Crackin' Business

Yes, it's time for my annual pilgrimage to worship at the shrine of triple-distilled pure Irish spring water, so you won't be hearing much either from or about me for a good while. Which is probably a very good thing, really.

So, enjoy your well-deserved summer break yous all (if you get one, that is), and I look forward to enjoying your company again at the end of August, when I shall return to 'crack the whip of satire' (to misquote Trollope) over the shady beast that is the tacky UK Tefl Trade.

Enjoy your summer!

Alex Case Does the 'Six Questions' Bit...

And the next one, please! Yes, here's the next victim to submit to Sandy's six questions game. This time it's Alex Case, the well-known Japanese Samurai warrior and author of the appallingly cheesily-named TEFLtastic website. If, by some strange chance, you've not yet discovered the cheddar-flavoured delights of Alex's site, I recommend you do so soon - it's almost as good as this one!

*******

1.What's the worst EFL job you've ever had?

I look back on all my jobs fondly, but there are some bits of several which are funny looking back:

- Adult students who copied all their homework from each other and then complained when they failed the final test until they were passed by the school owner (Turkey)
- Asking if I could use the computer to prepare a lesson and being asked “Why? No one has ever done that before” by the school boss (London, near Piccadilly Circus)
- Being told that the fact that we could guess the answers to a reading comprehension in Dutch despite not understanding a word was the definition of a good reading comprehension task (pre summer school training week, UK)
- Being told I wouldn’t get my full bonus because I didn’t drive, even though they knew that when I signed up (same summer camp)
- Being told to spend less time planning my lessons and more time chatting with the kids between lessons (ditto)
- Showing my best flexibility by saying that I didn’t care which classes I got as long as there was variety and being given just two levels in four days a week in a private primary school and so having to repeat each lesson 6 times (Thailand)
- A student who picked his scabs in class (Japan- nice students, bad skin!)
- Being told in an accusing voice that a sixty five year old student who studied thirty minutes a week (if she arrived on time) and never did her homework had dropped out because she felt like she wasn’t making progress (Japan)

2. Compare and Contrast: your worst colleague and your worst boss

Again, some bits and pieces rather than one person:

Colleagues - one continually mentioning that he went to Cambridge in every conversation, playing his home made techno music on the teachers’ room CD player, installing file sharing software on the school computer so he could illegally download music while other teachers were waiting to print out their lessons, hanging around the summer camp in Turkey telling all the students he got sacked because he was a Muslim; another, a Welsh guy teaching a lesson on Irish English to a group of Elementary level Turkish kids; a teacher in Thailand who tried to move in on my girlfriend by telling her she was the one to cure him of his addiction to prozzies

Boss - one tried to introduce a policy that teachers had to wear a suit once a week (even though most of our students will still never see us in a suit and no other school in Spain had that policy), boasted that in his previous job he spent the entire year’s marketing budget in two weeks, finished some lessons 25 minutes late and was usually unshaven and with bloodshot eyes but would nag the teachers about their own organization and appearance; another, a former Catholic priest and boys’ school headmaster with a penchant for cross dressing shows in the summer school cabarets, giving the first full time contract in 2 years to the least qualified teacher who had the most complaints from students because he had a thing for Welsh girls, and being told to tell more jokes in my classes

3. Your worst lesson - does it haunt you still?

- An observed DELTA lesson on skimming and scanning where the students neither skimmed nor scanned. Don’t know how I passed that one!
- A worksheet using Hole in my Bucket by Spearhead, for which I only had a really bad tape recording. The class revolted and I lost it a bit and said “I did this yesterday with a lower level class and they did fine, so you are just going to do your best and that is that”. As usually seems to be the case, the students seemed to actually appreciate me showing my real feelings in class, but I was horribly embarrassed about snapping at them when actually the task was pants. Actually, lessons I have tried with one group and try to make go exactly the same with another is a consistent theme of bad lessons throughout my career. Same thing happened with another disastrous DELTA observed lesson, this time the “humanistic classic” Empty Chair
- I have a terrible skill for mentioning I don’t like things and then finding that the students have brought me precisely that for an end of course present and have it sitting in their bags. I did this again the other week with chocolate.
- Any number of times when you find out the next day or week that what you told your students was totally wrong. I can still picture the look of polite disbelief on the face of a Japanese engineer as I told them that metres squared and square metres was the same thing.
- Times when your native speaker intuition abandons you, e.g. not being able to hear if something is wrong or not because you have heard it so many times
- As anyone who reads my blog and my O Level English teacher can tell you, my spelling is shocking, and many times that shocking spelling has gone onto the board and then into their notebooks
- Describing vocab with pictures that accidentally look very rude indeed
- Saying “Right, this is your homework and pausing, then realizing or being told “But teacher, there is half an hour left” -usually due to having a teaching body clock that suddenly flashed back to another school where I finished at that time every day
- Breaking my flies in the toilet just before going into the first session I was giving on a 4 week TEFL course. Luckily had a long jumper on
- Any time I had to raise my arms in a kindergarten summer school in a non air conditioned building, especially when wearing blue or grey shirts (white shirts with yellow patterns- the most useful teaching tip they never tell you on your TEFL courses)
- The two 4 year old kids in the class running into each other while searching for hidden flashcards and getting a nose bleed and a black eye, all while their mothers were observing for the first time that year

4. What's the whackiest thing you've ever done with a class?

The thing where you all link hands and have to untangle yourselves, and loads of other similar warmers. The students seemed to quite like them, but there was hardly ever any language use or link to the rest of the lesson. I’d never do those now, but actually I miss being experimental like that, and it did seem to help class dynamics. I also had that trust building thing where you fall back into each others’ arms on my lesson plan many times, but chickened out each and every time.

Another one, which was theoretically a good idea to practice directions, was to design a treasure hunt in the local area in Waterloo. Unfortunately, half of them just went to the pub (which wasn’t on the route!) and didn’t see them until the first lesson the next day.

5. Why did you decide to become an EFL teacher; and what regrets do you have (if any)?

I had done three years of care work, and was thinking of taking the diploma in social work, but thought it might be a good idea to take a break and travel for a bit first. I’d done a one-week intro to TEFL years before when I was on the dole, and suddenly had enough cash due to getting paid to sleep in care homes, so I did one and off I went. No regrets, as social work is all paperwork and so not really my kind of thing at all. I still have no idea of what else I could have done.

6. If you could change just one thing in contemporary EFL, what would it be - and why?

I would make all accredited schools in the UK (e.g., the ones that could issue documents for students to use to get student visas) only employ teachers with a PGCE-equivalent one-year full-time TEFL qualification or people who were in the process of getting such a qualification. The government would then find that they had to provide at least some funding for said training, as they should for an industry that brings so much money into the economy. Those teachers would inevitably go abroad at least half the time, but as many of them would work for British chains like International House and the British Council and hopefully spread a reputation for good teaching from British teachers, I hardly think the government would live to regret that. There was recently a suggestion in one of the UK newspapers that there should be regulations on who could call themselves a college, in a similar way to universities, and we could do something similar with “Approved English School” or suchlike for schools that kept to those qualifications.

*******

So, thanks very much Alex. In fact, there's another victim in the pipeline, but she's being a little coy with me. Come on, you know who you are!

Six Questions for Melanie Butler

Continuing almost every TEFL blogger's new-found tradition of interviewing other colleagues and cronies in the whacky world of EFL, I present, for your utter delight, an interview with the owner, editor-in-chief, and crusading Tefl catwoman of the EL Gazette, Melanie Butler.

Although Melanie customarily shies away from direct publicity, I have managed to locate this fine piccy of her alongside, featuring a younger edition of the woman when she was recruited by intelligence services to introduce the sophisticated yet decadent Western pastime of pole-dancing to an eager pre-revolutionary Iran.

*******

1. How long have you been at the ELG, and what have been its highs and lows over that time?

I was turned down as the first editor of the Gazette in 1979, but freelanced for it more or less continuously until I bought it with my ex-partner in 1987. Apart from two years working as a publisher for Pearson Longman in the early nineties, I've been here ever since.

One low I particularly remember was being slapped with a gagging writ - which means you are forbidden to publish anything unless you remove a particular article - by a major UK institution (which will remain nameless, as I don't want another writ). A gagging order literally stops the presses until you can find a judge to hear the case. We couldn't afford not to publish and had to give in. A few months later, the management of the particular institution took me out for lunch, and when I asked why they had gagged us, they said it was because the allegations in the article were true.

That experience made me very aware of the importance of evidence in British libel law. It also made me realise the importance of a good lawyer. I am hugely indebted to Julian Pike of Farrer and Co, who has been an invaluable (and eternally tolerant) ally over the years. At the Gazette we get about four or five threats of libel writs a year (we wouldn't be doing our job well if we didn't). Our high point in the libel stakes was when a distance training provider, a Mr Ian B Dick of ILC , with a post restante address at an office building called International House, took us to the press complaints commission. His complaint was thrown out, which alowed us to run the headline "Dick's complaints do not stand up, say commission".

In the last few years it has been a major financial struggle to survive, but it hasn't stoppped us doing major investigative pieces (or getting libel threats). I am most proud of recently launching a digital version of the Gazette, which is free for any EFL teacher in the world. Just log on to
http://www.elgazettedigital.com/ .

2. How do you see ELG's role nowadays - what is its 'mission statement', implied or otherwise?

I'm not sure we have a mission statement - it all sounds too corporate. But we do have a motto: "If we publish it, we can prove it. If you can prove it, we will publish it." A lot of teachers do not understand this, and they get upset when they tell us of something that happened, but won't let us have any evidence, refuse to give us their name (we don't have to publish a name, but we do have to know it), and say they would never provide any evidence to a court if things went wrong. We're often sure their stories are true, but we simply cannot afford to run a story without evidence. The average cost of a libel case in the UK is tens of millions of pounds, and the writer, the editor, myself and the company are all liable.

The other main role of the Gazette is to report what is happening around the world in EFL - not just to native speaker teachers, but in state schools, universities and at governmental level. We try to be a neutral provider of accurate information - even if we don't always succeed.

3. What's your background as a Tefler and a journalist?

I started in Tefl as an unqualified summer school teacher in Iran, before the revolution. I earned £13 an hour, which would be equvalent to £60 an hour in today's terms.. From a financial point of view, it has been pretty much down hill ever since! I am too old to have done a Celta (it hadn't been invented), but I did do a Delta in 1977. I taught in Spain and Italy, then came back to the UK and joined the BBC World Service, where I wrote and produced EFL teaching programmes.

I continued as a freelance scriptwriter and EFL teacher until 1987, when my ex partner and I bought the Gazette from the media mogul Robert Maxwell, shortly before he fell off his yacht. Apart from a couple of years at Pearson Longman, where I was in charge of the splendidly named "adult publishing" list (no, I didn't make blue movies), I have been here pretty much ever since.

4. Compare and contrast; your worst EFL boss and colleague.

I have been my own boss pretty much for the last 22 years, and I'm not sure I can remember. I was sent out by the founder of the Callan school in London (when Callan was just another little method school run by another little man with a method) to Madrid, which was a fiasco - but mostly because I was the only teacher. The people who ran the school were perfectly sweet, but had no idea what they were doing. I left after a month or so because there were so few students that - as an hourly paid teacher - I was in danger of starving to death. I've been against hourly paid teaching ever since.

I didn't like the corporate world much. When I worked at the Beeb we were protected from the worst of it by our section boss, the resplendent Chris Farham. However, I did find it a bit of a nightmare at Longman. The people were nice, but the system was ridiculous - there was so much paperwork, I don't know how we ever got anything done. The worst thing of all was when I was put on a Culture Change Committee - as if a committee could ever change a culture. We ended up having a meeting about the meeting that we had had about the culture having too many meetings. Within a year, all but two members of the committee had left the company (including myself).

5. Compare and contrast; your best and worst EFL moments in the classroom.

My worst moment was probably the first time I walked into a class at the Callan school in Madrid, and my first class, a bunch of student translators, asked their first questions: " When do you use the future perfect continuous?" I ran into the loo clutching my copy of Thompson and Martinet and cried! About thirty years later, looking at analysis of the British National Corpus, I found the correct answer to the question: "We almost never use the future perfect continuous. There is only one exampe of it in the Corpus - it is probably the least useful tense in the world. Forget about it."

My reaction, by the way, was not to say that grammar doesn't matter. Of course it bloody matters, and teachers who don't know anything about it are about as useful as driving instructors who don't know about the internal combustion engine. I've been interested in grammar, and grammar research, ever since.

My best moment in the classroom was probably when I was working at the European Business School in London, where I had the class with the lowest level of English. I decided not to bother with grammar and vocabulary, but to concentrate on getting them to write essays and make presentations in a way that fitted in to British Academic culture (an early form of EAP). I used a range of unorthodox methods, from booting out all the French who sat at the back and chewed gum, to telling the Germans to shut up and write the essay the way I told them to write the essay. I gave lectures, I tore up their essays, and I also swore a lot in several languages.

I have never been a fan of the "being your own best teacher and making your students own the learning process" bollocks - just do whatever works best (short of downright cheating) to get the results, that's what I say. If you don't believe me - visit Holland. The teachers would make Mario Rinvolucri die of shame, and the whole population speaks English!

It worked at the European Business School. When the exam results came out, my lot still came bottom in English, but they were top in every other subject! My students, a bunch of linguistically challenged Germans and bolshy French kids, were ecstatic. When, shortly afterwards, I was involved in buying the Gazette, they did all the business calculations for us before the sale, and about three of them came and worked for us for free for a few months.

6. If you could change one thing in UK Tefl, what would it be?

Why UK EFL? Most of the world treats native speaker teacher graduates like cannon fodder - though, I do have to say, some of the London schools seem to take the biscuit. Outside their own countries, non-native speakers fare even worse. And before you sneer, Sandy, [can you see me sneering, Melanie?] I should say that the best teachers I have ever seen in action were Polish.

