Mr Bean Finds His Voice!

Oh NO! This is JUST the sort of thing that gives Tefl a bad name...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/theteacher/2009/03/090311_teacher_animal_bird.shtml

Go take a look at this guy. The appalling glasses, the naff hairstyle, the weird expressions and gestures, ... and such an extreme lack of dress-sense! Aaaargh!!

Do you sincerely want to be part of an 'industry' that promotes itself like this? Words fail me ... only my tears stop me from crying out "ENOUGH!!"

Fuggin' 'bird-brain' indeed!!

Keeping it up at 60

Just when I was getting a perverse feeling of dread about having to face new students next week, I fell upon this little piece from a few years back. It's just what I needed to put me in a positive frame of mind about venturing out onto fresh turf and facing an unknown away side for the very first time.

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I came across a wonderful little article in the online Torygraph the other day. It wasn’t specific to EFL, but teaching’s teaching, innit, and I thought some of you would appreciate its conclusions regarding knowledge, humour, presentation, and involvement – not to mention the lack of the prescriptive approach.

Anyway, I’ve lifted large chunks of the article (lazy sod, I am!) to present to you here, but I do recommend you read the whole piece for yourself.

So, to start off with, the author asked his class of youngsters what their “Ideal School” would be like...

"We want more lessons like Mr Orme's." they said. This provoked a collective gasp of approval. I was not surprised; our pupils have long revered Mr Orme, who has taught history at the school for nearly 40 years.

Nevertheless, curiosity and mild envy provoked me to ask why they so enjoyed his lessons. "We learn so much", "They're fun!" and "I don't know - they're just good" were some of the answers.

A few days later, I sat at the back of one of Mr Orme's lessons. He places a lot of value on the use of the visual image and had a slide of a painting projected on a screen as his pupils entered the room.

The whirr of the projector, the dim light and the sight of a wide-eyed teacher perched on his desk, greeting his pupils as they entered, all combined to create a special atmosphere.

He was successful, I think, for three main reasons.

First, almost everything he said was a question. It was clear that all the pupils felt confident that sensible answers would be warmly received with a nod and a smile.

This, combined with the fact that all the questions were demanding but answerable, meant there were always hands up. The children wanted to be involved and recognised, so they listened to each other's answers and their teacher's embellishment of them. This all generated a gradual build up of knowledge and confidence.

Second, the content of the lesson was demanding and stimulating. Even at a selective, academic school like mine, it can be difficult to pitch work at the right level.

The topic these 12-year-olds were studying - the difference between medieval and Renaissance attitudes towards mankind - and the level of thinking required of them, were impressive.

But Mr Orme's energy and obvious enthusiasm were perhaps the main reason why the pupils concentrated so well. They were engaged by his lively and humorous tone, by his depth of knowledge and by the way he made eye contact.

Afterwards, I told him that I hoped to be as energetic as him at his age (60). What, I asked, had sustained his enthusiasm for all these years?

There were, of course, many things about the job he loved, but he was especially emphatic when he said: "I get to teach what I am interested in. My head of department doesn't prescribe what I have to cover in my lessons, and he encourages intellectual debate."

At a time when teachers so often complain that their job is overly prescriptive and burdensome, it is an approach that seems especially wise.

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Now, I know my approach to teaching on this blog is usually a corrosive cocktail of cynicism and despair, but I really enjoyed reading the Torygraph article, as it restored my faith in my ability to possibly get something right in the classroom. The key-words are all there - student involvement, recognition of their efforts and contributions, humour, etc - yet there seems to be something more, some sort of hidden factor.

Can anybody tell me just what it is ... before I go all moisty-eyed?

Karenne Kalinago answers six questions...

Actually, the irrepressible Karenne Sylvester (of Kalinago fame) has, being the control-freak of a woman she is, done a sneaky one and added another question. Such cheek! Even worse, she has changed some of the questions and added bits on to others. Hey - who's the bloody boss round here, eh?!

I also requested a few spicy pictures of her armpits, or any other interesting part of her naturally unbounded anatomy, and here's what I got...! Phwoah! Classy and freaky, eh? Now, I do like an independent-minded woman ... as well as one with nice plumpy jugs.

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1. How long have you been in TEFL and how did you make this unfortunate choice?
I started teaching in Hong Kong after being robbed in Thailand in 1995. I'd been back-packing and working my way through Australia and was now exploring Asia. A friend I knew well took just about all of my last funds, leaving me behind on a beach in Koh Phan Gan.

