
But I will.
My first day. Eight a.m. I was introduced to the staff. They were all middle-aged types, unattractive and grumpy, except for one girl about my age – 28. None of them did or said anything to help me or make me feel welcome. Only grudgingly did they tell me what I had to do or where I had to go. It seemed a little odd, but I didn’t think on it much. It was New York, I was getting used to people being crabby and unhelpful.
Then I had my first class.
God knows I didn’t know much about how to teach, despite having done it for two years in Thailand and Korea. I was supposed to teach three classes a day, each 100 minutes long. One specifically about reading, one specifically about grammar, another specifically about conversation. The books were all exercise books of the type you’d study at home, basically unsuitable for a class (although I didn’t so much realize that at the time) and most likely purchased by the school because they were cheap. There were a lot of books in the office, but we were forbidden to photocopy anything that we hadn’t written ourselves – the government could fine the school $10,000 for that.
The students didn’t have the books anyway. The first day I stood there like an idiot for two hours trying to lead discussions, sweating profusely with nerves.
The students were mostly youngish people, in their twenties, from a variety of countries, with a few middle-agers. They were all united in one thing: their misery. The Poles, Ukrainians and Russians were miserable because America was much dirtier, more expensive, and more full of smelly foreigners and blacks than they had thought it was going to be. The Chinese immigrants were miserable because they worked so much. The Japanese and Korean students were miserable because their currencies had recently collapsed against the dollar and everything was suddenly expensive and they all had to get jobs. There were Albanians, Moldavians, and a few Dominicans too.
They were all miserable. They’d all finally made it to the America they’d always dreamed of and seen in films, and found it dirty and shabby and rude and expensive. They made five times as much money, but everything cost ten times as much. The streets might be paved with gold, but only in areas where you would be stopped by security guards if you tried to enter.
Actually, I take that back. The Japanese girls weren’t miserable. They were drunk every night, having a marvelous time.
But everybody else was fucking miserable.
Most of the students from Russian, Poland and the Ukraine were immigrants who’d won the green card lottery. Most of them worked 40 – 50 hours a week in various construction, factory and restaurant jobs but received government Pell grants to study English – they were obliged to study 24 hours a week, however. The Japanese and Korean students were mostly on student visas, and they too were obliged to study 24 hours a week. They were forbidden by the terms of their visa to work, but most of them did, in Japanese restaurants and offices. A number of the students were already naturalized citizens, but many were single mothers on welfare – and, you guessed it, were obliged to study 24 hours a week.
In short, not too many of them wanted to be there.
They all agreed that it was extremely difficult to get much opportunity to practice English in New York, however. Some felt this a good thing, some felt it a bad thing, but nobody denied it. All the nationalities lived in their own areas – the Russians in Brighton and Coney Island, the Poles in Greenpoint, the Chinese in Chinatown, the Japanese in the East Village, etc, etc. They lived and worked with people from their own countries, listened to music and watched TV programs and videos in their native language, and mostly couldn’t even recognize the weird slangy mumbo-jumbo that came out of the mouths of the few actual Americans they had to deal with.
The school was run as a not-for-profit organization, which means they were basically guaranteed a profit by the government in tax breaks and grants. The owner was a mountainous Samoan woman, a self-made success story who came from nothing.. A huge, bloated, living embodiment of the American dream. By working relentlessly, she had succeeded, despite knowing nothing about what she was doing. She had about 17 brothers, and they all worked at the school in some capacity. I must say that the management was always kind and decent to me. It’s not their fault we were working in Hell.
I
God knows I’d sucked pretty hard as a teacher in Thailand and Korea, but here I was in a position to REALLY fucking suck. My hours were a brutal 36 a week. I worked 8:00 to 3:00, Monday through Thursday. Then Tuesday and Thursday evening I worked from 4:30 to about 9:30, although we were supposed to work until 10:30. I felt like a cat’s chew toy after those days. The government could fine the school $10,000 if they found out you left early, but most of the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Domincan students begged and whined and cajoled you until you let the class go early. (And no fucking government inspectors come around at 10:00pm, believe me.) The Japanese and Koreans simply smiled and agreed, and then went and complained to the management the next day.
There were strict rules about attendance records – the government could fine you $10,000 if you marked a student present when they actually weren’t there. There was a general attendance record, and an attendance card for each student that had to be filled out for the gold folks at Immigration. There was also a book in which you had to fill out your weekly lesson plan, which was checked by the management – more government fines if you fucked that up – but all you really had to do was write down some page numbers and stuff and everybody was happy.