If I could change one thing about UK EFL, it would be the stupid British Council decision to leave out teachers' terms and conditions from the things they inspect in the accreditation scheme. This is not only because I think it is immoral - more importantly, I think that it is simply fatuous to say that you can guarantee quality when you have teachers at accredited schools teaching 45 hours a week. Worse still are the summer schools, with teachers working 60 hours a week - before preparation and marking - particularly when they are supposed to be looking after a bunch of kids and teenagers. They're too tired to stand up - it's a catastrophe waiting to happen.

*******

Well, thanks a million, Melanie. And I sincerely hope you get over the shame of appearing in this blog soon!

A New Career in a New Town

Well, it's a new country actually, but I couldn't resist the chance to make profitable use of one of my favourite David Bowie titles. And, erm, it's more of a continuation of the tedious soap-opera that is my current career (if it can seriously be called that) than an attempt to embark on a new one. But what the hell, eh!

You see, I've just about had enough of the deceitful circus that passes for education (and therefore, teaching) in this Gulf country, and so I've decided to take a bit of a plunge and throw in the towel (apologies for the yawning cliches there, folks). So, it's goodbye to the beach and the soaring temperatures, and hello again to the caviar and the vodka.

Of course, there are other contributing reasons too, the most important one being that my wife needs to fulfil a two-year residence requirement in the UK before she can get her grubby hands on a British passport. Unfortunately, my attempts to bribe the commissioner at the British Embassy here with plentiful gallons of fermented yak's milk came to nowt, so I was left with no recourse but the legal way.

The new job's not too bad either. It's one of those 60-days-on, 30-days-off types, based somewhere near the Caspian Sea, and the tax-free mullah is quite generous - just a shade under 9,000 quid for the three months. The teaching's six hours per day for six days a week, which, if my memory serves me well, is just about do-able - provided certain 'refreshments' are readily available!

Anyway, I've no wish to divulge the exact location, lest some of my less charitable followers decide to put on some sort of reception committe for me upon arrival, but let me just say that my knowledge of Russian should come in extremely handy! Meanwhile, I'll be jetting back to Skidrow-on-Sea in a few days, and looking forward to reacquainting myself with the sophisticated delights of contemporary British culture in its urban setting.

Or even the suburban variety - it is Skidrow-on-Sea after all!

Another Peek at TWIN

This will be my last piece in the timely trilogy of five articles about the full horrors of working on UK summer schools. It’s actually a rerun of a posting I made a couple of years ago about the terrible Twin. Let it serve as an example – one of the worst - of the genre of less-than-ideal summer Tefl employment. And remember - if you willingly sign up for this sort of punishment, you really only have yourself to blame!

******

I came across a very caustic and damning warning about Summer Schools on St. Dave's a few weeks back (click here for the posting) from a frustrated Tefl guerilla called Robski. As a brief outline, just take a butcher's hook at these few examples...

I have noticed that Lewisham based TWIN have started advertising again for summer staff. Whatever you do, do NOT work for this organisation. I was employed on recruitment and then to run one of the summer centres. People were hired and then terminated after they had bought flights, made arrangements etc. Some were told they didn't have a job only days before coming into the UK.

Hmm, that sounds like standard Tefl cowboy practice, if my experience of Summer Schools is worth anything. But go on, Robski - tell me something I don't know!!

Other people were fired for complaining. Support from head office was awful and often management would just shout their way through problems. The staff turnover in Lewisham was very high; they really do like to fire people. In the first week local staff walked out because they realised the money was rubbish for what was being asked of them. As each one left the job got worse. Also, a member of the local staff was attacked by some students.

Well, that IS interesting! Usually it's the staff who end up attacking each other, especially after a long night at the Plough and Lettuce and nine pints of Old Speckled Hen. Anything else we should know, Robski?

Many other things went wrong, too. Too many things when you are trying to take care of other people's children. And there was a major gap with CRB checks - the company didn't even think about it.

Now that's very serious! It's actually an offence to employ anybody who has contact with young people without doing a CRB check. A clear case for the police, and especially Inspector McHammered of The Lard (deceased), methinks. Anyway, I got in touch with the author of the piece and asked for more stories from the TWIN House of Horrors. This is the scary stuff that I got back...

Dear Sandy, TWIN was by far the most crooked organisation I've worked for. I think what bothered me the most was that they really did not care either about the staff or the kids. They know too well that any shit tends to fall on centre managers should something serious occur.

The sad thing is that families send the most precious thing they have - their son or daughter - and companies such as TWIN still don't know for sure if they have beds for them all.

I was centre manager for Twin at Malvern Girls College. The college accommodation was okay, though a bit spread out. It was here that TWIN made a deduction from wages of all except senior staff for accommodation – non residential teachers did not pay this charge. I know for a fact that Malvern did not charge TWIN for accommodation provided to staff. The problems I had to deal with were phenomenal.

A further example: At Malvern we had what we called 'leaderless' kids. These were 6 very young individual Russian boys - 9 or 10 years old. Due to overcrowding in all buildings we had to house them in a building dominated by much older French boys – literally nowhere else to put them. Until we could relocate them to a safer house they were actually at some risk.

We had no leader who could speak Russian, and no leader paid to look after them. An Irish colleague of mine took them under his wing but TWIN did not pay him for the extra work he put in to looking after them. One day these kids were found playing on the railway line ... [and] ... One evening one of these kids had to go to hospital and it was pure luck that his mum was French and a local leader was able to speak to him in French. So we put him in my car and I took him to Worcester Infirmary - serious insurance issues here because I'm using my car for work purposes.

The company did not have a system in place for such problems, and no money was allocated to pay for taxis. (At this point we had no petty cash left at all.) Also about petty cash – we ran out. One night I had to cancel the disco and I did not want to pay for it myself from my own money. I had a very nasty phone call from a senior manager to complain at me, even though I had still not received extra petty cash.

A colleague who was supposed to be assistant / deputy to me was about to quit and I needed her to stay. I asked my line manager if I could give her 100 pounds cash to get her to stay. The answer was ‘yes’ and I was promised I would get this money back – but of course I did not get it back. In total, by the end, I was out of pocket by 150 pounds, and I did not get any petrol money for all the driving around that I did. At Cambridge TWIN did have to pay for every room – even for staff – which is why some were housed more cheaply off site. But then there was an issue about how many students there were for each staff member. I do not know the exact ratio, but it was too low.

At Salisbury the centre manager just walked out. At Oxford he disappeared suddenly. I never found out whether he was fired for complaining or he quit too. Before I was in Malvern, I was asked to work in Lewisham for a couple of weeks to 'help out' with recruitment. Whoever was doing it had in fact walked out and it was a mess. I SHOULD HAVE LEFT THEN. I recruited according to the numbers I was told, and more or less managed to staff the centres (Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge, Portsmouth, London). But after student numbers did not meet predictions, I was told to terminate a number of contracts - some of these people had bought plane tickets from Poland and elsewhere. We then had some people who dropped out and I had to recruit more people - MAD, MAD, MAD!!

And finally, when I got to my centre in Malvern, another one dropped out - which I had warned them about, as it always happens - and we were understaffed. Not enough to supervise, teach, or even keep the centre running right. The day before I arrived at Malvern TWIN asked me if I had had a CRB check. Luckily for them I had one from my previous job. If I hadn't had one I would not have been allowed by Malvern to enter the building. Only two other staff members at Malvern had CRBs. Also, since many leaders and teachers were coming in from Poland, Czech Republic etc. TWIN needed to do this straight away after offering contracts – yet they did not. In most cases, TWIN didn’t even take up references.

When I was recruiting in London the positions had to be filled, but you only had a certain amount of time to do it, and no time to check references. Again, I should have left then. When I had a problem or needed to know company policy about something (for example taking a leaderless 9-year-old Russian boy to the hospital) my line manager was usually drunk in the pub - really! (Graham Impey, was his name – the guy just couldn’t cope.)

So, there you have it. And it's not a vile slur from a 'disgruntled' Sandy McManus - it's actually entirely true, and a frighteningly accurate rendition of everything you can expect if YOU work for TWIN this Summer – or probably any other cheapskate outfit. Just think of it – they’ll rip you off financially, pile up the workload, have you working illegally, and then leave you in the shit when you can’t cope. Is that the way you want to spend your Summer?

Strangely enough (well, not really), I see that Twin are still advertising on tefl.com for “Centre Managers, Activity Managers, Teachers, Activity Staff for Summer School” for their sites “Across the UK - Eastbourne, London, Guildford, Salisbury, Ardingly (Hayward's Heath), Cardiff, Portsmouth, and Saffron Walden” - even though their first SS is due to open on the 21st of this month!

The advert states that “CRB checks will be required” – but this not to say they will be done.

Anyway, if you still fancy taking your chances and are feeling desperate for a spell of humiliation, note that they are paying their Residential Teachers from £270 to £330 per week, depending on experience and qualifications. Why not call their ‘Vacations Team’ recruiter, Kate Melhorn, on 020 8297 0041, and tell her that Sandy McManus recommended you?!

Malvern House - Still No Shame? [UPDATED]

Continuing the Crap Jobs! theme from my previous posting, I notice that the odiously self-regarding MalvernShitHouse outfit are advertising yet again for teaching staff. I reckon they have a permanent ad running on tefl.com, which seems to give the lie to their statement that "Malvern House is London's favourite college". In fact, it seems to be about as favoured as a rat sandwich by its teachers (which is probably the only meat they can afford).

Of course, I can't let you know exactly how much they plan to pay their unfortunate Tefler-victims this time round, as the ad makes only the usual bland reference to 'competitive rates of pay'. There is mention, though, of a "Summer bonus also applicable to anyone starting before 29th June", but the ad carries no details of its substance. Perhaps they'll give you some free sun-cream, or a bottle of Tesco's white wine to take home?!

What I can offer you, though, is this little insight into the grotty place from my TeflTrade (RIP) website of a couple of years ago. This fine piece of bungling and inept investigative journalism managed to show the school in a typically shabby and corrupt light (no mean achievement, I can tell you).

*******

Malvern House - the School without Shame! [June 2007]

Malvern House is no stranger to the pages of this blog. It has been responsible for at least two postings, the first one way back in April 2005. Back then, they were paying their unfortunate Teflers just 9.50 an hour - and last August they were advertising for teachers and ... paying the same rates. Well, guess how much they're paying them now?

Yes, that WAS a trick question, wasn't it?! You've probably already guessed that nowadays they pay ... exactly the same! And that's even for teachers with the Dip.!! Just take a close look at their most recent appeal for unwary Tefl victims, taken from tefl.com.

• "Malvern House is fun, lively language school. We are the largest language school in London and the second largest in the U.K."
  
• "We have several positions available for the start of the new term, and one position available immediately. Our starting pay is £9.50 an hour; however we do guarantee hours for our teachers. "

Well, I wonder what's 'exciting' about earning less than ten quid an hour - less than 300 quid a week? Still, it's nice to know that they do guarantee the hours - that's really big of them!! And the fact that there is one position available immediately - well, you know what to think, don't you!

Unfortunately, that bit about being the largest EFL school in London, and the second biggest in the UK, is also true. What she failed to add, however, is that it's probably one of the most unethical and corrupt outfits too, if we judge by its past.

You see, Malvern House is owned and operated by the odious Malhotra family, who were responsible for THE biggest EFL scam in London several years ago. Remember Evendine College? Hundreds and hundreds of students left high and dry? Dozens of teachers left unpaid? These articles might serve as a reminder...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evendine_College

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-80257504.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-104030145.html

There's also this, from a British Council report into dodgy EFL providers:

The Supply of Goods and Services Act is especially pertinent in light of the closure of Evendine College. Evendine College was part of the Anglo Education Group PLC, and owned by Mr. Suresh Malhotra. On Thursday, 19 June, 2003, Evendine College closed its doors without notice to staff or students. Less than a month later, Mr. Malhotra put the college into voluntary liquidation. Many students had paid for courses that Evendine College failed to provide, and were left without any recourse. Around the same time, an investigative journalist’s report had found that Evendine College was one of the many private ELT institutions willing to provide false visa documentation to persons posing as "students".

Well, if that's not unethical - and criminal - then I don't know what is! In fact, Suresh Malhotra was officially banned from running a company for several years. However - surprise, surprise! - his name does appear on other websites as being linked to the school.

Anyway, let's get back to the Director, as Companies House data states that he has an extremely desirable address in the fashionable posh suburb of Chalfont St. Giles. In fact, I looked up the postcode on houseprices.com, and this is what it told me:

31/07/2002 £725,000 [Detached, Freehold] Hollyoak, Nightingales Lane, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, HP8 4SF

So, the Malhotras bought their domestic pile almost five years ago (and a year before Evendine College crashed) for a tad under three quarters of a million quid. Property prices have risen substantially since then, however, and it would not be unfair to assume that the current value of that little homestead would be closer to the following more recent prices:

1. 12/03/2007 £1,210,000 [Detached, Freehold] Brackenhurst, Nightingales Lane, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, HP8 4SF

2. 30/10/2006 £1,380,000 [Detached, Freehold] Sutton House, Nightingales Lane, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, HP8 4SF 3. 28/06/2005

3. £1,850,000 [Detached, Freehold] Wilmers, Nightingales Lane, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, HP8 4SF

So, the owners of the largest EFL school in London pay amongst the lowest wages - less than 300 quid a week for properly qualified and experienced EFL professionals - whilst they themselves live in luxury in Buckinghamshire. Interesting that, innit?!

First Published: Thursday, 7 June 2007

Anyway, this year MalvernShitHouse appear to be anticipating a large influx of students (or perhaps a large outflux of teachers) in summer, as they claim "We require experienced teachers for positions from 29th June 2009." If you are indeed desperate enough to work for this bunch of shysters, then magic your CV to HR@malvernhouse.com, where it will be given a fearsome inspection by the appropriately-named Antonia Corp, who claims to be in charge of recruiting at MalvernShitHouse.

In fact, Miss Corp (I'm presuming she's the unweddable and unbeddable single type) is also no stranger to this very blog, having sent the tart epistle below to Yours Truly some years ago, when I was foolish enough to give her college a cyperspace mauling for offering low-paid jobs dressed up as 'career opportunities'. As you can see, she has a very high opinion of herself and the school that employs her, whilst she apparently prefers to dismiss her EFL teachers as 'losers' and 'Guardian-readers'!

