Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

Once more TEFL leaves me with a feeling of abject grief . Having spent the last 5 months of 2009 convinced that I'd hit upon a winning formula for getting my flock to speak my mother tongue without any of us breaking into too much of a sweat, I mark their end of term tests and find that my prediction that all of them would achieve at least 75% was nothing more than wildly optimistic grope in the darkness , with scores ranging from 68.5% down to a frankly degenerate 30% . My cunning recipe involving making recordings for them to listen to at home (at least once a day , no more than 7 minutes per recording ) appears to have fallen on deaf ears, as the lazy fucks obviously haven't been doing any such thing, despite cleverly lying en masse to me that they were diligently following my linguistic orientations. Where do you end up once you've gone past your wit's end , I wonder? I passed that milestone some years ago. To swing wildly away on a tangent for a moment, the rel...