Desperate, I flipped a coin between Korea and Hong Kong.

I was both too proud and too embarrassed to ask my parents to bail me out (they were not impressed with my resignation from a normal life) and I ended up in a horrid job teaching English for pennies.

For a while, I lived in the infamous ChungKing Mansions on Mainland Hong Kong, a destitute and demoralizing place, before moving over to the very bohemian Lamma Island.

From the very first moment of failing to answer a question on the Present Perfect - what the heck was that - I fell in love with the teaching English profession. It combined everything I loved doing: traveling, story-telling, drawing pictures, explaining stuff and learning.

2. What's your background prior to TEFL - any stories to tell?
I'm a wine-taster.
Seriously.

That and marketing.
Plenty of stories but basically I simply hated the plastic life I had in London. I left to see what else the world had to offer.

One of the best jobs I ever had was as cook, deckhand and hostess on board a yacht in the Whitsunday islands.

3. Compare and contrast - your worst EFL boss.
Actually, he was the worst boss ever. His nickname was Buzz Lightyear. A total and complete idiot: treated me and paid me like crap because I was married to an Ecuadorian.

Got him back though, took his best EFL teachers and we set up our own school (which later failed).

The thing is, I'm quite philosophical and each time I have had a 'bad' boss I have used that person as a sort of benchmark of the kind of person I never want to be like. I analyze everything they do and the reactions other people have to their presence and then do my best to be the opposite.

It's a Tao thing.

On the flip-side I have had some fantastic bosses. Annie and Sonia at the Experiment in Ecuador taught me so much about finance, managing budgets and responsibility, William of the Summerbridge Hong Kong board and Andrina, Tom and Fred here in Germany have been great.

4. Why did you set up your own website and blogs?
I blog for a number of reasons. Mostly because I'm in love with the independence of sitting in front of the computer, jotting down my own development as a teacher and teacher trainer and sharing that with the world.

That some people enjoy some of what I write is very rewarding.

You know what I mean, Sandy. Those private pat-on-the-back smiles you get when someone adds to the conversation and a dialogue opens up.

I also blog for students and often leave things for my students to review or re-watch, learn more about.

I've heard some rather disparaging comments about bloggers by a handful of ELT authors and I think it's silly. Bloggers aren't here, in my opinion, to replace books - we're doing something entirely different. They're welcome to join in the fun.

In many respects, it reminds me, romantically, of the ancient steps of the pantheon and of the philosophical debates tossed back and forth between the thinkers of the 17th - 18th centuries in letters. Except it's on an instant time stream and it's public. Read it now, not in a subjective history book in fifty years.

I'll just state, right up front, because this has been asked in a few emails and in sly side bar comments:

I have no intention of writing textbooks or becoming a big wig in the TEFL world. I'm not even remotely interested in that. I don't mind doing odd little side projects here and there (am currently) but I do not want my name on a book cover (although it's been offered).

Regarding my website, I wrote SimplyConversations, a simple speaking skills material a few years ago and then sent it off to several publishers. Two met with me and both came back with the same response independently of each other: it's not commercial.

The UK publishers told me that if I could figure out a way to make it profitable (photocopiable material sells one copy per institution, textbooks times as many people in a class: do the math) then they'd be interested in taking it on.

I didn't write the SimplyConversations sets to make loads of cash (I sell them starting at 79c a set). I wrote them because my students insisted on me bringing "my game" into class.

Their fluency and vocabulary dramatically improved and they loved the spontaneity involved. I later did a lot of research into why it works - all that information's on the website.

Selling them gives me a minor income, no great shakes and the ELT publishers were right, most people like photocopiable materials to be free. However, I enjoy the work and at the end of the month when there's a plus instead of a minus after paying my maintenance and production costs, I smile and am proud.

The best thing about both the website and the blogs is that they are mine and I can do whatever I want with them. I can stretch, I can shout, I can cry and I can laugh the entire way through my own work.

It's powerfully addictive.

The worst thing about both the website and the blogs is that they are mine and if I do whatever I want with them, I can also make a big fool of myself.

It's a risk I'm willing to take.

5. If you could do anything else, what would it be?
Write movies.

I will do this, of course, once I have made a million bucks from selling my materials piece by piece, download by download.

Perhaps by the time I'm 60. LOL.