Dear Sandy,

I am assuming you are a 30-something failed actor/artist/writer or suchlike, of the usual ilk that believes that by slagging off their current profession they will somehow feel more satisfied about going to work every day.

I can’t exactly say I was quaking in my boots to find I was mentioned on your pathetic moaning website for losers and readers of the Guardian that we are offering one of the “crappest jobs in tefl”. Perhaps you would care to visit one of our schools and meet some of the 64-strong teaching team, all of whom readily accepted the STARTING salary of £9.50/hr, and have a strong commitment to their students and each other, in turn providing one of the best training grounds for newer teachers, as well as excellent promotional prospects for gifted and experienced teachers.

As the only (and feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong) school in London with a separate team of teachers dedicated to the professional advancement and development of the teaching population at Malvern House (over 75 hrs per week are dedicated to teacher development and training), I think you would agree that £9.50/hr is an excellent salary considering all the benefits (of which there are too many to mention here – completion bonuses, monthly drinks parties, guaranteed hours, permanent contracts etc etc.).

Feel free to pop in next time you have some spare time (which I’m sure won’t be long!) and I’ll show you around. Or maybe you could just ask one of our 10,000 previous students – there are many still in the UK, mostly in good jobs or higher education – if they thought their teacher seemed unmotivated or uncaring.

Antonia Corp
Malvern House London

So, there you go - a lot of charming people at such a charming school! And, just in case you didn't know it already, 9.50 is an 'excellent rate' of pay, at MalvernShitHouse anyway, and such basic things as guaranteed work and permanent contracts are now apparently to be regarded as 'benefits'! That's the modern face of UK Tefl - and don't it suck, eh!?

UPDATE: One of my comrades deep in the Tefl battlefield has advised me that MalverhShitHouse's listing on the British Councils 'UK Accreditation' website is noticeable for its extremely coy presence. In fact, it states the following...

Malvern House, London
Publishable statement withdrawn.

Strange, eh? I mean, if MalvernShitHouse forked out a load of cash to renew their BC accreditation, you think they'd want the world to know, wouldn't you? In fact, what these terse words typically mean is that the school refused to have the statement published - presumably because it wasn't good enough. Or at all!

In fact, you can check out all your favourite (and also the less admired) EFL schools right here:

http://www.britishcouncil.org/accreditation-more-about-your-accredited-centre.htm

Have fun!

Crap Job! Crap Job! Leeds Language College!!

I can remember that, back on the old TeflTrade blog (RIP), I used to do a 'Crap Job of the Month' posting every month or so. Now, for some odd reason I seem to have overlooked this essential weapon in the current TEFL Tradesman's armoury, but I have recently had a stiff and sobering reminder of the need for eternal vigilance and a permanent state of readiness in the war against TEFL shysters and bastards-deserving-of-being-shat-upon.

Because here's what must surely be the Crappiest EFL Job for 2009. Ladies and Gentlemen, and those of Indeterminate and Median status, let me introduce you to ... the Leeds Language College, where treading the treasured TEFL boards will get you the enormously generous sum of just over eight quid an hour!

For those with an eye on their career and an annual salary, that's, erm ... a starving starting salary of £12k a year for 30 hours of classroom capers per week. Don't believe me? Take a butcher's at the following then, from tefl.com, that essential repository of crappy jobs and dubious career prospects.

English Teacher - Leeds Language College Ltd
Location Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Deadline Monday 15. June 2009
Experience 1 year
Positions 3

Wow - they've got three positions on the go! I wonder why?! And best not hang about - the deadline will be past in a week, and then your Golden Opportunity will be gone (but probably not forever). Anyway, take a quick look at the details below, which are almost exactly the same as those that attracted the attention of the Tefl Blacklist (RIP) last year...

Details
Qualified CELTA teacher required to teach English to foreign students (age18+) of all levels in a British Council accredited college in the centre of Leeds. Must be a proficient English speaker with degree level education. Average six hours daily. Three to nine hours subject to requirements (it is expected that this will give an average six hours daily over the year). Please send CV'S for the attention of Adam Priestley to LeedsLanguageCollege@yahoo.co.uk.

So, some days you'll only be wanted for three hours of teaching, on others it'll be nine. Well, that ain't too bad, is it? As long as you're awake, you'll probably pass muster for the undoubtedly demanding c*nt called Adam Priestley, who is too tight to even get a proper e-mail address!

Qualifications
Must have CELTA qualifications or equivalent. Degree level educated. Native English speaker.

Compensation
Guaranteed hours Monday-Friday all year round. Starting salary £12k+ per annum (30 hours per week).

My God - I wonder just how many people with a degree and a CELTA would consider flogging themselves for less than 250 quid a week? Surely a job on the checkout at Waitrose or Morrison's would get you more cash? Or even washing cars in the supermarket car park!

Anyway, you can give the skinflint c*nt called Adam Priestley a ring at the number below and tell him what to do with his arsehole of a job. In fact, I'll do that very thing tomorrow (Monday) and let you know how I get on! Anyway, it's high time we started dealing with these wrist-job rogues in the appropriate manner, so a bombardment of unpleasant phone calls would be a good way to start off the campaign against them! To the barricades (OK, pick up your mobiles, comrades...)!

Company/Organisation: Leeds Language College Ltd
Address: Provident House, Vicar Lane
Leeds, LS2 7NL
Telephone: 0113 242 7534
Contact person: Mr. Adam Priestley, Manager

By the way, I checked out the school's credentials at Companies House, and it turns out that our dashing businessman Adam Charles Priestley resides with his parents at a very nice place called Blue Firs in Southfields Road, Strensall, York, and was born in March 1974. Last year his Leeds Language College made a surplus of more than 22,000 quid, so I reckon he could spare a little more for his teachers, don't you?!

How to Double Your Money at Summer School!

Sincerely now, would you like to know how to make more money from your summer school than your employer intended to pay you? If so, read the piece below, kindly provided by a colleague of mine who has a legal background, and has put his knowledge to extremely good use after suffering the indignities of a summer school last year. Well done, mate!

You probably already know the bad news - that a lot of UK summer schools pay very, very close to minimum wage per hour. However, the good news is that they don’t know the minimum wage legislation very well – but you, after reading this, surely do! So, Sandy is providing you with a copper-bottomed way to bump up your miserable summer wages this year.

In fact, it's really quite easy to work a summer school, get the money, make a complaint to the minimum wage unit, and get more money. You can even get the school thrown off the British Council accreditation scheme if you are feeling particularly vindictive. Of course, I wouldn't suggest you do anything as naughty as that, but ... Oh fuck, you're right - I DO want you to do just that!

Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks. In short, there are just THREE essential facts that you need to know if you want to make a minimum wage complaint. Follow these steps and you can't go wrong, dear downtrodden Tefler.

Fact 1. What is "working time"?

All employees in the UK (in fact in the EU) are entitled to minimum wage (currently £5.73 an hour in the UK) for every minute of 'working time'. This notion of 'working time' includes every bit of working time - not just that which is actually on your timetable. So, if you have to do a spot of lunch-time cover for Jason, or go round the pubs at night picking out the students (and the teachers), that's all working time, according to the legal definition, which is ... ALL TIME SPENT AT YOUR EMPLOYER'S DISPOSAL.

In fact, most summer schools are pretty clueless as to what constitutes working time, but actually it’s not that hard. It includes...

· Every minute you teach.

· Every minute you spend in meetings

· Every minute you spend training, including induction days.

· Every minute you are obliged to spend with students, eating with the, taking them on trips, putting them to bed, playing French cricket.

· All travelling time undertaken for the employer that includes the bus ride to and from Madame Tussauds and to and from the airport.

· Any minute of the day that you are on call. So that means that, if our contract says you have to put the students first at all times, your working time includes every minute that you are not physically in the staff room, in your bedroom, or off the premises.

· If you are on call at night, then you have to be paid for every single minute you are asleep. It doesn’t matter whether you ever actually have to get up and deal with the kids - if the presumption is you might have to, they have to pay you. If you are contracted for “overnight duties” they definitely have to pay you. If you have to sleep near the students, they probably have to pay up (why else are you sleeping there?). If there isn’t a night rota and the school does have juniors, they probably have to pay you (because the presumption is you are on call). Indeed if you have to be on the premises the night before your day off and the night of your day off, they have to pay you minimum wage for those nights as well. However, they do not have to pay you for sleeping on site at night if there is someone else on call.

In fact, the only time when you are working and they don’t have to pay you is for marking and preparation (so don't do it!). Unless they tell you when you have to do it - "Saturdays is for preparation" – in which case you can claim for it.

Fact 2. Who calculates the hours?

Strangely, it is not the employer's job to calculate every working hour over 48 hours a week, it is the employee's. This might seem like a complete bore, but it is actually good news. Because it means, if you can make a minimum wage complaint, you will have a note of the hours and your employer won’t. Simply write down, to the nearest 15 minutes or so, every moment you are required to be on the premises and can’t hide in your room or the staff room. Also, write down to the nearest quarter of an hour every time you have to be off the premises for you employer on airport runs, for example. And of course, write down all the hours you have to be in your room at night because you are (or could be deemed to be) on call. Occasionally asking if you can leave the premises when you are not on duty can also be helpful – if they say no, then you are on call and that is working time.

In short, be sure to write all your working hours down - every single one of them. This is the way to make yourself some money.

Fact 3. How to calculate if you have a claim for minimum wage.

At the end of your summer school, multiply the total number of working hours you have noted down by £5.73. Now deduct £31.22 for accommodation – that is all they are allowed to charge you (and no - they can’t deduct for food as well). That is what you should have earned BEFORE holiday pay. Now check this against your pay slip. (If the holiday pay is not noted on the pay slip they owe you that as well.)

If you think you are owed any money then just make a complaint to the Minimum Wage Unit. You can do this on-line at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/nmw/nmw_complaint_form.pdf . You will have to provide evidence – pay slips, contract, timetables and, of course, your note of working hours. You do not have to even give your name. If they find in your favour (and remember the employer has to prove that you are wrong about the hours, and they won’t have the records), then they fine the employer and give you the money.

Even better - if you win, you can rub their nose in it still more. You can send the results and your paperwork (contract, note of hours, pay slips) to Accreditation UK, reminding them that the employer is in breach of their undertaking to obey UK employment law, and thus in breach of accreditation. Copy everything in to the EL Gazette and, for good measure, send a copy to the Border Police.

So enjoy your Summer School this year, won't you. 'Cos if the Tories win the election next year, you can very probably kiss this type of legislation goodbye.

UPDATE: My 'mole' has just informed me of the following...

Two legal technicalities.

a) If preparation and marking are mentioned in your contract, you have to do them. However, if they don't tell you how long you have to spend at them, you can do the minimum (half an hour a day, say). If they complain, ask them how long you need to do for each lesson, and those hours become part of your working time.

b) You do have to tell the Minimum Wage Unit your name - otherwise they can't pay you! However, you can tell them not to release the name to the employer.

Summer School Saturnalia [Revisited]

In my previous posting about the sheer folly of committing yourself to a six-week sentence on a residential Summer School, I promised (threatened?) to spill the beans on those other clowns in the equation, your ‘professional’ EFL colleagues. So, here it is, the uncut version. By the way, if you think you can recognise any of your former colleagues here (see picture alongside!), or yourself even, you’re probably right.

Your crackpot colleagues, that mixture of the innocent and the despicable, who have all been mad enough to make the same stupid commitment that you did, will very probably come in three general types: the frequently drunk, the seriously alcoholic, and the totally psychotic. While you’re far more likely to meet the first two types, it’s the third that you really want to look out for, as he (it’s always a bloke) is by far the most dangerous.

Anyway, let me explain in historical terms, as I describe the very first Summer School that I ever did, somewhere near fashionable Folkestone, back in 1990. Our Director of Studies there was a diminutive Scottish guy called Derek, and while he seemed alright at first, it soon became clear that our Derek had a few, erm, ‘medical’ problems.

For starters, he was often a bit unsteady on his legs by lunchtime, and tended to disappear during the afternoons. Then, some time between six and seven o’clock, he would make a spectacular reappearance, usually by crashing into the photocopier, or falling down the stairs. His character would often oscillate between being overtly pally to bawling at people for minor misdemeanours, like leaving a window open, or a door unlocked.

Of course, poor Derek was a sad alcoholic, but did his darnedest to try and hide it. He would even tag along with the teachers to the pub in the evening, as if he hadn’t had enough during the day, and usually rounded off the evening by abusing a few staff members, who meekly accepted it as if it had been written into the job-description. Some nights he would come charging through the teachers' quarters, all lit up on liquor, bellowing that he’d been let down again by a bunch of no-hopers who couldn’t teach a baby to shit.

One night we’d all had enough of our dearest Caledonian Del-boy and his unwanted attention, so we slipped out of the Friday night end-of-course disco one by one, at two or three minute intervals, with the intention of reassembling at the local curry house. And so we did. Only, Derek turned up too, just as we were tucking in to the steaming vindaloos and tandoori chicken, and proceeded to abuse us again for being ‘a fine bunch of mates, leaving me alone like that’.

Well, I’d had enough – in both senses. So I stood up and told him straight that we didn’t like him, didn’t want to be with him, and he could fuck off back to the school right there and then. But he didn’t. Amazingly, he just plonked himself down at an adjacent table, ordered himself a meal, and sat there all by himself, cursing us roundly between mouthfuls of curry. Oh, you poor abandoned soul, Derek!

Then there was Ipswich man, a few years later. Now, he wasn’t so much the alcoholic, more the psycho type – but with a drink habit on top. I saw him ranting one day, his eyes rolling as he was telling some unfortunate Spanish kid of about 10 that Ipswich Town were the best team in the world, and England too, because Alf Ramsey had been their manager. Thrilling stuff, I thought, I’m sure Pablo will appreciate that nugget of wisdom. But it was his habit of rolling fags and ‘prowling’ around the school grounds after dark that marked him out as a true weirdo.

Then one day, on an excursion, Ipswich man abandoned his charges and disappeared for a couple of hours. When he later re-emerged by the coach, he had a few cans of Stella in his hand, and plenty inside him, obviously. On the ride home he started singing, all by himself, and bawdy footy songs, no less. Another clearly disturbed chap, in this case he just had to be given the push.

