I haven't posted for yonks because I've been busy forging a new career in English language teaching. Actually, the latter sentence makes me appear like some sub-Apprentice-like Thatcherite wannabee - "The sky's not the limit when there's footsteps on the moon"...Pleeease.
The truth is I was bored and jaded by my old note-taking job (waiting ages to get paid, long commute)and heard from various sources about the joys and financial opportunities created by teaching English as a foreign language - both at home and abroad.
Anyway, I forked out the £950 (I actually had some money for a change) for the one-month intensive Tesol course at a school in Edinburgh, and spent four weeks in grammatical purgatory as I attempted to both understand and teach esoterica such as 'Present future continuous', 'Gerund's', 'Modals' and 'conditional clauses'.
Yeah, the grammar stuff is hard but nothing prepares you for that sharp punch in the stomach when you finally have to stand up in front of other sentient beings and appear to know what you are talking about.
Luckily, our students/victims were all 'mature' Spaniards on a two week 'freebie' course courtesy of the school. We, the apprentice teachers were actually paying them to be there. This was fortunate, both for us and the students own sanity - I have no doubt that were it the other way around, an avalanche of refund applications would have swamped the school's admin desk like January snow.
Thank god it did actually get easier as the course went on...well a bit, and revelation of revelations, I actually passed! Just.
Anyway, I had only a few days of relative calm and freedom to ponce about on my laurel's (Hardy) before being head-hunted by a dynamic and upwardly thrusting internationally renowned English language 'provider'. 'Head-hunted' is probably a touch dramatic, I did e-mail them a CV a couple of days before...I think the previous candidate got run over by a bus or something.
So there I found myself on teacher induction day, in the gloomy classroom of a local Uni masquerading as a summer school, babbling incoherently as I showed my new teaching manager my 'provisional' Tesol qualification (the real Mcoy was still in the post) and a rather ancient and dog eared copy of my degree certificate from an ex-poly most people had never heard of.
My initial contract was for two weeks full-time: 30 hours contact teaching time per-week (15 Min's between lessons), one hour 'free lunch' in the Uni canteen and all lesson plans prepared for us on on our special corporate pen drives. The money was okay-ish and I needed the experience...and who can afford to waive the offer of a free lunch in these economically fragile times?
First lesson. A typically rainy Scottish Monday morning. There I stood in front of 14 hormonal and very tired and demotivated Italian teenagers, an electronic whiteboard shimmering behind me, its surface awash with the green Crayola scrawl of conditional sentence examples that were virtually unintelligible to me, never mind the kids. I never got the hang of those electronic pens, you had to angle the thing just right or you'd end up with a spastic scrawl - Frankenstein spellings and odd letter omissions. I was constantly dodging the 'spotlight' from the overhead projector too, which either blinded me or painted strange hieroglyphs on my face and body, a blank canvas for a YouTube conceptualist.
Amazingly, both myself and the students seemed to settle down and create a 'meaningful and disciplined language learning environment'...which basically means they became a little less bored and I was half-competent at making myself understood. We sort of met in the middle.
Thankfully, I was teaching intermediate level groups, which meant they had some grasp of basic English - I'd heard horror stories about the awkward and deathly silent wildernesses generated in beginner classes, tumbleweeds of incomprehension hitting inexperienced teachers squarely in the mush.
As the days wore on(literally), a grim and very dark concentration camp humour was adopted by us teachers - a psychic defence mechanism to ward off the horror of repeated exposure to loud, cocky and very privileged Italian yoofs - and that was just the girls. These summer schools are very expensive and all the students I got to know were the offspring of Roman and Milanese doctors, lawyers and very private dentists - no urchins from the mean streets here. In the student handbook there is a specific warning about straying off campus and meeting 'undesirables', it goes very much like: "If you should meet children from the local area, be polite but don't initiate conversation." So much for authentic cultural exchange.
The last 'excursion' on the kids summer school fortnight is a shopping trip to Prince's street...the high street brands and their accompanying logo's already neatly printed along with other Edinburgh landmarks such as the Scots Monument and the Castle on photocopied 'local culture sheets'.
I had my contract extended and completed another two weeks of teaching at the summer school, and despite everything, I have to say that overall it was 'interesting' if very hard work. But I would much rather teach adult learners, especially economic migrants such as the Spaniards I taught on the Tesol course. Its not just the behaviour/concentration aspect, its about teaching individuals authentic everyday language they will meet on the street, helping them to apply for jobs and accommodation and helping them to integrate into our culture and contributing the best of their own in turn.
