TEFL Slaves
April 28th, 2006 by MarkWhile surfing before work this morning, I stumbled upon a truly terrifying article about TEFL, called The Slavery of Teaching English.
Sure, you dress it up a bit, you produce your own handouts, you try to have a bit of fun. But you are basically a busker playing the same tired old tunes. Even though most students are charming and receptive, it is an exhausting existence, a life of pure drudgery.
Nevertheless, you always have to be on form, ever the life-giver. And perhaps worst of all, you always end up using the omnipresent “Headway” textbooks, which make full obeisance to every modern piety, and whose pages are full of fatuous illustrations of wimpish little men in aprons doing the washing-up, while their briefcase-carrying womenfolk stride out of the front door to waiting limos.
So while teaching English is fine if you want to spend a year abroad, and great for meeting pretty foreign girls, considered as a career that might offer some degree of professional fulfilment, it fails on every count. No one with a scrap of ambition can possibly consider it. As the philosopher Alain de Botton says: “You become a TEFL teacher when your life has gone wrong.”
As a character in Tim Parks’s Cara Massimina said,
What was a language teacher in the end? A nobody. A mere failed somebody else.
What a bleak picture. The financial situation for EFL teachers in Asia is far better than that of the Europe-based teachers described in the article, but I still find some unsettling parallels between their situation and mine. While I earn far more money than those poor souls teaching English in Rome, I’m not learning a great deal on the job.
When I was working as a programmer, I was always learning new things. The skills needed to do the job were constantly changing and expanding. I used advanced mathematics on a regular basis; I learned a great deal about the business world; and I was an integral part of creating things, things made out of pure ideas and logic, that made my employers millions of dollars. In short, I was challenged and stimulated. Spending eight to ten hours a day doing such work, had a clear effect on me. My mind was sharper. I could think more clearly, I could read faster, I could learn new things more easily.
Unfortunately, TEFL may be taking a toll. I’ve only been at it for about four years, and I can already feel the effects. Anything more I’ve learned about L2 acquisition and any progress I’ve made in learning Mandarin is more than out-weighed by what I’ve lost in other foreign language skills, math skills, and programming skills. Now, my urge to create has been confined to just a few JavaScript tools. Now, I can’t remember how to do Laplace transforms or how to talk about politics in Japanese. I just remember the names of my students, what their problems are, how to deal with their parents, and what they should work on next class.
Teaching is important work, good work that can affect lives. Somebody has to do it, and as long as I am doing it, I’ll put my whole heart into it and do it as well as I can. I’m beginning to realize I can’t keep at it forever, though.
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April 28th, 2006 at 6:13 am
The Slavery of Teaching English.
Mark tipped me off to this article: The slavery of teaching English It seems that teaching English in Europe is a truly horrifying experience leading to poverty and a meaningless life.Sure, you dress it up a bit, you produce your own handouts, you try …
April 28th, 2006 at 8:38 am
I absolutely know how you feel. As bad as it might sound, I just didn’t feel like I was getting enough out of teaching English. When I started missing college (the studying, not the partying) I knew something was wrong and it was time to change jobs.
April 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
But if JK Rowling has done it, I feel strangely encouraged…
It’s tricky. There are more things that you can do with teaching, but the reality of the EFL that most of us do will become pretty repetitive. I’ve already taught most of American Headway and Interchange 2 three times.