The saddest thing was that he abandoned his room in such a rush that he left most of his personal belongings there, including his degree certificate (not bad – a 2:2 from Sheffield University) and letters from his parents, indicating their concern for his mental health. Another poor sod – I do sometimes wonder how he’s coping, or whether he’s still alive.

Look, I could go on with similar tales, but I’m sure you get the picture. However, I have left the worst to the end. It’s a case of a guy who, upon arriving on site, appeared to be a bit of a bible-basher, what with his habit of lifting quotes from the Testaments old and new. However, the staff started to become more than just a little agitated when he decided that the building, along with some of its occupants, needed exorcising. This one was clearly not the average Tefl nutter.

Just as our Loony Lord was in the midst of terrorising all the teachers, the cavalry arrived: four burly coppers, who managed to pin him down in a back room, and then carted him off to the local nick. I can’t recall if it was actually true, but somebody did mention there’d been a full moon that night, too.

Again there was the painful task of gathering up his belongings and sending them on. In this case, there were several doses of anti-psychotic drugs, a well-thumbed copy of The Bible, and, strangely, some First Aid manuals. A very sad business indeed. Later that week we phoned one of the people who had given him a reference, and told them if they’d known he was on medication. The woman sounded apologetic, although not enough, and merely informed us that, when he’d worked for her the previous year, he’d been ‘having problems with his sexuality’. Obviously he’d moved on to more serious matters – God and the Devil.

So, have I managed to put you off doing a Summer School this year? I certainly hope so, for your sake!

First Published: Monday, 9 May 2005

UK Summer Schools - A Masochist Writes...

Well, as the dreadful summer school season is swiftly marching towards us, I thought I'd dig out a few of my old 'dissertations' on the unfortunate subject, and present a sort of thematic approach to the coming few weeks' blogs on The TEFL Tradesman. Skillful, ain't I?

Have you ever done a Summer School? No? That's excellent. Best try and keep things that way, actually. Having volunteered for many (far too many!) summer-time incarcerations in the past, I am very probably the least enthusiastic about the whole charade, as I know what working on a summer school really involves. After all, I did about a dozen of them in the 1990s, before the proverbial penny dropped. So, never mind the crap entreaties to ‘join in the summer fun’, and such tosh, which you can read on tefl.com these days – the reality is utterly different. Let me provide you with a few examples, served up, with no apparent relish, from my bitter memories…

If you’re a virtual novice teacher, with a Celta and say a year or two’s experience in taming teenagers in Mediterranean classrooms, you can expect to earn around 200 quid a week, after you’ve paid your tax and National Insurance. On top of this you’ll be provided with free accommodation and meals, although not all schools guarantee this. This might sound like a lot of money if you’ve been earning peanuts in Poland, but on the UK salary scale it’s probably about the same as you’d get doing a McJob – or washing cars at your local Tesco car-park.

The real downside is, of course, the hours you’ll be expected to put in – around 12 or 14 a day, for six days a week. In other words, your 200 quid works out at around three quid an hour for your six-day sentence! You do get a little time off for good behaviour, though - the nightmare of the weekly excursion, where you, a 'responsible adult' have to escort groups of spoilt foreign teenage brats to castles and museums,, and listen to them moaning about how expensive and crap the souvenirs are, they can’t find the toilets, and 'Teacher, I feel sick..." on the coach.

A typical day (although there never is a ‘typical day’, really) could involve struggling to get the kids up around 7:00, and making sure they’re dressed, breakfasted and ready for class at 9:00. This might sound like a relatively unformidable task, but don't forget it does involve finding the delightful buggers in the first place, as many will have 'travelled' during the night to a neighbour's bed or floor. On top of that, you have to ensure they're not still wanking, putting on the right clothes, and all manner of things that they manage to find extremely difficult now they're in a foreign country. Somehow, at the same time, you have to remember to get your own breakfast too, and attend a morning meeting before classes begin, with your DoS, who is probably a survivor from the previous year’s course - perhaps the only one, in fact.

She or he will take great pleasure in giving you the worst possible classroom combination of teenage angst and ebullient hormones to manage. Even worse, as a non-teaching DoS (which doesn’t necessarily mean he/she can’t teach, but might well) your unpleasant boss will be swilling cheap coffee and working off a hangover in the morning while you’re trying to keep vicious Vladimir from attacking gentle Julio, whilst at the same time making sure romantic Mario doesn’t try to shaft pretty Paula in the mid-morning break.

Then, after three hours of quite pointless classroom games, exercises and activities, you’ll be expected to escort your charges to the dining hall and watch over them whilst they chuck the revolting English food at each other. This is all on a typical day, remember. On the atypical ones, you’ll be expected to wipe up their puke after they’ve delivered a gastronomic thumbs down on the British pie and chips; and later you'll probably be expected to keep them from escaping off the site, or you may even have to chain Sergei the Russian anarchist (or shoplifter/brains behind the school's chocolate ice-cream racket) to a litter bin until the police arrive.

It gets better, though. In the afternoons you get to don the company t-shirt, perhaps even a clean one, and – hey presto! – you’re transformed into a sports and activities supervisor. Now you’re expected to entertain them with games of rounders and sack races, keeping them from smoking too much grass at the same time, and generally make sure they’re too shagged out to want to do anything else (especially shagging) after dinner.

As if that wasn’t enough, in the evenings you become a Butlins Redcoat and run the entertainment programme. You name it, you’ll be doing it – bingo caller, quiz master, DJ; or any combination of all three. Of course, you might be lucky and get posted on video duty, which means you’ll only have to endure a couple of hours of adolescent films and teenage farting, plus supervise some heavy petting in the back row behind the sofas.

And then, just as you thought you were about to slope off up the stairs to Bedfordshire, your Course Director reminds you that you’re on ‘put-down duty’. Much as you might like to put some of the loathsome miscreants down for good, with a sharp jab from a vet’s syringe, this actually means you have to make sure the boys stay in their beds and do not scamp across the playing fields for a midnight rendezvous with the opposite sex on the cricket square.

Finally, some time after midnight, as some of your colleagues are coming back from the pub and rowdily chanting racist football songs, you get to take that slither of valium and fall into a sweet, dreamy oblivion - for about six hours or so. Then it’s up again at seven to repeat the whole pointless fiasco, just to keep some rich kids amused for a couple of weeks or so.

You get the picture? And as for those crackpot colleagues, well – that’ll take another posting, perhaps next week.

By the way, if you do decide to do a summer school this year, just don’t say you weren’t warned, OK?

First Published: Friday, 15 April 2005

Sandy's Guide to Student-Centred Learning

Welcome to “You're Talking Out Yer Arse”, an occasional series in which Sandy McManus poos all over some of the more extreme teaching methodologies by teasing off the thin veneer of shiny bullshit and revealing them in all their turdly glory. Today's subject is student-centred learning, a sort of constructivist hell in which the teacher is heavily sidelined and reduced to arranging the desks and supervising the toilet breaks.

However, let's do the needful and start with a bit of solid theory, shall we? I mean, what trendy Tefler worth his Celta could possibly disagree with the following?

"Student-centred learning is an approach to education that focuses exclusively on the student's needs, abilities, interests, and learning styles, rather than those of others involved in the educational process, such as teachers and administrators. This process of putting students first views the teacher as a facilitator of learning, and is in stark contrast to existing establishment/teacher-centred lecturing and careerism, which has the teacher at its centre in an active role and students in a passive, receptive role."

So, the students get to make all the decisions and do all the graft - not bad, eh? This approach, of course, relieves us teachers of most of our tedious traditional pedagogical roles and duties, and means we can spend more time in the pub or the betting shop. A typical student-centred classroom would include the following shenanigans...

• The students set their own objectives. These could be meaningful, authentic problems which serve to further their understandings of the subject matter and themselves; or just something simple like colouring-in the empty bits on page 94 of Headache Intermediate.

• Students complete their own activities, designed by themselves to achieve goals determined by themselves. The teacher sits in the staff-room smoking roll-ups, drinking tea and reading Viz all day, but is available for 'consultation' the whole time.
  

• Students can happily ignore any directions and step by step instructions from the teacher as they progress through their activities. In fact, they'd be lucky to find the teacher in the class at all if I had my way here.

• Students are motivated by intrinsic factors such as the desire to learn, succeed, impress their colleagues, shag that horny Brazilian bit, etc. Those students who do not already possess the full range of intrinsic motivators can purchase them at a discounted price from the teacher.

• Students can work in groups determined by themselves, or alone. Or perhaps not even at all? Maybe they'd rather stay in bed - group-sex or working in pairs, according to their self-defined objectives. It's a real shame the poor old teacher gets excluded here!

• Student work is evaluated solely by the other students, and any differences in opinion are settled by a punch-up in the classroom (preferably without you, dear teacher, unless you're happy to be sued and lose your job).

So, do you think you have what it takes to be a modern student-centred EFL teacher? Are you happy to be an over-educated doormat? Could you feel comfortable being relegated to the status of a mere collaborator in the process of learning - maybe just doing the photocopying and bringing in the sandwiches? Would you feel unconcerned if your students told you to bugger off while they tried to successfully set up a student-centred classroom?

No, I thought not.

Coming Next: You're (not) Talking Out Yer Arse #2 – The Silent Way

Rockin' with Rodent Language Holidays!

Well, there I was, a-rootin’ and a-rummagin’ amongst my old teaching stuff (notice I didn’t say ‘EFL stuff’ there – teaching is teaching, after all), when I came across a little piece of useful gear from the last ever summer school I did, many years ago. So naturally my first thought was to share it with you, dear reader(s).

Anyway, back then I worked for an outfit called Regent, a name that swiftly morphed into Rodent, as the boss was an exceptionally oily git called Alistair, a sort of underachieving privately-educated ultra-middle class twat with no ambition other than to lord it over us plebby Teflers and soothe his half-concealed inferiority complex. As for the DOS - ooh, it pains me to recall her twisted Ulster vowels and her natural ability to bring chaos wherever there was formerly harmony.

However, I'm digressing. What I have for you fortunate Tefl-twerps is a sort of ‘report generator’, one which helps teachers to write those irritating little student reports that most EFL schools appear to insist on, even for shorter-than-short Summer courses.

The thing is, you’re still expected to pen a few lines of blistering prose about, for example, Eduardo’s skill in handling abstract grammar notions, or his exemplary pronunciation of awkward consonant clusters - even if he is a snotty-nosed indolent little sprog that has only been in your class for a week. The reasoning behind such reports has never been clear, to my mind, but I do suspect it has something to do with the following.

Firstly, it satisfies the need for dear little Boris, for example, to be able to show his parents (who probably run half of some obscure Russian province in a vice-like grip of mafia-induced fear and brutality) that he wasn’t just intimidating the other darlings in the tuck-shop queue and laundering the family’s cash on ice-pops during his stay in England. It also serves as some sort of ‘pedagogical receipt’ for all the money his folks spent in sending the little terror away for a fortnight, and in effect means that they’re more likely to inflict him on you again the following year.

Anyway, my immediate thoughts were to chuck it, and send it the same way as my Concorde (the fastest swindlers in the business) baseball cap, the Rodent (sorry, Regent) pencil-case, and the undersized Churchill House sweatshirt. But then I thought, ‘hold on, this has some value to my half-dozen or so readers’ – especially the poor suckers who have signed themselves up for six weeks of torture at their local Summer school.

So, here it is, with just a few red herrings included included, just to keep you from falling asleep. It’s quite easy to use – just select the most appropriate sentence from each section, until you have a simple paragraph like the following example:

Victor has worked hard with a lot of enthusiasm and made good progress. He has also participated well in class activities, gaining much confidence, and is beginning to express himself more fluently. He is now at pre-intermediate level, and with further study should soon reach intermediate level. Well done Victor!

Rodent Language Holidays
Summer School Student Progress Reports
Teacher’s Comments

Comments on Participation and Progress

1. Andrea has worked hard and with enthusiasm during her stay with us, and has made good progress (in the boys' dormitories after lights).
2. Boris has worked well during his time at Rodent Language Holidays, participating enthusiastically in all classroom activities (and has excelled in violent sports).
3. Catherine has only been with us for a few weeks, but she is now able to communicate effectively in many situations (especially with her hands).
4. Daniel is a confident speaker of English, and communicates effectively at Intermediate level (as long as it's to do with porn).
5. Edith has a good general command of English, and is able to communicate in a wide range of everyday situations (especially shoplifting).
6. Georgy has participated well in all class activities, and has made great progress (in bullying the smaller kids).
7. Ines has worked hard with a lot of enthusiasm, and has made good progress (... in something). 8. Josef has enthusiastically participated in his activities, and has made the most of his time with us here at Rodent Language Holidays. (Shame he rarely stayed in class for more than five minutes, though).

9. Katya has been extremely popular with the boys, and has always given the most of herself.
10. The whole class has enjoyed Lena’s oral contributions, especially the extra-curricular ones.

Strengths

1. She is confident at communication, and now has good all-round skills (she can swear in both oral and written form).
2. He is a confident speaker, and during the course has been able to build on his knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and also develop his listening and writing skills (cocky little git).
3. He has worked hard during his time at Rodent Language Holidays to expand his knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and also develop his speaking and listening skills (and has no mates, little swot).
4. She speaks accurately and uses a wide range of appropriate vocabulary (e.g., 'fuck off', 'piss off' etc...).
5. She has a sound passive knowledge of the English language (and never said a word the whole fortnight).
6. He communicates well and is able to express himself clearly in most situations (especially with his fists and boots).
7. He is a confident communicator, always makes himself understood, and is able to follow native-speaker speech fully (shame about the body-odour, though).
8. She has gained in confidence, now has a good knowledge of English, and is beginning to express herself more fluently (especially when she wants a shag).
9. Her speaking is fluent, her pronunciation excellent, and her vocabulary is wide-ranging (so why the fuck did you send her?).
10. Apart from her bad breath, she has been a pleasure to teach.

