs and starting various businesses, until he discovered that he could neither work for somebody nor manage others –...

One of the things that has drawn me to admire, and at times gingerly adopt, the tenets of buddhism (a label I deride, incidentally, as to me it is less a relijurn and more a box of wise psychological tools - the allen key set of spiritualism, if you like) is the fact that, unlike other religions, it expressly forbids anger in all its forms . It seems to me that any move in this direction can only be a wise one for humankind. Imagine how many fewer high school massacres, suicide bombings, street stabbings, drunken beatings and tit-for-tat violence there would be if we could just learn to chill out , stop taking life so seriously and exercise a little patience at critical moments . As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, " Anger obscures your mind and makes your life unhappy. Anger can cause physical harm and even endanger your life. When you are angry, you are certainly unhappy and may be afraid, and you may also cause fear and unhappiness in others. Anger can make you destructive... The pain...