April 29th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
[...] This is how I felt after reading that article “The Slavery of Teaching English”, which was linked to on Mark’s post, “TEFL Slaves”. I finished reading it about an hour ago and it created quite a stir in my home. First, I tried to read it to my wife, which was a mistake. The implication that this article alluded to my own personal anguish was a nuance entirely lost on her, as our two snotty flu-ridden kids were crawling on top of her, begging her to put on the Narnia DVD for the 10th time this week. How dare she! After dismounting from my haughty pity pot several argumentative minutes later, I marvelled at my wife’s unwavering patience with my more selfish, egocentric facets of me. My reaction to this article is really the point; my future prospects as a white-collar worker in a western country are not. I am still processing the truth of this. Yes, TEFL is mostly a dead-end job. So is waiting tables. So is working at a mortuary. If you are smart, ambitious and tend to validate your self-worth through your work, then perhaps TEFL is not an exceedingly good career choice. But it can be, if you want, as some commenters mentioned on EFL Geek. But really, how many of us started this gig as a career choice? I certainly didn’t. And I admit that Alain de Botton’s statement “You become a TEFL teacher when your life has gone wrong.” was entirely on the money for me. And although I still hold on to the thought that teaching English is not a life sentence, I, like Mark, feel that Teaching is important work, good work that can affect lives. Somebody has to do it, and as long as I am doing it, I’ll put my whole heart into it and do it as well as I can. [...]
May 1st, 2006 at 4:16 am
The bit about American Headway in the article kind of surprised me. I’ve never taught it before, but I bought a copy a few months ago and was thinking about trying to integrate it in to our curriculum. I thought some of the information gap exercises looked good.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:55 pm
very true about being an ESL teaching not being able to “hack it” in the real world. In my case, I was making 65,000 US dollars a year as a Marketing Director in Atlanta. I worked 80 hours a week, I went to university and studied marketing and I made to the next level (second-level management - ready to wait 3/4 yrs and then make 100k plus. The price was too high. It took me all my life to learn the only lesson one should remember - to live in the moment and just be happy in life.
The office games you have to play and all the other pressure was too much. I left my job, took a year off and said to myself “I just want to be happy”. After my burn out, 911, and leaving marketing for a year. I thought about what would make me happy, so I tried ESL. It’s hard and sometimes a real pain in the ass, but would anyone rather be an floor manager at Wallmart, working at radio shack, or someother job that makes your life seem more worthless? At the very least, our ego gets pumped once in a while, you have a few good classes a week and you see the world. “life is the best university”. I keep hearing people bitch and moan about teaching ESL, but look at the other side once in a while.
Thanks
Larry
May 2nd, 2006 at 11:58 pm
If nothing else, there’s the promise of this kind of future (from Dan Brown, via Language Log):
Man. Wish I’d paid more attention in those linguistics classes.
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:17 am
Hey Mark.
I think perhaps it would be better to say that the label of EFL teacher as a “failed somebody else” is a applicable only if it’s not already one’s chosen path or at least a stage in that path. This may sound defensive, but I’ve heard enough of the ‘Oh, you’re just an English teacher’or worse yet ‘I’m just an English teacher’ (from insecure teachers) attitude in my 10 years in Taiwan to have the right to speak out.
Some might laugh and say, “Hyoh, right, like someone would choose to be an English teacher!” Well, I did. I came here during college, did it, liked it, and decided it was what I wanted to do. That simple. Not like I didn’t have other options. I graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa member with highest honors from UCSD, and with a promising job at a chem. lab to boot (they offered to pay to put me through a Masters program to keep me from leaving!) Problem was I just missed teaching!
At least part of the problem is that, in Taiwan at least, English teaching is as much or as little of a job as you can make it. You can be as good or as lousy as you want at it and still manage to make a decent living. I think for those of us who are at peace with being on the career route, then, the trick is, like anything else, to keep learning, keep getting better.
Along those lines, the other day, I was at a little hole-in-the-wall pub and ran into an old coworker – a Kiwi named Brent who’s now teaching at 政治大學 in Mu Zha. After the typical, ‘Hey man, long time no see, whacha been up to? etc.’ he actually took my hand and said, “Dan, I just wanted to thank you. Everything I know now about teaching was taught to me by you when I was at Kojen. Every time I look at a new lesson, I think, ‘How would Dan teach this?’ You are the man.” There’s no way, after hearing something like that, that I could possibly feel a failure!