Areas to Work on

1. At times she is grammatically inaccurate, and also needs to work on her pronunciation and vocabulary (OK, she's a dead loss really...).
2. He now needs further reading and writing practice (so tie him to a chair).
3. She should now concentrate on deepening her knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, as these are her main weaknesses (her other weaknesses are also deep, but how much space do I have?).
4. He sometimes lacks confidence during listening and/or speaking activities (and needs more shouting at).
5. She now needs more practice to consolidate and extend her knowledge of the language (which is abysmally small).
6. He now needs to work on his pronunciation and extend his vocabulary (beyond monosyllabic grunts).
7. With further studies and practice, he should continue to make good progress (given another 25 years).
8. He is an idle tosser, a total waste of space, and should not bother returning next year

Good Wishes

1. I/We wish him/her all the best for the future.
2. I/We wish him/her well.
3. I/We wish him/her luck for the future.
4. I/We would like to wish him/her very well for the future.
5. I/We wish him/her all the best for his/her future studies.
6. I/We sincerely hope that he/she will never return to this school again.
7. I/We sincerely hope that you, as his/her parents, feel sufficient remorse for having raised such a loathsome spoilt bastard!

8. Please ensure this odious little cunt never comes back this way again!

Useful, eh? Now don't say I never have anything useful to say (again)!

Six Awkward Questions (part 2)

So, here we have part two of the interview with Lindsay Clandfield, upcoming TEFL guru, and general good sport for doing this. As a measure of my gratitude to Lindsay, and to help raise his profile amongst the more discerning Teflers that read this blog, I am bringing you a picture of him in his earlier, more youthful days. Here we can plainly see Lindsay, when he had a full head of hair, undertaking a bit of 'personal tuition' with a young teacher-training greenhorn at International House in London. My, the things we'll do to get a trainee past the finishing line, eh?!

*******

4. What's the whackiest thing you've ever done with a class?
I had a small group of ten-year olds at a private academy. It was the typical after-school English class, and they were often tired from school. They didn’t like the book we were using, and neither did I. I tried several things with little success until I noticed that they were completely obsessed with a role-playing game: one of those games with cards (like Magic, I think). I asked if they wanted to play in class, as long as it was English. They ended up making a whole fantasy game of their own, including their own cards, decorated with pictures from the internet. It was called Gladiators (the film had just come out) and they spent hours working on character cards, dice combinations and situations, all in English. We even made a cardboard coliseum. I suppose it was getting wacky when the vocabulary they were demanding included words like: impale, gore, coup de grace, execute… I also had to hide the arena and the cards at the end of each class so the director of studies (see q. 2 above) wouldn’t find them.

5. Why did you decide to become an EFL teacher; and what regrets do you have (if any)?
My parents were both teachers, so it was one of those things I guess. I also fit the psychological profile of the bleeding heart liberal who is drawn to helping professions. I originally wanted to be a full-time, professional aid worker or someone in international politics but those two things never worked out and so I became… a teacher. Still, I don’t have any regrets. There are one or two jobs I took on that I wished I hadn’t perhaps, but I quit them pretty quickly. Discovering writing and teacher training has helped stave off a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. It’s easy to burn out in this world of EFL, there is no shortage of things that can grind you down especially if you are in the private sector. Variety has helped me keep going and meant that I don’t really have any regrets.

6. If you could change just one thing in contemporary EFL, what would it be - and why?
Can I say two things please? One thing I’d change would be the pervasive sense of contempt that many schools hold for their teachers and the teachers who provoke that kind of contempt. By this I mean schools that hire people that aren’t trained at all as teachers and the people who happily go off a teach without any training at all and charge ridiculously low prices (enough to pay for beer, and even then…). It has created a situation in which the dog bites its own tail and won’t let go. I know sites like yours and others like Alex Case’s site have gone on at length about this so I’ll stop there.

The other is from the point of view of a materials writer. I don’t mind if people or institutions decide not to use a coursebook because they use their own materials. Great! What does bug me is when some school says in a high-and-mighty way that they “make their own local materials”, but they are in essence a bunch of photocopies from several coursebooks or online places (worse when it includes lessons I’ve written). Worse still is when an institution does this, binds them into a book format, puts their logo on it, and then sells it to their students. If I could change one thing it would be to make those schools go bankrupt, instantly. If you are going to make and sell your own books, then do it all yourselves.

So, many thanks again to the brave man from Canada. Who's gonna be next?

Six Awkward Questions The TEFL Tradesman Asked Me...

Yes, that's right. I asked some Tefl geezer six rather perverse questions about his EFL career, and he was mad enough to give me an answer! So, my unashamed congratulations to the 'geezer' concerned, Lindsay Clandfield, whose Six Things website is almost as interesting as this blog.

Here we go with those questions and answers...

1. What's the worst EFL job you've ever had?
Easy to answer this one. It was a high school in the south of Mexico (Chiapas state). I had a full time job at the university there, which was actually quite good except for the fact that my net take-home pay was around 500 US dollars/month. So when I heard that a local high school needed an English teacher urgently I took it for the extra cash.

Class size was forty students, all with their hormones raging. I was totally unprepared. Materials = zero (there was supposed to be a book I think but it had been long abandoned… I saw ripped pages of it in the corner of the room). Support = zero. I was gleefully escorted to the class, the director opened the door and roared something at the kids and then closed it firmly, trapping me inside.

The students basically had a good time laughing at me (not with me) and I learned how to scream at them. After two weeks I found I was losing sleep over this. I finally quit after one term. An Israeli woman took over. She had come to Mexico after finishing her obligatory service in the Israeli military, so was perhaps better prepared. I never found out.

It was thanks to this experience that, some ten years later, I started writing my first book for teachers Dealing with Difficulties. This was the worst job because I felt completely out of my depth. It wasn’t one of those awful TEFL jobs, with an exploitative boss, weird colleagues and all that. That would come later. See below.

2. Compare and Contrast: your worst colleague and worst boss
I worked at a private academy in Spain which holds the distinction of having both my worst colleague and worst boss. The colleague was was an aggressive bloke who would mutter insults at everyone in the staff room (when sober) and then pick fights on a Friday afternoon when the teachers would go out for a beer. He left under a cloud, and we discovered some of his lesson plans at the school. It was like finding the notebooks of the psychotic killer played by Kevin Spacey in Seven.

The boss, the director of studies, was a tough-as-nails British woman who got her kicks playing teachers off against each other (in competition for hours, classes etc). Her favourite line was “You do as I tell you to, or else find yourself another job.” She kept to her word too. She insisted we all use a coursebook she had used some ten years previously – the teachers’ copies were falling apart at the seams. Poetic justice though – she was unceremoniously fired by the owner of the school (a Spaniard) when she got pregnant. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

3. Your worst lesson - does it haunt you still?
A composite of terrible things floats up in my mind. I will give you snippets:

• I am trying to teach a beginner class only in English without using any tense other than present simple because that’s what the head teacher told me to do (“Ok class, today we read some English, do some exercises. First we check homework. You do homework?”)


• I’m standing in front of a class of bored Barcelona businessmen and women. I am trying to get them to stand up and sing a song with me. I don’t take no for an answer. I am pulling a student from her chair.


• I am giving my first teacher training session to a group of young Brits and Americans. I have become completely unused to talking to native English speakers in a class. One twentysomething says “Are you trying to talk like the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?”
  
• I am trying to do a guided visualisation for an observed lesson. I am telling the students to close their eyes and imagine a scene. I am going red and sweating bullets because I hate guided visualisations. My students are not closing their eyes and are looking at me with hostility.
  
• I am feeling pretty good about a class of mine at the university. I have inherited them from the 75 year old cantankerous teacher they had last year. It is my second year as a teacher. I am young and energetic. We have lots of fun in class. At the end of the year, I boldly ask them what they think of me as a teacher. “Your classes are lots of fun, but we learned so much more with the other teacher from last year,” they answer.

Christ, Lindsay - you must be a right bloody chatterbox in person! I was only expecting a couple of hundred words, but you've sent me an introduction to your next book, I feel. It's good stuff, too, I have to admit it - despite the lack of foul language and libelous accusations.

It's so good, in fact, I'm gonna keep the second part of the 'interview' for later in the week, and save myself the bother of making up an interesting post myself this week.

BTW, anyone else fancy doing six quirky questions from Yours Truly?

Suspended Sentence!

Yes, it gives me truly immense pleasure to report that the TEFL charlatan and parasite known as Paul Lowe, a.k.a. 'The Windsor Swindler', has been given his just desserts at a court in Reading. In fact, I'm almost speechless with uncontainable joy, knowing that the cheating bastard has finally gotten himself nailed, so I'll detain you no further and leave you with the facts below!

College Owner Learns a Lesson
(from official press release)

The owner of a Windsor adult education college has been given a 40 week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, and along with the General Manager of the college a combined total of 450 hours community work, ordered to pay a total of £5,000 prosecution costs and £900 compensation related to making false statements about the courses offered.

Paul Lowe, owner of Windsor Schools in Osborne Road , was sentenced at Reading Crown Court on Friday 8 May for 15 offences under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and Fraud Act 2006 to which he had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing in August 2008.

The school’s general manager, Ashley Arnold, was sentenced for five offences under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 following guilty pleas at an earlier hearing in March 2009.

All the offences relate to making false claims about a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) teacher training course. The men claimed their college was validated by Trinity College London, a recognised and respected provider of TEFL courses.

The court heard how students signed up to courses after seeing glossy brochures and a slick website, meeting for pre-course interviews and sitting entrance exams, only to discover once they were on the course that it was a sham as official validation had already been taken away.

The prosecution was brought by Royal Borough trading standards service following a lengthy and involved investigation into Windsor Schools’ trading practices, with a total of 17 statements being taken from students, former tutors and representatives of Trinity College London.

The students’ suspicions were first alerted when their tutors began raising concerns about the value of the qualifications, at which point they involved trading standards. Trading Standards began investigating in January 2007, after beginning to receive complaints which eventually totalled 16 individual complaints. This is the third Crown court hearing for this case on top of three earlier Magistrates Court hearings.

Cllr Phil Bicknell, lead member for public protection, said: “The Royal Borough does not take formal action like this lightly. However, where businesses fail to have regard for trading laws and deliberately or recklessly mislead the public we will have no hesitation in prosecuting them.”

Steve Johnson, trading standards manager, added: “This has been a long, complicated and thorough investigation and credit should go to the officers involved. I hope this will be a warning to other institutions offering qualifications, diplomas and degrees – they must not make claims about their businesses or the courses which are untrue or misleading.“

Mr Lowe was given a 40 week prison custodial sentence that is suspended for 18 months and ordered to undertake 200 hours of community work, to pay £450 compensation to one of the consumers still left out of pocket, and £3000 of prosecution costs. Mr Arnold was sentenced to 250 hours community work, to pay £450 compensation to the consumer and £2000 prosecution costs.

In mitigation, and asking for a non custodial sentence, Mr Lowe's barrister claimed that his client suffers from a heart condition, depression, and has been diagnosed with depersonalization since he was 22. It is unclear as to whether the barrister was referring to depersonalization disorder, which is an accepted psychiatric diagnosis.

In summing up His Honour Judge Reddihough said “Students put their trust in each of you. You both knew the Trinity accreditation was of importance to students. You took their money knowing the accreditation was not available to them. This was a breach of trust in respect of those various students.”

After delivering the sentencing he went on to say ”I hope you have both learnt your lesson not to do anything dishonest or stupid like this again”.

Terrific Teaching Colleagues

Well, it's time for that madcap midget again - Mario Rinvoludicrous! Actually, he's one of my EFL heroes, being, as he is, absolutely unafraid to swim against the tide of tacky mediocrity that often floods the whacky world of modern EFL. The fact that he often swims accompanied by a large rubber ring in the shape of a cute yellow duck is irrelevant, in my eyes.

Anyway, here's an offering of his that I've managed to 'bowdlerise' (must look that one up some day) in order to make it more acceptable for the discerning Tefl Tradesman public. It's been adapted from an article in Humanising Language Teaching, concerning teachers who are deemed to be failing, and how they are 'revealed' in school inspectors’ reports.

Although Mario invites us into his world of dysfunctional teachers by stating "Let us look at three teachers ... who are clearly totally out of place in any school environment", I rather feel quite at home with all of them. My comments are, of course, in italics, as measured responses to the school inspector's callous and undeserved verbal lashings.

Teacher 1

Mr. R seems happy to ignore the minimum obligations of his job. [Too right - ignorance is bliss, after all!]
This state of affairs is fully known to Mr. R’s colleagues, superiors and students. [Damn right - and they don't give a toss either!]
In this situation Mr. R lives a state of permanent aggression and takes every opportunity to create conflict and tension in the school. [There's my man - a born fighter!]
Mr. R does not know the curriculum and does not wish to get to know it. [Absolutely - no careerist crap for Mr R!]
In class he reads the newspaper. [Shame on him - should be into Viz and Loaded!]
Mr. R has other interests. [Oh dear - a teacher with a real life!]

Working as he does in an evening school, he has another daytime job. [Ha - underpaid, that's his problem!]
His absences are numerous and he never lets people know in advance, which makes it very hard to find people to stand in for him. [Right on, Mr R - keep the bastards on their toes!]
Mr. R spends his time verbally attacking the Head and the Deputy Head. [What else are they for - we all slag them off relentlessly, don't we?!]
During my meeting with him, Mr. R declared that his students “are animals who are worthy only of my contempt.” [I salute you, Mr R - you take no prisoners, and tell it like it is!]

Apparently, Mr. R went even further and physically attacked the Deputy Head, and nearly had a fight with his own angry students. The man was a true hero! I guess even the inspectors were impressed with his feisty attitude, as after initially demanding his transfer to a daytime school, it was then decided to keep him where he was and merely monitor his teaching for a year. No doubt they wanted to see even more of him and his idiosyncratic approach to the pedagogical profession!

Teacher 2

At times when Ms G was quiet she would lean on the window sill and look out, staying silent for hours on end. [Ah - a practitioner of Taoism and the dogme approach.]
At other times she would pull a novel out of her bag and settle down to read it. [So? Don't teachers have the right to read in class, as well as the students?!]
Occasionally she would cry for the whole of the lesson. [Hmm. Usually I cry after a lesson, but rarely during it.]

