Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

TEFL courses tend to ignore the possibility of students spontaneously bursting into tears during lessons, and those of us who have experienced such troubling spectacles are thus left with few guidelines as to how to handle sensitively scenes of sudden and inexplicable emotional meltdown. Barely three months into my TEFL wanderings, I managed to make 66.67% of a class weep in under two hours, setting a personal best that stands until today. And before you jump to the perfectly understandable conclusion that I was teaching children of primary school age, I wasn’t - they were fully grown up Japanese Local Government Officers . In the class there were three students, the Group Leader, a squat, wide, inscrutable blade whose only facial expressions were an occasional stiff smirk and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes, and two twenty-something women from different Japanese Prefectures. It was my first lesson with them, and I’d chosen an exercise that remains one of my fa...

Tonight my students were listening to a recording and answering comprehension questions on it. As I patrolled the room looking at their answers over their shoulders, one student’s response to question two particularly caught my eye. The fellow had written intriguingly, “colon power”. The strange thing was, he wasn’t replying to the question, “Which of your personal attributes would you describe as a double-edged sword?”, but “Who was the US Secretary of State before Condoleezza Rice?”

A colleague of mine once came out of a lesson looking ashen. She had been doing an exercise with a group of Mongolians that involved her reading out a series of simple directions (turn left, go straight ahead, take the second right, etc) whilst the students diligently followed her instructions on a colourful map of a fictional town to get from A to B. Although a couple of the brighter stars in the firmament duly made it to the rendezvous in front of the imaginary school, they were in the minority. One ended up on wasteground behind the library, another was left standing precariously on the railway tracks, three found themselves in the pub car park, with the remaining two having inexplicably managed to return to where they’d started, in front of the local supermarket. Nothing odd here, we might ponder - such pandemonium is the very stuff of the “Communicative Approach”, the widely accepted and seldom questioned dogma of EFL teaching. There was, however, a sinister footnote to the bedlam...

Today I had a spiritless Hancock’s Half Hour* of a class with a student of mine. The theme of the lesson was “At the Restaurant”. I had made up thirty situations in a restaurant that the student had to complain about, things like, “A diner on a neighbouring table has started smoking, and you are sitting in a non-smoking area. Wound him with intent,” and “The waiter accidentally brushed up against your / your partner’s ample bosom when serving the wine. File a sexual harrassment complaint with the maitre d’.” You know, everyday situations. I patiently barnstormed virtually every possible known English structure for making complaints since the Great Vowel Shift and wrote them on the board. This student has been studying English for ALMOST TEN YEARS (though, in my defence, I have been awkwardly bound to her in the linguistic equivalent of a three-legged race for only six months.) The relevant language was ON THE BOARD . She has a “good job” in an AMERICAN MULTINATIONAL COMPANY . This...

One of the many things I love about Brazil is the copious use of nicknames, which are often creative and humorous and help to forge informal bonds of friendship, even affection. A couple of years ago, during an all-too-brief interlude, I actually worked doing something other than teaching English (before my cover was blown and I was unceremoniously defrocked – more about this another time.) I had muddled my way into the Human Resources department of a large Brazilian metallurgical company, immediately receiving the sobriquet, “Chuck Norris”, due to the surly, if not exactly intimidating, photo on my company id badge. Every large Brazilian company has to have an Internal Committee for the Prevention of Accidents, or CIPA, whose members are elected by co-workers. When the list of candidates circulated the factory it was a positive orgy of name-calling. As virtually nobody in the factory was known by the name they were christened with, the list had to include the contender’s real nam...

If recent experience is anything to go by, I would strongly suggest that those responsible for advising retiring soldiers on future career options cross TEFL off the list of possible alternatives. The wisdom of advocating a career requiring sometimes superhuman patience in dealing with foreigners to somebody who has spent a number of years being trained and armed to kill them is certainly questionable. L, a former member of the Parachute Regiment, provided ample evidence in his brief, incendiary career of the challenges involved in keeping a lid on conditioned aggression in the TEFL boiler room. L was a curious character, something of a loner, probably because he had come to B to work and had no roots in the area. This meant that he tended to socialise with teaching colleagues, and by association foreign students, with regularity. He had an odd technique of coming on to women which basically involved him asking them a question, then repeating their answer in a fatuous, high-pitched...

Every TEFL teacher experiences awkward classroom moments. It may be an unanswerable question exposing knowledge gaps, or unkind comments directed by one student towards another, or even unsubtle criticism aimed at the teacher (I once heard of a student who remarked, “You are very boring today!” after the teacher yawned in class. “Bored,” the teacher corrected him, “You mean bored. Boring means I am boring you – you are bored by me.” “I know,” the student replied flatly, “that’s exactly what I mean.”) Students using foul language is a constant source of discomfort in many a TEFL classroom. It’s not that we are particularly prudish or that we never swear ourselves, but there’s always an unsmiling student peering malevolently over ridiculously-shaped spectacles who you know is just itching to report any deviation from what she thinks a language class should be to your superiors and demand a refund, plus compensation for emotional damage suffered. There is also at least one larie smart ars...

I' m delighted to report that an ex-colleague has been in touch regarding this blog. Delighted because it means at least one person outside my immediate family has actually read what I'm scribbling. She kindly pointed out a number of factual inaccuracies regarding A, star of the previous post, "From Russia With Gloves". Being lazy, rather than rewrite the story, I am happy to put the record straight as follows: "...I would like to correct some of the stuff about that the girl who dyed her hair and went for the short skirts. She was actually from Azerbaijan and for me the funniest thing (oh no, not the funniest - there were so many moments) was when she came with her Dad - and looked all sweet and innocent - sitting in the chair with her knees together and her hands clasped - in an outfit that resembled Alice in Wonderland (hair band and all)... Dad sat there explaining about his daughter - I am not sure what he was really saying but obviously stuff about ...

Whilst it is wrong to generalise about cultures, it must be said that Russian students are relentlessly intriguing. Perhaps it is something to do with growing up during the Cold War, when all we saw of Russians were intimidating Soviet women shotputters and grim communist march-pasts in Red Square. By the early-to-mid nineties the trickle of students into England from the former Soviet republics became steady, as did the resulting frequency of bizarre interludes. Firstly, there was G, a huge, twenty-one-year-old bear of a Muscovite and avid boxer who excelled at telling macabre stories that invariably involved him fighting his brother, a lot of blood being shed and without exception ended with jolly descriptions of his distraught mother helpless to intervene to stop the carnage. Such tales were regularly recounted whatever the subject of the lesson, and any gaps in his vocabulary were filled by him standing up and reconstructing the conflict, swinging wild punches and viciously kne...

The reasons why people study English at a language school in a foreign country are many and various, and they don’t always have a whole lot to do with improving language skills. Parents send daughters abroad to try to separate them from unsuitable suitors, children are hastily dispatched in the unlikely hope that the experience may cure psychological disturbances, couples imagine that a crumbling marriage may be saved by that long-dreamed-of holiday abroad. Seldom are these artifices successful, and sometimes the results can be alarming, sometimes plain absurd. At a certain school where I worked there was a small cottage in the grounds surrounded by a walled courtyard with a gate, which was kept locked for security reasons when the building wasn’t in use as a secluded, executive classroom for one-to-one Business English students. One evening at a school barbecue, staff became alarmed by cries for help emanating from behind the wall, and on trying to open the gate, as expected, th...