I will agree that the job isn’t intellectually-stimulating enough – particularly if one is only doing kids’ work. (I’ve taught TOEFL essay writing, Salon articles, short stories by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Eric Fromm, The Yellow Wallpaper, “The Shawshank Redemption” etc. in advanced young adults’ classes)
However, I think in this post Self-Esteem 101 ‘Generation Me’ where everyone thinks they should be a chief and no one wants to be an Indian, we sometimes forget that one’s career does not have to be the ultimate definition of who we are as an individual. It also doesn’t have to be the primary source of one’s intellectual or spiritual inspiration.
Although switching to a hardcore bushiban job sucked away much of my energy and caused the last two years to be a bit stolid, in previous years I had so much going on that my friends back home with their cookie cutter computer- tech or investment banker lives were utterly envious of me.
In conclusion, I’ll say that perhaps part of the problem with the perception of English teaching as a dead-end is the English teachers themselves. How many English teachers does one meet who, even after living here how many years, are stuck in the loop – still blowing all their money on booze, drugs and skirt-chasing as if they’d just gotten out of college, still living in squalor and whinging about how much better ‘home’ is? Trust me – I go there every year and it aint that great. Neither are the lives of the friends I have there.
For those of you in the position that you’d rather be doing somewhere else or doing something else, my advice is to get at it. For those of you who are happy doing what you’re doing but just feel embarrassed when ‘career’ comes up in conversation, make peace with it. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.
October 30th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
[...] There’s also no pension plan for teachers. All indications are that it’s hard to do much with English teaching long term, and a large part of the job’s nature is repetitive. And if, right now, I can save a lot, that’s because my expenditure is relatively low. If in ten years I’m on a similar salary to this, and am raising a child or two, the package will no longer seem so rosy (though maybe that’s true of a lot of jobs). You could become a University teacher, which is a more secure, higher status job, and where pure English teaching becomes a less central part of your day, or you can open up your own school, or try to become one of the uber-expensive Taipei teachers I hear about. But even the last of those three is not really a solution to the things Mark talks about in this post, and the first two don’t appeal to me at present. As far as I can see, teaching English is something to do while you want to do other things than working with your life. I want to write, and live in strange places, and keep learning another language (slowly) while re-building my savings. I can do that here, and after another ten months, I’ll have saved up a lot. What I do next, I’m not sure. [...]
August 30th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Wow, “The Slavery Of Teaching English” is an excellent article that sums it all up. I have been in the TEFL game for 12 years and I want out. After reading that article, I am already out, mentally and spiritually at least…
April 16th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Great comments here. I came across this while searching for ‘the truth’ behind what everyone tells you about TEFL teaching. I wanted to do TEFL teaching to travel and expore the world, and do this on a budget. However, when I was actually faced with the prospect of having to teach. Not act as inspiring leader, or big sister and friend but the actual task of making sure others learn; I was daunted. I was horrified even. I don’t think this is only me? Maybe some one can play devil’s advocate here, am I falling at the first hurdle? Does everyone feel daunted upon embarking on teaching?
Anyway, my first few experiences of the TEFL industry have some what, NOT eased my anxieties. I found the intensive training too intensive, expecting us to teach within 8 hours of having learned the theory. I found the lessons a bit of a joke, how was I supposed to learn when all we did was games? Admitably we all have different ways of learning but I wondered if this was a company serious about excellent teacher training, or with lining their pockets, with students money.
They are a business after all, great that if fine. I only offer one opinion. Alot of people, so I hear, go out and teach English and love it. I am maybe too cautious but life is too short to do something half heartedly; and I am not about to fly across the world to be treated like a commodity. There to help learning. When I cannot ensure the job I do will be to my best abilities. There’s something all to money driven about the TEFL world. I now know if something is worth doing then then are no short cuts, only hard work and determination. A 40 hours course and appling to a few schools does not ring true of this. In future I will look in depth at my options and always read between the lines.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:56 am
This article is true….I taught EFL for 4 years and had a breakdown one week.
3 months later I got a job in Canada making 75,000 Cdn , I know work as a Business Analyst.