The class representatives in the January of that year complained that “so far we have done nothing; the teacher never explains anything, she writes a few phrases on the blackboard and then quickly rubs them out.” [As much as that, eh? And the students have the nerve to bloody complain!]
If a student asks her anything she responds with insults and threats. [Perfectly acceptable teaching method in my opinion.]
Most of her class groups have decided to ignore her. [My classes often end up the same way - again, what's the problem here?]
To avoid being got at during her lessons, the students do their homework, study other subjects, and read the paper - the inspector says that a modus vivendi has been created, based on mutual silence. [See - a mutually acceptable outcome, just like a class contract!]

According to Mario, in her interview with the inspector Ms G let on that "for many years the idea of entering into dialogue with the students has seemed to her to be immensely psychologically difficult, and even to say the name of the subject she is meant to teach leaves her feeling sick." Well, we can ALL sympathise with that, can't we...

Amazingly, our practitioner of the Silent Way got through four inspections! In fact, the inspector’s final decision in the case of Ms G was that “given her state of strong demotivation, total absence of didactic intent and dramatic relational difficulties, Ms G should be transferred to non-teaching duties.” Exactly - promotion to Director of Studies!!

Teacher 3

For the last one, I'll just leave you with the inspector's comments. As you can see, she is a victim of cruel and teasing students, all of whom need to be gassed or dealt with in a suitably extreme way. The final remarks, that she "feels liberated" as she is relieved of her teaching duties upon doctor's orders, evoke a lot of sympathy, I believe.

For fifteen years she’s been teaching in the same school without any complaints against her. In October 2004 Mrs. C began to feel got at by her colleagues. “they’ve marginalized me,” she told the inspector. Her students have no pity. They see her in difficulties and take full advantage. They laugh in her face and mock her for being badly dressed.

Mrs. C is absent from school more and more often; she is sucked into a negative spiral. At first she tells the inspector that there is nothing wrong, but then finally admits, in her last meeting with him, that there has been a change:

“I have always taught. I do the same things I did years ago. It’s the students that have changed. I can’t understand them anymore, and I don’t see why they don’t follow me.”

She then admits she is in the grip of anxiety and that the very idea of leaving home and walking into her classroom fills her with moral and physical dread. A medical examination allows her to give up teaching. She feels liberated.

Original Source: http://www.hltmag.co.uk/apr09/sart03.htm

Sandy's Miracle Teaching Method - Hypnogogy!

Well, let's face it - it had to come sooner or later, didn't it? It's called Hypnogogy, and Sandy's extremely proud to be able to bring you this revolutionary new methodology first - how to teach English while you sleep!

After all, the notion of 'learn in your sleep' has been around for decades. The fact that this novel approach to education was soon discredited is of no importance here. What matters is - you can get paid for sleeping your way through hours and hours of extremely dull, tedious EFL teaching! And think about it - if your teaching is enough to send your students off for a date with the sandman, why shouldn't you join in too? It's discrimination!

Anyway, for those tiresome pedants out there who insist on finding scientific proof of the effective nature of new teaching methods, let's briefly examine the theoretical approach behind the claim to being able to efficiently teach the English language in your pyjamas....

Firstly then, what do we mean by 'sleep'? The state is generally defined as “the resting state in which the body is not active and the mind is unconscious.” This chimes perfectly with the average Tefler's lifestyle choice and general lack of anything resembling ambition, being fond, as we are, of inactivity and something approaching a semi-conscious state. So it's bang on target there, then.

Another knowledgeable source refers to it as a condition in which "the eyes are usually closed and there is little or no conscious thought or voluntary movement, but there is intermittent dreaming”. Again, the similarity to the characteristics of the EFL crowd - lack of mental exertion and minimal physical movement - is striking, proving that the state of sleeping is ideal for teaching English also.

By way of example, I must admit that at times I spend the whole class daydreaming with my eyes closed, particularly while the little bastards are slogging their way through 12 pages of Murphy's Crapper. Moreover, my capacity for conscious thought and careful movement in the classroom has been severely limited many times by the previous night's intake of illicit prescription pharmaceuticals and home-made beverages - so it would seem that Hypnogogy was just made for us Teflers.

However, sleep has also been likened to death, especially in the Bible - but this might also provide us with a further analogy in our favour. For example, in Ecclesiastes 9:5 it states that “the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all.” Which again, appears to be extremely redolent of the average Tefl non-careerist. Are we alive or dead? Conscious or not? Do we give a flying fuck about it all?! It all makes so much sense!

So, there you have it - sleep is characterized as a condition typically devoid of conscious thought. Almost exactly the same as teaching EFL!

Coming next week: the practical side of the coin - tried and tested classroom techniques for the dozing Tefler

Are We Hearing 'Voices'?!

Well, it'll soon be interview time on the TEFL Tradesman, as I've asked some key players on the TEFL scene some penetrating and barbarously impertinent questions about themselves and how they see Tefl - career or carcrash?

Of course, I won't disclose any names right now, as it might frighten them off, but just to give you a taster of somebody you WON'T be reading about, here's one of my favourite pieces of forthright Tefl journalism from the sadly defunct TeflTrade of some 18 months ago...

*******

Yep, this is a real cracker of an activity that I picked up from IATEFL's Voices journal. Read this and tell me, please, that the writer, Tessa Woodworm, was taking the piss - or was just very stoned on magic mushrooms at the time.

The participants stand in a circle. One person thinks of an object and visualises its shape, size and weight. The person then, without speaking, mimes using this object. So, if they have thought of a ball, they pretend to throw the 'ball' up in that air and mime catching it, bouncing it and catching it again. Once the object seems clear, the 'ball' is passed to the person on the left. This person mimes receiving the 'ball', and then thinks of a different object, perhaps a flute. The ball then 'disappears' and the person mimes playing a flute ...

And so on - get the idea? Well, if you're tempted to mumble 'balls' at that, I'll join you. I mean, who but a person that trains EFL teachers would come up with such a daft time-waster as that? Who but a proto-Tefler would actually claim to enjoy doing that sort of nonsense?!

I mean, if I were there, I'd probably mime removing a condom from its wrapper and stretching it over an expectant-looking Mr Thomas, or something equally salubrious.

But my point (forgive the pun) is this: that such games are indeed fun to do with kids, but why the f*ck should adults (even consenting ones) indulge in such tomfoolery? And what right does a former President of IATEFL (Ms Woodworm - for it is she!) have in kidding us that this is the way to go?

The situation for the average UK Tefler has been one of steady decline over the past decade or so. And what are the IATEFL bigwigs urging us to do? Play with imaginary balls.

I think I could suggest a place for that imaginary flute, too!

First published: Friday, 7 September 2007

A few comments from the original posting...

1. 'A visitor' left this comment on 7 Sep 07
I'm well into humanistic stuff, me, but I must admit that it doesn't always sound that convincing.

Take, for instance, the description for this course, offered by one of her colleagues: http://www.sit.edu/ttsi/courses/being_present.html

It says: "The major focus of the course is the experiential application of presence within our work context. Through reflection we examine how presence or lack of presence influences the situations and relationships of our context."

I'm not sure how you get an eight-week course out of that, though. Just tell them to focus on what they're doing...

2. 'Sandy' left this comment on 8 Sep 07
Well, maybe it should be 'presents', and not 'presence', eh? I find that when students bring me presents, the outcomes undergo some positive transformation. But how you could spend eight weeks on it is beyond me, too. Maybe you write out your list of expected presents, change with your partner, and all have a nice game of charades. For two months.

3. 'M. le Prof d'Anglais' left this comment on 9 Sep 07
I'm not really into the humanistic stuff myself. I once saw Mario Rinvoludicrous give a talk on Neuro Linguistic Programming, and while there were a few good ideas for getting the students to talk, the pseudo-science was decidedly unconvincing. But Ms Woodworm really is extracting the urine, as they say. Unless you give instructions in English. there seems to be no meaningful exposure or use of the language whatsoever. While it's probably a great exercise for drama students, EFL students would just be mystified and think their teacher was as nutty as squirrel poo. And they'd probably be right.

4. 'A visitor' left this comment on 11 Sep 07
Ditto to all of the above. I was actually participating in a BTT a few years ago and saw one of the instructors do this with the group of would-be TEFLERs. I thought at the time "WTF!!?" I still do, it has no intrincsic use to promote use of target language in the classroom, so why the f*ck do it?

Cleaning Up in South Korea?

I've been left feeling very disappointed after reading that South Korea is no longer the primary destination for the social retard and sexual deviant commonly known as the international EFL teacher. Apparently, according to the article "Confronting Prejudice in South Korea", published in the Guardian Weekly recently, no foreign teachers have been arrested in South Korea in recent years for the use or possession of drugs. Such a shame!

Worse still, the article goes on to really hammer home just how puritan the place has become recently - "2008 government data shows that foreigners are arrested for sex-crimes at one quarter the rate of Korean nationals." Shocking! Of course, this might just mean that foreigners are better at avoiding getting caught out for their misdemeanours, but it does seem to strike a sorry contrast to the days of yesteryear when every small Korean city was apparently teeming with US college rejects in search of more than their fair share of 'oriental spice' and eastern pharmaceuticals.

This is sad news indeed, and shows how rapidly things can change when gullible people are made to believe that all foreign teachers are demonic incubi with backpacks full of illicit substances. It seems only yesterday that the Korean press were up in arms and the general public about to take to the streets to protest against predatory Teflers who seduced young Korean women and made them share their teacher's drugs. In fact, I would have thought that a 2007 internet article entitled "Korea is a Perverted Paradise for Foreign Teachers" would have gone a long way to encourage thousands of your average Tefl tourists to establish themselves in Korea, but apparently not.

Nowadays, prospective Teflers bound for the country of boiled bulldog have to submit to HIV and drug tests, along with criminal background checks and disclosures. Even - heaven help them! - the ones already living there have to prove that they are clean of drugs and shameful sexual diseases! How awful! What an infringement of human rights!!

In fact, I reckon it could be the requirement that they might even be expected to know how to teach that has had a greater determining factor in putting off potential Tefl tourists. No more backpackers with a dodgy certificate from TEFL International now, eh!

However, for me the article puts things very clearly in perspective with its opening paragraph, in which an EFL teacher currently working in Korea states that he has been denied service in bars - "I've been told to leave because I'm a foreigner" he moans. Now, if there's ANYTHING that's bound to put a prospective EFL teacher off going to work in a certain country, it just has to be that!

Easter Rising

Yes, it's that time of the year again - a chance to dig out one of my old scribblings from the TeflTrade (RIP) blog and give it a resurrection. No, I didn't say 'erection', you foul-minded Tefl twerp! Anyway, here's my 'adaptation' of a story from the online Grauniad of a few years back...

EFL Teachers to be 'Tagged'

by James Meikle, education correspondent
Monday October 9, 2006

EFL teachers at language schools are being asked to "clock in" to classes in an attempt to ensure attendance and cut drop-out rates from courses.

An electronic monitoring system is being tested at two EFL schools and nine more have expressed an interest in using it to track teachers. Its inventors insist they want to help teachers rather than enforcing a Big Brother approach, but the development coincides with some private language schools introducing good behaviour contracts which warn lazy Teflers they could face disciplinary procedures or even expulsion if they fail to turn up for classes.

The National Union of Tefl Suckers (NUTS) branded the scheme draconian, saying its members were being tagged like criminals. Gemma Goodgrope, president of the Teflers' union, recognised that teacher drop-out rates needed to be addressed but questioned whether such schemes would work when much of the problem might be increasing debt, low pay, lack of contracts, and a general lack of stability - sometimes mental. "Rather than employing such strong-arm tactics and effectively treating their employees like an underclass, which is what they effectively are, we believe more should be done to address the underlying reasons behind poor attendance - hangovers, overdoses, and a refusal to grant bail."

However, Tatum O'Greedy, Principal of the South-East London School of English, based in Jersey, stated that there was a real need to look at patterns of attendance. "There is a distinct correlation between attendance and a teacher's attainment. Teachers who miss out irregularly, we are not going to target. They may have had a bit of a late night the night before. However, teachers will be targeted if they miss three consecutive ‘learning events'. More than 50% of our teachers work part-time, and we are finding a lot of our teachers who work in take-aways on a Thursday night are missing on the Friday morning."

Original Source: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1890939,00.html

Some comments from the original posting

• I have long considered it necessary to tag EFL teachers, firstly in order to keep them out of the pubs, and secondly to ensure they are in class, rather than having a crafty ciggy (or worse) in the basement. Most EFL teacher are cockroaches - a 'necessary evil' in any school.
• One way to encourage teachers to become more professional may be to pay them reasonably and provide them with a more professional working environment run by more professional managers. Re the article, the expression 'having your cake and eating it' comes to mind. The situation seems to go from bad to worse.
• This blog is nearly as funny as toothache. Seriously, if you hate yourself this much, why don't you go out and get a different job? It really isn't that hard, you know. [Andy]
• Andy, you've caught me in a bad mood, so I'm gonna take a swing at you. First off, you really are a wanker, intcha!? Don't read the blog if you don't like it - quite simple, eh? Anyway, what's wrong with me taking the piss out of YOUR job (not necessarily MY job)? Private EFL schools and their teachers are ripe for this sort of humour, as they take themselves so seriously, promote themselves as utterly professional, yet they are really just SO amateur. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I don't suppose you'd listen, anyway. If you've ever worked in a proper college, university, institute or such, you'd know what I'm talking about - but you're probably just a two-bit Celta-belter!! So I won't waste my breath anymore.
• Alex, of course teachers should be paid propery. We do such at IVLAD and we give even marijuana discounts to our teachers. But teacher must show up on time. And not sleep with students and sell them ecstasy. That all I ask, really. [Dr Kim]
• Dr Kim - why don't you offer your teachers a marijuana bonus if they arrive on time? Say 100g per term, less 10g for every class they arrive late for?
  

Listen and Learn - Dodgy EFL Methods (part one)

Soon, all language teachers will become superfluous - we won't even be needed! - and all EFL classrooms will resemble a cobwebbed corner of The Munsters' residence. And you know why? It's because we've all been conditioned to study a language in order to learn it, whereas the reality is ... quite the opposite! Such fools we all are!!

