Why Work When You Can Teach English?: A Teacher's Journey in the World of TEFL

By Ian Lees

Why Work When You Can Teach English? is one teacher’s journey through the world of TEFL – Teaching English as a Foreign Language - from training and colleagues and the realities of the classroom, to schools and other forces that guide life as an English teacher abroad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483558912

Book preview

CLASSES

1

WHY WORK?

It was the moment we’d been aspiring to for three years. Aspiring in the undergraduate sense of sitting around on our backsides, doing sod all. Sometimes even in the library.

The great thing about university, we’d been told, is not just that it's a chance to gain a real education and widen one’s horizons, but that it's also a golden opportunity to meet like-minded people. And right enough, most of my friends were just like me. In the pubs at lunchtime, we held forth on the great themes we should have been studying, and at night we strutted awkwardly in dark corners of clubs trying to attract like-minded females. In the few lectures we did attend, we made risible efforts to avoid posing as the keenest minds of our generation.

University, it transpired, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so the final exam was as good a reason as any we’d had in three years for beginning a real knees-up before lunchtime.

The exam omens were good. Firstly, my alarm woke me up on time. Secondly, my memory of how I was going to answer the questions that were going to come up remained intact. I hadn’t cheated, I’m far too cowardly for that, much to the detriment of my global academic achievement. It’s just that when they ask the same five or six questions for twenty years consecutively, as clues go, it’s a biggy. Thirdly, I didn’t have anything that could properly be called a hangover, so I was feeling unusually fresh and perky.

Jim’s exam was finishing at one o’clock, and mine at half twelve, so, what with the sun shining and the flowers out, we decided to meet in The Horse and Cart at midday, get a few in before the masses arrived and have a poignant little us-together celebration, being lifelong buddies and all. It was a sage decision, as we had the pick of the cheese and pickle sandwiches.

As I sat at the shadowy table in the corner, beyond the reach of the dustbeams of sunlight that cast a veil over the polished tables, unchewed beermats and empty ashtrays, I noticed for the first time the clunky ticking of the mahogany clock on the wall. At the bar, Jim was the beneficiary of the landlord’s jovial reception, strictly reserved for the first customer of the day. He pulled the beers with the care and precision of a watchmaker, and raised his eyebrows to Jim for approval.

In silence, verging on reverence, we let our pints of bitter settle until they were crystal clear, the white head of foam forming a razor-sharp line all the way round. Jim raised his glass to mine, and with the wisdom of the centuries looked me right in the eyes, giving a barely perceptible nod. He saw that it was good. There was no need for words.

History would now begin from this moment on, everything prior to it a mere aside. With initials after our names we would stride forth and contribute, venture and pioneer. The rewards would be considerable. We had so much to offer, and, it must be said, me more than most. One day, someone would write about this very moment.

The moment was brief. Within days, it started to feel more like an end than a beginning. Jim had gone back home. Other friends, scattered across the country, had yet to finish exams or had disappeared to unknown locations. I was packing up to leave. The books I should have read. The ones I shouldn't have been. The CDs that more than anything else defined my academic years. The clothes that had weathered the epoch, start to finish, still just about good to go. I knew the questions would begin when I got home. Big Questions. For three years or more we were supposed to have been planning – nay, plotting - the future, but as far as we were concerned, like bad accidents, the future was just something that happened to other people.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

There’s an easy way to combat that first step into the big, bad world we’d been told so much about from the moment we first complained about baby food, and that’s to put your mind to work and start thinking. Of course, you don’t want to rush into things, do anything you’ll regret, so you need time to consider all the possibilities. Provisionally, six months is a nice round figure to allow yourself and work out what you’re going to be.

The process takes its inspiration from the Revision Plan of A-level days: before you can do any meaningful structured revision you need a plan. The plan needs to be properly thought out, down to the hour, and should be clearly presented and easy to follow. Naturally, by the time it’s finalized, coloured in and laminated, it’s rendered obsolete by the fact that you’ve only got five weeks till the first exam, an exam for which the plan allots a reassuring four months. The time required to draw up the plan hadn’t been properly planned for.