There was a complex formula on the back of the Immigration attendance records for test scores, classroom participation grades, final exams, etc, and I was actually stupid enough to try to adhere to that formula for a while, before I realized everybody else was just making the scores up. If you actually tried to fail somebody based on the fact they’d failed every exam you had given, the doughty little Eastern European manager would take you aside and gently explain that if we failed students, both they and we would have problems with the Gov, so could you just give them a few make-up exercises hmm?
“English Teacher A is the BEST teacher here,” a Polish girl told me. “He always lets you go early, you don’t have to bring your books to class, you never have tests, he just stands there and talks and everybody makes an A.”
I guess everybody had hoped America would be like that. . . interestingly, while almost all the students did anything and everything to avoid working in class, those who had children in the U.S. educational system always lividly cursed it for being so easy and undisciplined.
There were strict rules about the size of classes – the law forbade us to have more than thirteen students in an English class. To get around this, they’d put eighteen to twenty students in one class and simply put half of them on one student register and half on another. This pitiful subterfuge was evidently enough. In the business English classes, there were no rules, so there were often thirty or more students in a class. As many as they could jam into a room.
My colleagues. . . . basically they were nice people. Reserved but friendly enough, in their way, except for a few of them who had few pleasures in life other than arguing about politics and such. They were all miserable too, though. And what’s more they were pathetic. Simply pathetic people, washed-out uninteresting wrecks. I could describe the various ways in which they were pathetic and sad and lonely and boring and physically unattractive, but I just don’t have the heart. I don’t think any of them were married, and many of them still lived with their parents in middle-age. A few of them had taught abroad – I sometimes wondered worriedly whether it was the job or the city of New York that had drained the life essence out of them. The drunken whoremongers of Bangkok seemed like fabulous role models in comparison to these honest hardworking folk.
To teach English as a Second Language in New York, you are supposed to take a course sponsored by the State of New York Department of Education. There are a couple different levels of this, and they cost, at that time, a couple hundred bucks apiece. You generally do it on the weekends for about a month, as I recall. I hadn’t taken this course, but the manager said not to worry, they’d just misprint a thing or two on the paperwork and that would give us some time.
After four unhappy, rainy months of teaching English to exhausted, miserable, grumpy students, the year 1998 rolled around and they told me they couldn’t stall the Department of Education any more with my paperwork, but if I didn’t want to take the ESL course, I could continue teaching Business English courses with no problem.
These were to consist of Vocaulary Building, Business Communication, and Business English. The Vocabulary Building course was okay, except for the fact that there were up to forty students in one class. The Business English book was just extremely nitpicky grammar and punctuation, insisting that it would be incorrect to say, “She is taller than me” or “Everybody must clean out their desks”, and going on at great length about the evils of the comma splice. The Business Communication book was about how to write business letters, and was designed for American universities, so students generally didn’t understand a word of it.
In addition to tired and unhappy immigrants, I got to work with some tired and unhappy black and Hispanic single mothers in those courses. Forced to study 24 hours a week to keep their welfare checks, they often had no place to leave their children, and often tried to bring them into the school. Naturally, the school had no insurance to cover children on the premises, so here was another reason everybody was miserable.
The levels of the students were a constant problem. The school had three – beginner, intermediate, and advanced. A level lasted about 6 months. Students were obliged to be in the same level for all their subjects – grammar, reading/writing, and conversation. This was a nightmarish problem for Japanese students, who were often completely fluent in grammar and reading, but couldn’t speak a word of English, and for Dominican and Puerto Rican students, who could speak English fluently (albeit incorrectly) but couldn’t read or write much even in their native Spanish.
So why in the hell did I do this for a year? Certainly not for the $15 an hour, which by the time state and city taxes and social security were removed was much closer to $10 an hour. Certainly not for my luxurious dwelling places. I moved in October from the cheap cubicle hotel in the West Village to a grubby mouse-infested studio apartment on the Lower East Side next to the Avenue C Needle Exchange. (Only $695 a month, a real bargain.) In February of 1998 I moved from there to another 7 foot by 3 foot cubicle, albeit a bit nicer one with an attached toilet and shower, in a decent location in the East Village. $145 a week for that. I really lucked out – only 40 percent of my weekly take-home pay.
Why would someone suffer in a job they didn’t like in a city they didn’t like in uncomfortable dwelling?
Well, you probably guessed it.
I was to find that there was something worse than living and working in New York.
Dating in New York.
NEXT: BITCHES SUCK OUT MY SOUL