Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

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...