By contrast, the advantage with the six-month Thinking About Your Future Plan is that you don’t even have to get up and make a plan. You just think for a bit. And, if in six months you still haven’t come up with anything, well, you'll just have to take more time to think some more. Such decisions, however tardily they may be reached, are not to be taken lightly. Softly, softly, catchy monkey, fools rush in and all that… So at bottom, the first real step into the big, wide world doesn’t begin for another six months or, which is the same, when you decide. Whether you call it 'waiting for something to happen' or 'taking control of your own life', it certainly makes you feel better. As does unemployment benefit.

So with time to kill and an overdraft still not sick enough to warrant unplugging its support machine, I went to pay a few visits here and there to friends still in exams, they having been less meticulous than I when selecting their subjects of study. Some were being unreasonably unrelaxed about the whole thing. I, meanwhile, was in the coveted window-seat of the local by opening time.

As it was the summer of 2002, there was a World Cup to schedule myself around, a month-long carnival of colour and bonhomie hosted by our South Korean and Japanese cousins. How we sniggered at the Spanish, robbed of their dreams yet again! How we chuckled over Italian incredulity at those mysterious forces working against them behind the scenes! And how we held our heads high as conflicts political and cultural were finally served justice with one penalty kick against Argentina! At half seven in the morning we drank in unison and sang in jest. Strangers chatted spontaneously at the bar, and shared pages of the newspaper across tables. It was exactly how things were meant to be: free and carefree, our true passions unleashed, all tethers untied.

Unfortunately you don’t escape three years of questionable commitment to a higher institute of learning that easily, and soon enough the question of the graduation ceremony reared its mortared cranium. And having no intention of attending such an embarrassing affair, I managed to convince my parents that, well, I might go. The matter required wise counsel. Jim, long my partner in mediating between right and wrong, was by this time honing his sleeping skills, claiming exam stress, and his parents were extremely understanding. It’s mighty difficult to get out of bed after eight hours’ sleep if you’ve been used to at least twelve a day for the last three years. But once up, he rubbed his eyes, pondered the gravity of it all and swiftly decided he had no intention of donning mortar and wings either. A result. We had a united front. And a manifesto.

There were two important reasons for not going: the first is that you look and feel ridiculous, and picturing Jim in that get-up certainly made me smirk. I, on the other hand, have a habit of making myself look a fool, so one more day wouldn’t have mattered much, but it would have been remiss to overlook an opportunity to avoid humiliation. The second reason was down to principle. The idea of publicly celebrating academic success after three years of getting up early enough to catch last orders and pursue female foreign students around unpopular nightspots smacked of hypocrisy, and it would be wrong to implicate our parents in that. After all, it was supposed to be their day, not ours. So, little by little, we both managed to squirm out of the whole unseemly affair, and my certificate of graduation was eventually sent to my house a few months later.

My cherished six months were gradually eroding away, however, and I was beginning to see the benefit of exams finishing later rather than sooner. Beer tokens were also in increasingly short supply, with the government sanctioning but a small portion of my recommended daily intake. So I decided to shimmy on down to one of those job agencies and see if they could chuck a couple of hundred quid my way over the next week or so.

I’d been to these places before during the holidays and foresaw their lack of cooperation. If you give them the CV of a university graduate they won’t let you do anything suitable. You’re overqualified. All I wanted was to pretend to lift boxes for a few afternoons and then I’d call again at my leisure, but they were sure to insist on putting me in a suit and tie and office. So I gave them the bare minimum of information, and soon enough they gave me some of the best jobs I’d ever had. In the sense that they rarely lasted more than a couple of weeks, that is.

First there was Roy. Me and Roy had a wheely-cart each, some industrial gloves, a hefty supply of plastic bags and a broom. But Roy had the map showing the ‘beat’, and he guarded it jealously. As long as he knew where we were going and I didn’t, I had to follow him around all day like a stray dog's pet, and I adapted to the role with unsettling aplomb. Now, I can safely say that Roy was the most stupid person I’ve ever met. This didn’t make him bad company by any means, but his catchphrase ‘stick by me son and you’ll be alright’ did send a shiver down my spine every time he sensed I was struggling to grasp instructions. Given that he seemed to have done nothing but watch soap operas all his life, I was intrigued that he still hadn’t developed the tools to recognize a cliché. He had developed the knack, however, for unprompted monologues that unwittingly challenged the very fundamentals of human understanding. One such discourse, set during the rumbles of a metaphor-heavy thunderstorm as we chain-smoked on someone’s doorstep, went like this:

‘Y’know, it’s fackin’ ‘ard this job. Peopow fink it’s easy, but it’s fackin’ ‘ard. Vee uvver day, fra exarmpow, I go ‘ome a’ four o’clock, lay darn on ve sofa an’ faw stray' asleep. An ah wake up a’ five. So vats an aar arz asleep, ini’? Vat’s abaa' an aa', ini’? Four tiw five?’

He was, with genuine sincerity, broaching a question. Four tiw five? How could there be any doubt? You don’t have to calculate anything, it’s just one! You can’t do any maths with one!

As we ambled about town, sweeping streets that were clean, ignoring others that were filthy, all apparently in accordance with the confidential beat, we would keep our eyes peeled for the council officials who, legend had it, cruised around in unmarked cars making notes on unattended leaves and cigarette butts and crisp packets and dog shit. For the last hour of each afternoon we hid in a park.

Roy was fifty-two and had an eight-year-old son by a woman twenty years his junior. His big ambition was to get on the trucks, and he’d made the request to management umpteen times over the years, but had always been denied. Every morning at the depot we lumbered towards the exit with our carts while young muscled men leapt onto growling trucks, hanging off the side doors and shouting obscene encouragement as they rumbled into the battlefield, irrepressible street bandits on the side of Good. Me and Roy would struggle miserably to get our clunky carts and flailing brooms out of their way, and once the din of their triumphant departure abated, we would traipse into the unwanted sympathy of silent streets. Roy had been with his cart for over twenty years and the bastards wouldn’t let him have a go on the trucks. He’d been asking for a new broom for months and they wouldn’t even give him one of them. You could see where his had worn down at the edges resulting in a wholly unsatisfactory sweep. He showed me. I never found a reason to tell him that I wouldn’t be with him for the next twenty years, that I’d probably be swanning off in a few days. I’m sure he was used to that, anyway.

After Roy I was given a cushy number as the second man in an Argos van. Lamps, little snooker tables, mirrors, garden swings and God-knows-what else rolled around in the back as my partner-in-delivery burst blood vessels at the traffic and I sat reading his Sun. And his News of the World. And his Daily Star. Delivery Van Driver Mick, 37, said the love of his life was Manchester United and his dream was to go to Old Trafford. Full name Michael Parish, he was born within the sound of Bow Bells, and believed that not all immigrants were lazy but that the traffic problem in London was getting worse. Loving parents Frank, 55, and Sue, 54, wished they could see more of their son, but his work and busy social life took up much of his time. I don't think I ever had a moment's proper eye contact with Mick. His head, with its red face and shark-like frown, was constantly jerking left and right in search of targets for his frenetic ire. He even once launched a rant at a road sign as if it had both volition and a penchant for petty spitefulness. Yet he was the archetypal 'very nice man' when we dropped the stuff off, and he seemed to derive genuine pleasure from the mixture of relief and expectation on people's faces as they emerged from their houses on our arrival. 'Well she was fuckin' 'appy!' he'd remark with a wide-eyed smile after we dropped off a sofa set, before immediately switching back to his sweaty frown and fighting with the gear stick. But half an hour’s work for a whole day’s pay, dropping off brothel-friendly furniture across swathes of semi-detached suburbia, wasn’t bad at all.

After cabin fever Mick came the best of the lot. The tube factory. The tubes were apparently car parts and the like, but all I saw were aluminium tubes: some big, some small, some wide, some thin. I had a seat at a simple welding machine with a foot-pedal, some tubes in a crate on my right and some slightly smaller ones in a crate on my left. I would grab a tube from each and weld them together with a stamp of my foot, then lob the result over my shoulder to gradually fill up a third crate behind me. From time to time someone in a forklift truck would sidle up from nowhere and, like a professional curler in a bit of a hurry, slide a new, full crate next to me. The driver would give me the official factory thumbs-up signal which had to be reciprocated and confirmed with a grave nod of the head before he could depart. If I finished a crate quickly I could toddle off for a stroll before the next lot came. Or I could just pop off anyway and if anyone asked I would say the tubes were the wrong size or the welding wasn’t fixing or some such. As half the factory was waltzing around on forklift trucks it was impossible to chase up anyone to verify anything.

