Pig Sty Avenue

Level 1 would actually be quite challenging, as you attempted to get through your Cert. course, (which I recall as like cramming a degree into four weeks, in Barcelona, with after-school refreshments in a bar called Antibiotica).  As you progressed through the levels you'd meet a whole range of bad guys, such as the chiselling school owners who'd do their damnedest each month to lighten your meagre wage packet of a few Euros or Turkish Lira.  There were the drunken DoSs.  And there'd be a whole level devoted to the residential school in Great Malvern owned and "run" by a family of psychopaths. I found that as I reached the 10th level it had all got a bit dull, the actual teaching had become like falling off a log, and the best amusement was found in the games additional features, academic research and teaching management.  But then I found a hidden level.  If, as you progress, you pick up enough materials and test writing skills, qualifications, and abilities ...

With their ability to resign in untimely and mysterious circumstances, maybe Martin O'Neill and now Steve Coppell are seeking career changes, and moving into TEFL, where such flounces are par for the course. I've been thinking of putting together a football themed set of materials for a while now, maybe they'd be interested?  

I'm now, very now, putting together a Wiki for the pre-sessional I'm designing, and part of the course will be about podcasting. Anyway, for The Avenue's regular TEFL teaching readers, here's a link to some very useful looking podcasts at Splendid Speaking . And it's also a good name for EFL podcasts, don't you think? Back to the grindstone...

I accepted a job with an English company for a job in Libya, which fell through. So they offered me work in their school in the East Midlands, and put me up in a guesthouse, and I thought wtf, a man's got to work. Just beginning to start week two of it and I'm not so sure. The big cheese seemed ok at the interview but now she seems to burst out of frequent meetings only to dash around the building, pointing at people, asking rhetorical questions, misunderstanding anything you might be foolish enough to utter, making tactless asides, and leaving only demoralization and puzzlement in her wake. It's as if she's got a big Mad Ideas Box in her office and she gets several out in a day and has to act on all of them immediately: in the most uninspiring and unconvincing ways, too. She reminds me of the bastard who owned Scabby College, a kind of Dotheboys Hall for middle class foreigners where Herself and I somehow managed to last a whole year. The big cheese owner of the s...

Well, here goes for another week at Global Education Inc. There are two more weeks of teaching, and another of marking. Bizarrely, we don't get paid for that final week of marking, but, we're now told, we had an extra couple of quid on the hourly rate - which should just about cover it, we're told. There was a meeting with the MSU big cheeses last week. Another shoulder shrugging, nervous laughter affair. We established that there's something called "a zero hours contract" whereby you have a contract, but no guaranteed hours. Which sounds pretty ropey. Unfortunately, that's NOT what we're on, but what we might aspire to. We have no kind of contract at all, we're rented by the hour. It was during the course of this meeting that any shreds of glamour attaching to working for MSU were blown away by the realization that as I push 50, a few months away from getting an MA in TESOL, and with ten years really good experience, I'm still just a T...

We moved here because the mother-in-law is frail and elderly, and needed us down-the-street rather than four hours away. I was very pleased to get five weeks pre-sessional teaching at a Major Scottish University (MSU). I got another week at the end of the pre-sessional as a nominal ESOL teacher to a group of Japanese students; in fact, I mostly supervised them around places like Glasgow School of Art and Stirling Castle. I enjoyed all of this, more or less. And then I was really chuffed to find that there was a thing called (or any rate this is what I'm going to call it) the Strathclyde International Institute. This was not-quite part of the University. It's role was to put international students through a term or two's course which would put them onto being able to join either undergraduate or masters' courses at MSU. The University was responsible for recruiting and paying the part time teachers who formed the bulk of the teaching staff. This ensured SII had ...