6. What's wrong with the TEFL industry?
The current rates of pay in most countries around the world mean that teachers suffer and thus, students suffer because they simply do not get the quality they deserve.

I can't bear these chain-schools run by people who have yachts, islands and football teams but yet if you go into the language institute's staff room, the computer's from 2000 and it crashes three times a day.

Beautiful paintings on the wall, shiny folders with logos and teachers living on tuna fish and pasta.

Or worse, fantastic teachers leaving the profession because they simply have to earn enough to feed their families.

Translation: all that talent goes into some meaningless, uncreative, office job.

The issue of the non-competitive market salary has brought about an unacceptable atmosphere of incompetence - a small percentage of teachers believe that because they're not earning well, it's an excuse not to prepare, improve their skills or work hard and it's this group of housewives, filling-in-time-til-a-real-job-comes and general time-wasters who drag down the spirits of good teachers.

Basically creating the spinning hamster on a wheel scenario we're in nowadays, as the language institutes are then able to use this lack of professionalism in the field as an excuse not to pay the good teachers appropriately.

In an ideal world we need to raise the bar, understand that this is a profession not a hobby, get paid properly and introduce regulatory pay scales like in any other service industry.

7. Anything else?
The teaching associations need a good overhaul.

There is way too much kow-towing to the big wigs and not enough paying attention to unbelievably crucial - ney, vital - issues like the one I mentioned above.

I'm sort of cautiously watching the recent changes in a couple of the international ones here on this side of the pond - I've noticed that a few younger guys are becoming vocal parts of the scene - we'll see if they bring about change or it's just more of the same.

I also know that a few entrepreneurial people like Kenny Christian of The English Profi are working on creating a network of language freelancers - it is my sincere hope that he, and people like him, shake things up.

That's it.

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Anyway, many thanks to Karenne for her extremely idiosyncratic and interesting take on the six-questions routine. Meanwhile, here's a picture of those, erm, armpits, but in their more contemporary guise!

Goodbye to All That; Hello to All This...

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Frank McCourt, R.I.P.

Well, it usually takes a death or something equally terminal to rouse me from my extended summer silence, and it saddens me to report on the untimely exit of Frank McCourt, one of my favourite Irish writers - dammit, one of my favourite writers, full stop.

He is probably best known as the author of Angela's Ashes, but I actually preferred 'Tis, the touching story of his first faltering footsteps as a teacher in a foreign land. Here's what I wrote about him a few years back...

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Well, the other day I spotted one of the [Irish] authors’ works in my local bookshop, and I bought myself a fine book entitled ‘Tis, by Frank McCourt. It’s a delight from start to finish, I must say, written in a pacey style which is almost stream-of-consciousness. What’s more, it’s a must-read for all Teflers, as it chronicles the poor fellow’s shambolic teaching career as an immigrant in a foreign land (in this case, the USA).

I won’t spoil it for you, but let me just say there are several moments, exquisitely described, that I could empathise with immediately – teaching (or not) with a large hangover, ditching the course book in favour of something more (un)suitable, and trying to motivate a room full of testosterone-charged teenagers to study English.

Even better, there are several quite moving scenes too, but I’ll limit myself to illustrating just one. In a quiet moment during a class test, the rookie teacher Frank starts rooting around in some cupboards at the back of the classroom…

[I] find them stuffed with old grammar books, newspapers, exams, and hundreds of pages of uncorrected student compositions going back to 1942. I’m about to dump everything in the trash till I start reading the old compositions…

I pile the crumbling papers on my desk and begin reading to my classes. They sit up. There are familiar names. 'Hey, that was my father – he was wounded in Africa'. - 'Hey, that was my uncle Sal, who was killed in Guam'...

While I read the essays aloud there are tears. Boys run from the room to the toilets and return red-eyed. Girls weep openly and console each other… Dozens of Staten Island and Brooklyn families are named in these papers, so brittle we worry they’ll fall apart. They are suddenly interested in compositions with the title ‘My Life’, and I want to say, "See what you can learn about your fathers and uncles and aunts? Don’t you want to write about your life for the next generation?”

Ah, the joys of writing – and the power of literature.

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Your loss is a sad one, Frank, and quite premature. I was hoping to be able to interview you one day, to pick up a few tips and that, but you've slipped away from me, you old bugger!

Who can possibly ever replace you?

http://www.scotsman.com/latest-irish-news/Author-Frank-McCourt-dies-at.5474008.jp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8615809

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8158451.stm

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?!