Now let me explain. If we are all to believe the upstanding and honourable-looking guy alongside, we'll be happy to learn that "research shows that subconscious learning of English is much better than consciously 'studying' the language." So, throw away that TEFL certificate/diploma/doctorate, and just look for another job (perhaps as exciting as teaching), as subconscious language acquisition is here for keeps. Yes, really.

That's right, my dears, the bell has already tolled for us intrepid EFL teachers, who have vainly struggled to unravel the mysteries of the present perfect tense for our students (and ourselves, of course). For according to the blue-eyed TEFL guru above, who goes by the monicker of AJ Hoge, "students who learn English subconsciously learn faster and better than students who use traditional, conscious, analytical study methods." Yeah, right mate...

Anyway, what exactly is this magical method that makes such awesome use of the subconscious part of our brainbox? Well, apparently, Mr Hoge has written a whole number of 'short stories' that provide just enough understandable English input to your brain, but which rely on your subconscious brain decoding the tough bits you didn't catch first (or fourth) time around. Or something like that.

It seems that the mere fact of repetition forces the subconscious brain to, somehow, sort things out and arrive at the right meaning. So, according to the blurb "You never think about grammar rules. You never attempt to memorize words." And you probably never understand much either - or am I being a shade too pessimistic here?

However, let's press on, for the next part is the truly wonderful bit. Apparently, once your subconscious brain has decoded all the bits you couldn't make head or tail of when you were struggling to allocate meaning to that stream of gibberish, it then shoves them into your active vocabulary, so that you can use them! It's SO amazing!! Mr Hoax, sorry, I mean Mr Hoge, thinks so too - look at this...

"When you learn in this way, you can actually use the grammar too! ... It will feel automatic – you’ll just say things better and write things better and it will feel effortless. You won’t be thinking about rules at all!" Yes, it's as if it were ... just by magic! Follow the Yellow Brick Hoge!!

The truth is that you'll probably be talking and writing garbage too! I mean, does anybody actually believe all this flim-flam man type of stuff? Use my lazy-arse method and you too can become as proficient as Jade Goody? Pah! It's just another form of snake-oil salesmanship, I reckon.

However, don't let yourself be afraid - throw your intrinsic bullshit-detector to the four winds, because...

"So many students are afraid to use subconscious methods because they don’t trust their own brains." Really?!

Well, I would recommend that all prospective students trust their own brains here and give Mr Rogue a wide berth the next time he comes punting his magic method around your neck of the woods. Something tells me his lazy-brained method is the pedagogical equivalent of anti-aging cream - everybody wants to believe it works, so they buy it just to feel better in themselves. Anyway, if he's right, it could put us all out of a job!

For those of you soon-to-be-forever-unemployed EFL teachers who would like to know more about this 'language learning for suckers' scam, you can find out all about Mr H. and his dodgy lame-brained language-acquisition approach right here:

http://effortlessenglishclub.com/subconscious-vs-conscious-learning

However, before I lose you to another page in cyberspace, can I interest you in the unique Sandy McMAnus approach to learning a language? You don't even have to book a course or buy a single text book. Just .... ah, but that would be telling, wouldn't it?!

Gotcha!

Paul Lowe, a.k.a. The Windsor Swindler, has been booked in for an appointment with the beak at Reading next month - see the official announcement below. Well, it's hardly before time, is it?!

Now, I've been warned off making any remarks that might be construed as 'scandalising the court', a specific offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981 that carries a hefty £750 fine, so let me just recommend that anybody with an interest in this case attend. After all, it would be an exceptionally good day for justice in the EFL community if the public gallery turns out to be absolutely heaving with interested humanity on the day.

Paul Lowe - pleaded guilty to ten Trade Descriptions Act charges (making a false declaration under section 14) and five Fraud Act (Fraud, section 1 & section 2) charges at his hearing in August 2008.

Ashley Arnold - pleaded guilty to five Trade Descriptions Act charges (making a false declaration under section 14) on March 30, 2009.

Reading Crown Court, at 10am, on 8 May 2009, has been set for both to be sentenced together.

By the way - this is NO April Fools day joke!

The UK TEFL Scene - Hobos and Humbug

The other day I logged in to my old TeflTrade (RIP) blog-city account, just for old times' sake I guess. There I found a message that arrived about a year ago, and which I hadn't even opened. I reckon it accurately expresses the scornful opinions of many reluctant UK Teflers on the futility of their ill-chosen 'profession'.

Sandy, Great pity to lose you. We need someone outspoken: understandable that you lost heart. Too often I noticed deleted, interesting stuff which probably was due to you being threatened by British Council, schools etc. We need people like you, however. Inescapable fact is that to be an EFL teacher you have to come to terms with being poor, even in a 'good' school. Graduates now often start in jobs at £26,000+ per year (usually in a financial institution) and EFL is, quite frankly, a hobo career: OK for a year or so when young but unrealistic later on. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't all so pretentious, but the way schools market themselves is nauseating: superfluous crap masking the economic facts that the staff can hardly afford to buy a garden shed for themselves to live in! EFL as a real career is only available to one in a thousand: the occasional one who can get a university job or somesuch: even that is extremely limited and modest. Sandy: thanks for exposing the pretence and humbug. Thank you, thank you. Philo

Well said, Philo. As an example of the pretentious shit that emanates from most EFL schools in the UK, I have a prime example here, from the Bournemouth Business School International. Look at this job advert from tefl.com from a few months ago -

BBSI is looking for an experienced and qualified, EFL-trained teacher of Legal Studies, International and Commercial Law. The successful candidate will have a professional study background in legal fields, and will ideally have worked within the legal profession. S/he will have a broad knowledge of law rather than be a specialist.

So, not just a TEFL qualification, but professional experience and a qualification in Law. And what sort of salary are they offering for this pearl of a job?

Salary circa £16000.00 - £17000.00 depending on experience and qualifications. Supplementary earning may be possible at the rate of £14.00 per hour.

Hmm - cracking, eh? You can expect a starting salary of just over 300 quid a week - on a par with a checkout girl at Tesco's (with none of the perks, obviously!). As Philo said above, on that sort of money, you just might be able to afford a shed to live in - or maybe the BBSI director will rent you one in his garden?

Of course, if you're more ambitious, you might want to apply for this prime TEFL post, also at that shining example of TEFL bullshit, BBSI...

We are seeking an experienced and qualified individual for the role of Senior Tutor, Law. Prime responsibilities as a key member of our strong and supportive tutorial cadre would be the supervision of those BBSI staff associated with training in law and the ongoing management of all aspects of course planning, structure, content and teaching resources within the Law Department. The successful candidate would have a professional background in the legal profession and have extensive experience in teaching Legal English to international students.

The ideal candidate will possess a Law Degree, or similar, and have a CELTA or DELTA qualification, plus at least 2 years' sound teaching experience in a quality school or college.

Compensation
Salary for a Senior tutor is circa £18,000.00 - £19,000.00, depending on the candidate's experience and qualifications. Supplementary earning may also be possible pro-rata for extra hours worked.

Oh wow!! A wonderful 19,000 quid for a job in a management and supervisory role! How can you possibly resist it?! And you don't need anything more than a Law degree , a Diploma, and a couple of years of experience teaching in a "quality college" - which probably excludes any internal candidates!

So, are you ready to go for it? If so, contact this old dragon, the DoS known as Gill Casey. Yes, I know - she looks hard enough to bite your bollocks off from 30 yards, so take care! You can e-mail the old boiler on g.casey@bbsi.co.uk - or maybe you'd rather turn up in person? The address is Bournemouth Business School International, 26 St Peters Road, Bournemouth BH1 2LW. But just make sure you've got your armour plated y-fronts on.

Anyway, last year I had this to say about the place and the dog-shit jobs they were offering:

"... the nauseatingly self-proclaiming blurb drones on. 'BBSI has a policy of constant innovation ...' it barks, which probably means they'll give you the sack as soon as it suits them."

Has the place improved since then? Somehow I doubt it.

Remember the motto - At BBSI, Crap Always Comes First!

Dave Sperling is a Pathetic Wanker - it's Official!

You have been banned from this forum.

Please contact the webmaster or board administrator for more information.

I mean, what sort of a twat's business is the old Yiddo c*nt about? This must be the Nth time he's given me the boot from his frankly bland and boring forum ... and for what?

Well, apparently I transgressed one of the unwritten rules about never making public a PM (private message). The thing is - and I'm not sure that the toosser of a Moderator realised this - that the PM I passed into the public domain was mine! Yes, I'd composed it myself! I'd first sent it to another 'collaborator' , but then decided to go public with it. Don't I have the right to decide what to do with my own messages, Dave?

Anyway, this below is the first notice of my apparently subversive behaviour:

From: Revenant
To: XXXXXX
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2009 8:35 pm
Subject: Warning Quote message

You are being issued a warning for posting a PM on the open forums. This is not permitted.
Revealing information with regards to names of individuals or revealing information that could identify people for the purposes of getting them in trouble is also not permitted.
Normally, these infractions can result in an automatic deactivation of your account. This time you are being simply issued a warning.
However, -any- trouble involving your account on here at any time in the future will result in the deactivation of your account.
This warning is not up for discussion or debate. Any attempt to do so will be construed as your communicating that you do not desire to comply with this warning, and your account will be removed accordingly.
-Mod

So, I replied with a simple Oh dear! Yep, that's all - but that was clearly too much for the arrogant little runt of a Moderator. I mean, look at that line - Any attempt to do so [i.e., discuss, debate, tell me to fuck off] will be construed as you being naughty and not doing what you're told, you plebby little Tefler...

So I'm struck off - again! Actually, I couldn't care tuppence really, as I've got another three identities to fall back on, and anyway, it's about as exciting as a tee-total barmitzvah on his forum these days. Every time an interesting issue looks set to boil over, Dave and his gaggle of mincing moderators switch off the gas and push the whole thing off the back burner.

And, can you believe this - when I made a posting about the notorious TEFL paedophile James Fraser Darling and his alleged appearance in China (or was it Turkey?) last summer, he gave me the push AND pulled the thread! Yes, naming and shaming an infamous child-molester is not allowed, because, as the Moderator stated above, " Revealing information with regards to names of individuals or revealing information that could identify people for the purposes of getting them in trouble is also not permitted."

And who would want to get a convicted paedophile into trouble, eh? Not Dave, of course!

So, Dave - you really ARE a cunt and a wanker - well done!

Work through Easter for 299 quid a week!

Yes, if you're really quick, you might be lucky and get the chance to work your Easter holidays for the mighty sum of 299 quid a week! That's how little that well-known "unfriendly family-run school" known as the Devon School of English are offering. Look at this pitiful advert below from tefl.com...

We are looking for dynamic, enthusiatic [sic] and committed teachers for a 4-week Easter period from 30 March 2009 (with the possibility of extending after this period).

Mm, I wonder what you need to be 'committed' to? Making ends meet? Living on a pittance? Or just making lots of dosh for the odious Hawthorne family!? I mean, look at the attractive salary, erm, wages, on offer...

Compensation
The basic timetable is 23 hours per week. Payment will be weekly at rates starting from 13 GBP per hour.

So, 13 quid times 23 hours equals ... yes, 299 quid a week! Or less than 1200 smackers a month - which, after deductions for tax and National Insurance, will give you less than 1,000 quid for the four weeks of work!! Impressive, eh?!

So, go on ... take a long hard look at this monstrous bunch of tight-fisted shysters who are offering wages that are half the national average - although probably good for a shitehole like Paignton (a.k.a. Trumpton-on-Sea). Now, which family would YOU prefer to spend Easter with - the Munsters, or the Monsters?

TEFLing in Turkey with Tony the Trot

Yikes! It was all there a minute ago - the text, I mean - and now some bugger's swiped it! Who could it be? Bastard! You'll pay for this, you miscreant!

Well, I guess I'll just have to leave you with a very fetching portrait of good old Lev Davidovich, (looking somewhat washed out, I admit) until I can lay my hands on it. Was it you, Shaunie? Or that mad git The Baron?! Snakey bastards, both of you...

Yellow Headway Fever: Protect Yourself from This Deadly Disease!

I received an e-mail the other day in praise of (well, mentioning) this blog posting of mine from the past on TeflTrade (R.I.P.), so I figured it was well worth another outing. And let's face it, why shouldn't I brazenly plagiarise my own stuff? OK, I know - only ten or 15% of it's really my own work, but let's not get too picky here, eh?!

If you're teaching EFL abroad and you work in a location where the Yellow Headway is common (Pre-intermediate level), you absolutely must protect yourself from this deadly disease. Read on if you want to avoid the killer sickness that is currently ravaging the TEFL industry world-wide.

You Get Sick

Scarlet, canary yellow and shimmering blue feathered birds flecked with iridescent green, chirp songs to greet the sunrise as you awake. But you don't really notice - your hangover usually starts that way. Then, Thor's silver hammer begins to bang-bang-bang away at your head in fury. Your eyes close from the sheer pain. The nausea increases as you struggle to get up. Your back feels so hefty, like a slab of concrete. Again you try getting up, and your muscles scream so loudly you move, or crawl, as if in slow motion. Your palm burns from the 102 plus degrees F radiating from your forehead as you brush your hair back, trying to stimulate yourself to alertness. A trip hammer thunders away inside your chest at 100 to 110 beats per minute.
Good morning. You have Yellow Headway Fever.

You Get Worse

A few days after the sudden onset of symptoms, you worsen. You become jaundiced, and watch as your skin yellows to the point you more resemble a Halloween caricature than a dying person. The destruction of your liver cells results in the accumulation of yellow bile pigments in your skin, and your heart slows to around 50 beats per minute. That rumbling in your stomach is your gastro-intestinal tract bleeding. You vomit the characteristic black blood of Yellow Headway Fever. Although things are starting to become much worse, you don't have much longer to suffer, though. Death usually occurs between the fourth and eighth day after the onset of the disease.