But there really was no compulsion to skive. Instead, it was a rather pleasing task, especially when you got a good rhythm going as you whacked the tubes onto the welder, smacked the pedal and cast away, a good Plonk! Smack! Throw! Plonk! Smack! Throw! Plonk! Smack! Throw! Among all the machinery you could sing at the top of your voice and no one could hear you. To the stamp of my foot I belted out number after number as the forklifts pirouetted around me with hypnotic grace and, occasionally, cheeky wit. The whole place had a flowing music to it, and the huge entrance at the end of the factory floor let in so much sunlight that you felt as if you were all on a voyage to a happy shore. The hours flew by. It was the only place I’ve worked where the fire alarm was regarded as a tedious interruption, rather than a mini Bank Holiday. After a couple of weeks, when they told me they'd no longer be needing me, I felt fulfilled. On my last day I hung up my overalls, picked up my lunchbox, and strode into the glare of the sunlit entrance a better man.

The final wardrobe door the agency sent me through led to the dairy. The dairy was famous. If you got milk, so it was related, you’d stink of old milk for weeks on end. Not sour milk, mind, which is an easily recognizable odour, but old milk, which is a kind of lingering humidity that stays, sometimes dormant, under the skin for weeks. People don’t think it’s milk. They think it’s you. And worse, it emerges without warning in waves whose potency and frequency is directly proportional to the sexual desirability of the person in your company. I approached the dairy warily.

Luckily I got juice, which involved nothing more unpleasant than blue overalls and a shower hat which, when on, was actually quite becoming. The bearded bloke next to me on the packing line brought his own rather natty one and encouraged everyone else to do the same. Apparently management didn’t mind, as long as the colours weren’t too bright.

There was nothing to this one at all, despite tribal elders insisting there was a trick to getting six rectangular cartons of orange juice into a cardboard box specifically designed for six rectangular cartons of orange juice. The only trick was to change the packing boxes from Budget Juice to Florida 100% without stopping the machine. The dairy was night shift work, and the best bit about it was strolling back to the centre of town early morning as the sun emerged through the mist over the river with barely another soul in view. I never tired of that sight.

You never know that summer has finally been and gone until a month or so after the event. It takes a while to accept that a few grim days in a row are no longer an aberration, but the norm. Convinced it was the key to making summer last forever, I had consciously basked in every glorious day, stopping in the street like a madman to watch people smiling and laughing; staring at the deep quivering green of a tree against the blue sky; listening to the creak of the floorboards under my feet as I entered the pub, first customer of the day. But it made no difference. Sunny days became irregular. Friends dwindled in number at the weekend. And there was no Slovenia versus Paraguay to drink around.

Something was different, and it wasn’t going to go away. It whispered that nights in the dairy wouldn’t be the same followed by dark and drizzly mornings, that hoiking wet leaves out of drainage grills in the bitter cold, or long grey days in a factory of machinery wouldn’t be rewarded with the same sensation of time suspended. Little by little, lazy days off in the pub began to feel like trying to get away from something rather than going towards it.

And then it happened. We knew, deep down, it was coming, but had pretended it might ignore us, or at least appear in a nice cosy form, wrapped in pink ribbons. We’d certainly never talked about it. That would have been like confronting a dark secret that, once admitted, would divide us forever. We didn’t want anything to change. We were rather happy with the way things were. Life was okay. We wanted it to go on forever.

I barely knew her personally, and only vaguely remembered having talked to her briefly at some do long ago, but Jim told me because she was the girlfriend of one of his London mates. Now though, she suddenly seemed different. More remote. Not arrogant, but somehow improved. More authoritative, perhaps. More 'adult'. Anyway, the news was serious. She’d got a job.

As so often in situations like these, you don’t know quite how to react. These are things you can only learn from going through the experiences of life itself. Although I hardly knew her, Jim was a friend and had called specially to break the news, so I had to say something for his benefit. A