Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

The previous tale of Madeleine Albright has brought to mind another strange sequence of events related to me by my ex-colleague Crockers. We were thrown together when our two companies were merged, and we spent a large proportion of our time exchanging knee-slappers by email, normally topical jibes about the big-top-inspired events going on around us. Many such commentaries involved the dapper Andrea, a neat, likeable Italian taken to wearing three-piece suits and arriving for work at six in the morning, a full three hours before the rest of us ambled in. When the two companies had been combined, Andrea, sensing the opportunity of his vita , had arranged a visit to our office, then moved like lightning to ask for a personal meeting with the owner to utterly pan our half of the organisation and offer himself humbly as the answer to the aghast boss’s hastily improvised prayers. In all the time he worked with us as Office Manager, I can honestly remember only one measure he took that...

Truth, as the old cliché goes, is often stranger than fiction. Everyone remembers the classic Fawlty Towers episode, “The Germans”, where John Cleese’s eponymous character, Basil, receives a bang on the head and, suffering from concussion, proceeds to insult a visiting group of German tourists by making relentless reference to the Second World War. It is as much a comment on British obsession with the conflict as it is about German sensitivities. We laugh because the situation is so extreme, and we accept Basil’s ranting due to the bandages wrapped around his head. Sadly, my ex-colleague, E, had no such mitigating appendages. E didn’t so much behave as if he didn’t know the war was over, he acted as if he wouldn’t be satisfied until the next one had begun. Like a deranged Basil Fawlty, the subject of his ire was everything German, the country, the people, the language. Even the German-speaking Swiss were condemned by association. The supreme irony was that E had in fact chosen to s...

Thinking about it, I suspect tales of madness will be a prominent theme of this blog. It is difficult to tell if a propensity towards lunacy leads people into the profession of EFL teaching or whether years of inane chats about holidays and food with people who are barely able to chat back eventually wear down even the brightest and the best, grey-matter-wise. (I'm not sure if I should have hyphenated there – years of TEFL and it’s still a grey area for me...) P was one of those itinerant colleagues who’d turn up every summer, each time slightly more sagging and crumpled than the last. The first summer I met him he boasted to me that he’d been to the 1994 World Cup in the USA and had “almost interviewed Maradonna”. I thought it a strange claim to fame, like me saying I “almost slept with Angeline Jolie” because she happened to visit England once. One of the things we learn on TEFL courses is that we should teach language that’ll be useful for who’s learning it. P was unfe...

Experience has shown me that TEFL is populated by a rich patchwork of humanity, from driven, career-seeking go-getters to odd misfits who seem happy to let normal life go on around them. An ex-colleague of mine had a running joke with his students that we were all taking part in a vast hoax, teachers were pretending they were teaching and students were feigning being students, but, unbeknownst to us all, we were in fact inmates in some form of mental institution. It was a popular joke at which most people laughed, some rather more uncomfortably than others. Looking back now, the warning signs were there on my month-long TEFL Certificate course in B, where in a rainy November I spent four weeks in the company of as big a cross-section of mental health as can be imagined. As with everything TEFL, the course involved a lot of pairwork, and I became aware of a fellow TEFL graveyard aspirant, hereby known as D, who would virtually run into the room to sit next to me when classes began....