You Get Out

Yellow Headway Fever is an untreatable, textbook-borne disease which is endemic in language schools that utilise the much over-rated Headway series. In schools in Eastern Europe and Russia an alert caused by outbreaks of Yellow Headway Fever is currently raging. Every year, from November until mid-January, scores of TEFL deaths from Yellow Headway Fever are usually recorded.

Immunization is futile. The only possible solutions involve the teacher making a sustained retreat from the classroom, and finding a proper job - usually in his country of origin. As there is no specific medical treatment for Yellow Headway Fever, once it is contracted, care consists of treating the symptoms of the disease by preventing dehydration, reducing fever - and removing all copies of the dreaded Yellow Headway from the resources room.

Take care. Don't be a victim!

Original Source: http://bettereflteacher.blogspot.com/2007/11/yellow-fever-english-teachers-abroad.html

[First Published: Saturday, 10 November 2007]

A Few Comments from the Original Posting

'Al' left this comment on 10 Nov 07
Hey there, I think headway is a barrel of roses compared to the tripe I have to use at the moment, have you ever used the tefl phlegm that is cutting edge? shudders...............

'Sandy' left this comment on 11 Nov 07
Actually, I have used Cutting Hedges, and prefer it to Headache. But it's just not suitable for students in the ME region - too much about sex, drugs, abortion, etc etc. Headache, on the other hand, is so utterly bland it coiuld be used anywhere in the world - hence its popularity, I guess.

'A visitor' left this comment on 16 Nov 07
Given your public spiritedness, do you not think a warning about the perils of Business Arse might be in order? It can be VERY painful.

'A visitor' left this comment on 16 Nov 07
Aye, an' worr about 'All Anal Business Pairwork' an' 'Rohypnol Recipes For Tied Up Teachers' ? not to mention 'English Vocab: A 2 M'. An' fer the more pastoral care types: 'When You Weep, I Seep- A Coping Guide For Teachers of Attractive Students From Eastern Europe'. Word.

'Sandy' left this comment on 16 Nov 07
OK, MCW - give me the hard news on 'Business Arse' and I'll print it. I'll not be cowed into submission again - for a while, anyway. As for you, Shaunie, just keep on taking that medicinal mixture of scrumpy cider, red wine and black rum, and you'll soon get better. Or dead. I'm sure they'd give you a nice funeral in Finland...

The TeflTrade Conference! (Repeat)

So, it's time for one from the archives again, as I really can't be bothered to cook up something new. Anyway, now that the dreaded 'TEFL Conference Season' is approaching, here's a relevant offering from December 2006, which turned out to be quite popular at the time (the article I mean, not the year, dolthead!)

Can you believe it?! After lengthy negotiations in numerous seedy European cafes and ‘amusement arcades', Sandy McManus has pulled off a feat that is virtually unknown in the brief history of trendy Tefl teaching. Yes indeedy, coming your way soon will be the very first TeflTrade EFL Conference, due to take place on an as yet undisclosed date at the Mountain Grill Café, Portobello Road (Full English Breakfast, only four quid). The Conference will be taking place under the theme of "Spam, double egg and chips", and a wide range of Tefl gurus, groupies and junkies have been booked to appear (whilst certain others have been paid to stay away).

Just look at this for a line-up...!

Jim Screwdriver - Lesson planning and how to avoid it

Trainers and trainees often view the lesson plan as an act of writing - but lesson planning is essentially a thinking skill. In particular, it entails thinking up reasons to avoid writing one in the first place. How can teachers avoid planning more successfully? How can trainers help teachers to avoid the dreaded LP in more thoughtful ways? There'll be some concrete suggestions for helping pressed-for-time Teflers avoid making a wide range of different plans for their chaotic ‘lessons'.

Jim Screwdriver is currently an inmate at Hastings College in the UK, having recently been released from an eight year sentence at International House in Budapest, Hungary. He is adapting heroically to not being an IH inmate any more, after having unfortunately wasted most of his career in the organisation. The new edition of his block-busting book "Unlearning Teaching - Forgetting your Way to Success" has just been published, and he's nervously waiting to hear how crap everybody thinks it is.


Adrian Underpass - The Unlearning school: a way of transforming work?

How ready to unlearn is your organization? And what might happen when unlearning is not just a product, but part of the contemporary systems-based organizational operating paradigm (what??!)? In this interactive mumbo-jumbo session, the well-known and celebrated Mr Underpass will outline the principle of the unlearning organization, describe two or three practical unlearning strategies tried by an actual ELT school, discuss the possible effects of entirely forgetting your clients and staff, and look at the issue of competitive unlearning. There will be time for questions and sharing of spliffs before, during, and at the end.

Adrian Underpass was for some years director of the International Teacher Training Institute at International House in Hastings. Then he studied an MSc in Irresponsible Business Practice at the Nigerian Institute for Ethical Business Affairs, and realised how ripe for manipulation EFL was. He now works with some of the most unscrupulous EFL outfits in the country, teaching them how to screw over and humiliate their gullible employees and sell it as "Professional Development". Currently he is also masquerading as a training adviser to Embassy-CES, and this summer will be offering a course on the Pilgrims programme entitled ‘Leading as Unlearning, Unlearning as Leading - What the Fuck do I know?'.

Jennifer Joking - English as a Lingua Flatulenta: past empirical, present controversial, future uncertain (NB: sponsored by Heinz Beans)

At the start of the 21st century, English is spoken most frequently (and badly) as a lingua franca among its non-native speakers. Yet, paradoxically, it is still assumed that the non-native majority should defer to the native minority for models of acceptable usage. In this presentation, Mad Jenny will outline her obsession with majorities and minorities, show off her recent ‘research' into English as a Lingua Flatulenta (ELF), discuss the controversy that she thinks she is provoking, and go on to consider two phenomena implicated in ELF's chances of survival: global warming and methane emissions.

Jennifer Joking is Senior Bonkers Lecturer at Kings' College London. She is the author of a wide range of unreadable books about how the English Language is responsible for cultural imperialism, world poverty, and almost everything else that sensitive unemployable middle-class Brits like her enjoy wittering on about. At present she is unfortunately writing a third book, English as a Lingua Flatulenta: Gone with the Wind?


Martin Budgerigar - What grammar should we teach? And why? And how? And where?

This talk explores the difficulty grammar poses to semi-literate EFL teachers in terms of comprehension, as well as speaking coherently and doing joined-up writing. It argues that current approaches and materials neglect some of the most crucial features of modern EFL staffing problems - that few modern Teflers ever read anything more than ‘Viz' and ‘Loaded', and wouldn't recognise an ergative verb if it shat on their shoes. The talk is aimed at teachers, teacher educators and materials writers, and extensive illustrations are provided for those EFL professionals who have reading problems.

Martin Budgerigar has bored learners in classrooms all over the world for 30 years. He is the author of 'Basic Grammar for English Language Teachers', winner of the 2000 Dukes of Hazard Award for Prime Bullshit. He currently teaches English language and literature at the Lycée Bill and Ben in Ruwanda.

And finally, there's the headlining act...!

Mario Rinvolucrative !!

"We will start with a warm-up, as sensitive work is not possible without it. We shall then snog each other for a bit, and exchange our socks. Only then, after a symbolic exchange of body-fluids and skin-tissue has taken place, shall we take a close look at Ana Marbles' use of NLP (Numerous Lucrative Paychecks) in her quest to understand the very different ways several of her students failed to learn anything at all from her after three years of classes, but continued to stump up 200 Euros a month each. We will then do an active investigation of how two or three members of our group manage the minor miracle of self-correction while in full flow in an L2 that they speak, at the same time as taking a shower, reading The Bible, and walking the dog." [Woof-woof!]

"Benefits to you if you attend the session: If you already speak NLP (and I hear it as a language) you will see, hear and feel NLP techniques and insights being applied to unearthing learner process. If you don't yet speak NLP, you will meet it in warm and sickly action. If you dislike NLP and all it works then come along anyway, as I could well come a cropper and you could enjoy a comfortable sneer. Or I just might kick you in the bollocks."

Mario's first CD Rom for students, ‘Mindgames - how to psyche out your teacher', was written in collaboration with his therapist in 2000. Mario's other books include ‘Humanising your Principal', ‘Using your Mother's Tongue' (X-certificate), and ‘100 Ways of Doing Nothing in Class', His next book, ‘Unlocking Self-abuse through NLP - Integrated under-the-desk activities for intermediate and advanced students', will be released as soon as it passes the Board of Censors.

Mario Rinvolucrative was once a Hindu hamster kept by Sanjay Gandhi, but after an unfortunate accident involving some curry sauce and fried banana skins, he returned to Earth as a psycho-specialist in EFL. He will be available for book signings and mutual exchanging of socks in the post-conference booze-up at The Rising Sun. Mario cooks and gardens with more joy than skill - just like he teaches.

First Published: Tuesday, 12 December 2006

Manchester School of English (part 2)

Well, as I promised in my previous posting, I've done my investigations into the Manchester School of English, and I present my findings here. Take them as you will, but I reckon the place is definitely a bit dodgey! I've passed all this information on to the relevant state authorities, and I am entirely confident that they will either ignore or lose it.

According to the documents lodged with Companies House, the Secretary is one Afzal Ahmed, born on the 12th of June, 1960. He claims to be a British citizen and a Teacher - interestingly enough, that's exactly the same as the Director of the school, his son, Kazif Ahmed. Another coincidence is that they share the same birthday too (June 12), although Kazif was apparently born in 1989 - which makes him a very young teacher at just 19!

And what about this - the company accounts were due on December 27 last year, but are overdue. In fact, the school has never filed a tax return at all! I wonder if that could be related to the fact that they apparently pay their employees in cash, without deducting PAYE tax or National Insurance payments?!

Anyway, now for a bit of history. The MSE Certificate of incorporation is dated Nov. 29, 2007, with a company number of 6441110. The school was set up as a 'general commercial company', not by the Ahmeds, but by agents - Brighton Company Formations Ltd, registered at Midstall, Randolphs Farm, Brighton Rd, Hurstpierpoint, Sussex. It therefore seems to be one of those "off-the-peg" companies that accountants and lawyers specialise in setting up for others.

The curious thing, though, is that the following day, the 30th of November 2007, the director and Secretary resigned. Well, this might be normal in the world of off-the-peg companies - who knows? It does seem odd, though, that Afzal and Kazif were not appointed as Secretary and Director until almost six months later, on May 27, 2008.

On the same day their registered office changed, from Office 412, City House, 131 Friar Gate, Preston. Their current registered office is now the same as the school's - 86 Princess Street, Manchester, which is the Ahmed's residential address too. So, do the classrooms double up as bedrooms at night?

Could this be a dodgey setup? The Companies House website whimpers the following: "The fact that the information has been placed on the public record should not be taken to indicate that Companies House has verified or validated it in any way." In other words, their dates of birth, nationalities, and status as teachers have not even been checked - ever!

Even worse, though, is the fact that the Manchester School of English does not feature AT ALL on the Home Office's Register of Education and Training Providers - which is clearly illegal if they intend to recruit students from outside the European Union.

So, a dodgey EFL school? Visa racket? Something worse? Naah!!

Manchester School of English - a Crap Job! with a difference?!

Well, thank God for Sandy's spy network. Without my loose alliance of sinister Teflers, I would never have found out about this double-dodgy outfit, who, according to my top-secret informant, "may even have links to terrorism"!!

Their list of "misdemeanors" is quite lengthy, as you'll see. Previous employees have declared them guilty of...

• Making people redundant without giving proper notice periods, etc.


• Sacking TEN people in two months


• Refusing to pay salaries/wages or invoices


• Being run by Indians who are themselves illegal immigrants


• Having no experience in running language schools - the levels are all mixed up


• Claiming to have an accommodation service where there is none


• Having no accreditation service


• Being a 'front' for other activities - the "school" is just a couple of rooms


• Employing unqualified 'teachers' and having no Director of Studies


• Illegally hiring teachers as self-employed to avoid PAYE tax and NI


• Paying crap wages - eight quid an hour

Yet it gets much worse. Look at this further report from Agent X...

A friend of mine had the misfortune to be employed by them, and their misogynistic treatment of her was pretty poor. The turnover of all the staff seemed high, even though my friend was only there a couple of months. The sacking is not so much the issue, but she was quite simply told she couldn't do the job - the whole thing could have been handled better, with proper notice periods given and outstanding wages of one week paid etc.

As mentioned before, there is no DOS, and the school is run by a couple of Indian immigrants who know nothing about teaching, yet supposedly offer IELTS courses. Interesting factors are: The father is often out of the country for months at a time, mainly in Lahore and Mumbai. He is in fact from Lahore and has no family in India apparently, and hasn't been seen for several months. He is a devout Muslim (not that that means anything of course of itself but when combined with extreme misogynism, it smacks of more to me).

Clearly it's the owners who are the real issue. They are a father and son outfit (both called Ahmed) and the link to terrorism can only be a suspicion in my mind, for otherwise surely the police would have done something. Although the elder seemed very charming on initial meeting, it was really a subterfuge, which soon dropped and he became really sexist - not just sexist jokes, but dangerous and violent stuff, talking about beating wives, pornography, and other distasteful stuff.

Well, they do sound a nice bunch of buggers, don't they!? They were advertising for teachers a couple of months ago, and the following ad tells you all you need to know...

Manchester School of English

English Language Teachers required for:

1. Morning 9am to 1pm

2. or evenings 6pm to 8pm.

*Must have degree plus Tefl/Celta/Tesol Certificate.

*Must be enthusiastic, organised, and have a passion for teaching.

*Native English Speakers only.

*Self Employed position – start pay £8.00 per hour - paid weekly.

To apply please email: info@manchester-english.com

Manchester School of English, 86 Princess Street, Manchester M1 6NG

Tel: 0161-237 1917

website: http://www.manchester-english.com/

So, there you - you'd better whizz your application in extra-pronto, as I imagine there's quite a lot of demand for such a choice plum of a Tefl job. I mean - eight quid an hour! This one's clearly the top of the Tefl tree in Manchester!

Actually, I've already done some preliminary investigations into this bunch of obvious shysters, and I've unearthed a few interesting facts about them. However, I'll keep you buggers in suspense a while longer, and publish the results tomorrow.

Until then, my dears...