Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

When Sammy, Dario and their ilk decided that they wanted to become billionaires at everyone else’s expense , I felt that TEFL was my trump card, which is something I hadn’t really expected, given my past skepticism as to its usefulness in my meandering professional trajectory.  “I can always go back to teaching English, if it all goes tits skywards,” I reassured myself. A recent visit to my accountant’s office to disclose the true horror of my finances unexpectedly proved to be a masterstroke - being an incredible human being, he asked me what the plan was to try to get some money in. A fair question , I had to concede. “If I had somewhere to teach in the evenings, I could try to get some group classes going,” I explained, ”That can be quite lucrative if you can get enough students.” “You can do that here,” he announced, without missing a beat. He subsequently affixed a whiteboard to the wall, and even arranged for me to have a desk in the corner and offered the use of his mul...

As a pioneer of digital nomadity, I was asked the other day by one of my followers what my view is of the ongoing AI revolution . I have to admit that I’m something of a layman when it comes to this particular subject, but thinking on my feet, I replied that the technology does seem to allow the creation of incredibly realistic videos of people from a simple photograph , so I imagine the early adopters will be  con-men and/or  perverts .  Indeed, my Brazilian friend Deberkleberson recently gave me a demonstration of AI-powered image generation. He typed into his computer that he wanted a picture of a badger bursting into flames on a street in Dubai with Brad Pitt’s face on it , and I must say the result was uncanny. To be fair, I’m not entirely convinced of the utility of such an image, unless it was designed for use in some kind of campaign to warn about the dangers of wildfires in the UAE ; although, I can’t imagine they have badgers there. All that fur would make it f...