ThrEE MoRe GOod REaSOnS NoT To TeACh EnGLISh

Continuing in my attempt to lay bare the realities of the EFL abroad game.

REASON NUMBER THREE NOT TO TEACH ENGLISH ABROAD
“It’s really fun and easy.”

Well.

Certainly it’s probably more fun than loading bricks.

Spending your evenings chatting to a bunch of university girls or something. Hey that’s okay.

But spend a Saturday morning and afternoon chasing a class of screeching 9-year-olds around and then an hour afterwards talking to angry parents who want to know why you let their children out 3 minutes early, and you might well wish you were back at the Tool and Die factory.

Or try sitting with a hostile TOEFL or CAE class of rich teens who want to know about grammatical rules you’ve never even heard of, and are about to march down to the director’s office and demand their parents’ money back.

Or perhaps a group of office drones who sleep 5 hours a night, being forced against their will to study English by a global-minded boss. Think they’ll resent you just a bit? Give you a hard time? Oh just possibly.

The other thing is the hours.

They suck paste. No two ways about it.

Okay, you hear that you’re working less than 30 hours a week. Your average 50 hours-a-week office drone says, “Man, that’s the promised land!”

Not quite, because those 30 hours are likely to be distributed across early mornings, late evenings, and weekends.

Here’s my schedule history: Bangkok – Monday through Thursday, first class 10:30 am to 12:30pm, another class 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Occasional classes in between, but not often. Saturdays and Sundays, 9:00 to 4:00, with a one hour lunch break. One day off—Thursday.

Korea: Monday through Friday – first classes, 7:00 am to 9:00 or 10:00am, then in the evening from 6:00 to 9:00pm. No weekend work, and good fucking thing.

New York: Monday and Wednesday 9:00 am to 3:30pm. Tuesday and Thursday, a soul-sucking 9:00am to 9:00pm. Oh, but we did get a one-hour break from 3:30 to 4:30. Thank God for small favors. Those three days off were nice, but Jesus, man, I came out of those 12-hour days feeling like the cat’s chew toy.

Prague: A horrible, unpredictable patchwork, but often classes in the morning, 7:00 or 8:00, then different afternoon classes between 4:00 and 8:00. A lot of “company” jobs that involved travelling around a lot. Mine weren’t too bad, but a lot of people had to take trains to outlying areas as much as an hour away.

Russia: Doing okay here, usually 4:30 to 9:30 Monday through Friday. But my job is the exception, and most people aren’t so lucky. In Moscow it’s all mornings and evenings and business work. Still and all most people are out relaxing drinking beers in the cafes when I’m working, and going home right about the time I arrive.

“Say, English Teacher X, want to go to the movies tonight?”

“Err, well, does it start after 10:00pm?”

So you see, these aren’t exactly the most sociable kind of hours. You’re simultaneously going to be getting up early, working late, and having nothing to do all day.

There are a lot of fun times to be had for English teachers in other countries, no doubt.

But going to a class with a bad hangover and three hours of sleep isn’t much fun past the first year you do it.

REASON NUMBER FOUR NOT TO TEACH ENGLISH:
“I’ll be really popular with the chicks, and everybody will love me.”

Tell that to my colleague in Korea who found the dead cat nailed to his front door.

Oh, of course, you’ll get a lot of attention you probably wouldn’t get otherwise. Kids will bug you to answers questions for their school English homework. Lonely, bored, uninteresting people will invite you over for dinner to get free English lessons.

Unless of course you’re working in a city that’s already saturated with foreigners, like Prague or Bangkok. In which case you’ll be ignored and looked down upon. “English teacher” has become synonymous with “ne’er do well” in quite a few places.

(And rightly so.)

Plus, being charmless and unattractive in one country is going to leave you charmless and unattractive in other countries, too. If you are, expect to get attention only from those most desperate for your money (real or imagined), your visa, or the free English lessons they can get by hanging around with you.

See how many of your girlfriends still love you when you stop correcting their mistakes when they speak English.

But what about your students?

Most students have rather complex feelings about English. Very love-hate.
I offer this metaphor.

Imagine you are a 30ish American businessman with a wife and kids. You’re living relatively happily in some large American city.

Then Imagine that suddenly Kenya or Pakistan becomes the most powerful country in the world.

Every film in the local multiplex is from Kenya or Pakistan. Your children listen to nothing except music from Kenya or Pakistan. You suddenly find your job is in danger because you don’t have a good grasp of Swahili or Urdu. The traditions and values of your country are beginning to be replaced by those of Pakistan and Kenya. Most people wear traditional Pakistani or Kenyan clothes. If you don’t, you feel stupid.

Now are you going to go to your Swahili or Urdu lessons smiling happily? You work hard all week already. Another 6 hours a week will keep you away from your family, your hobbies, simple relaxation.

You know that your children’s future is largely dependent on their learning Swahili or Urdu. You force them to go to extra Urdu and Swahili lessons after school. They would of course rather be playing football or watching MTV. But you know what’s best for them. They sit sullenly in Urdu or Swahili class sending SMS messages to their friends on their mobiles.

There is, of coure, occasional outright hostility to foreigners – I had a lot of old men hiss angrily at me in Korea, for example. One guy made a throat-cutting gesture and shouted obscenities at me while I was ice-skating with a Korean girl. Foreigners are routinely overcharged for practically everything in quite a few foreign countries, if not targeted for outright ripoffs and thefts.

I’ve been lectured and sneered at about American foreign policy a fair bit, too, but that doesn’t bother me because they’re obviously just jealous.

REASON NUMBER FIVE NOT TO TEACH ENGLISH
“I’ll get out of the rat race.”

Well, sure. Step away from that old office grind, the old nine to five prison. The new washer-dryer combo, the new DVD player, the new computer every 3 years. The gilded cage of life in the west.

Yes indeed! Leave all that behind! Step into a world where you’re living in a cruddy run-down flat shared with another person! Where you rarely have a steady supply of hot water! Where you can’t afford nice clothes, a DVD player OR a computer! Where you wash your clothes in the bathtub! Hey but at least you’re not working nine to five!

Do you really hate your life? Or are you just bored with it? Perhaps you just need a new hobby. Are you really ready to throw everything away for a life of uncertainty?

Make damn sure you are, because it can often be difficult to go back. Spending a few years abroad can cause tremendous difficulties with your insurance and your credit ratings, for example, as well as your employability. “I see. . . you’ve been teaching English abroad for the last few years. . . how interesting. . . well, I’m sure such experience might serve you well at the counter at McDonalds, but our company requires a different caliber of sort. . .”

There’s an old film entitled “Flashpoint” starring Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams. They play border patrol agents in Texas who find a corpse in a crashed jeep which seems to have some relation to the JFK assassination.

Kris Kristofferson plays a decorated Vietnam war hero, a West Point graduate from a good family, a guy who had a lot going for him but decided to toss it all away to lead the simple life as a border patrol agent.

Towards the end of the film, the mysterious government agent who comes to investigate the situation tells Kristofferson something that has always stuck with me.
“You don’t beat the system by hiding out at the bottom of it.”

Think about that carefully.

BAcK To RaMBLinGZ MenU