THE TOP 5 MOANS ABOUT EFL

THE TOP 5 MOANS YOU WILL HEAR ABOUT EFL

There’s nothing EFL teachers enjoy more than a good old whinge about their schools, their working conditions, and their students. Wherever teachers gather to whine and dine, you’ll hear them airing their pet peeves and latest stories of indignities visited upon them at the hands of venal, unscrupulous bosses until the wee small hours.

Let’s take a little time to examine just exactly what it is that gets up the noses of legions of EFL teachers. Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment and edification, I present The Top Five Moans about EFL.

1.       My boss is a dishonest, dislikeable, unscrupulous shit. Yes, yes, yes, we’ve all worked for bosses who come under that category. If you’re working in a developing country, it’s par for the course. The problem, of course, is that the management’s bottom line (and only line) is profits. And if maximizing profits requires shafting teachers, staff and students alike, then that’s what they’ll do. There is no educational watchdog to stipulate otherwise, no governing body to clamp down on shoddy or non-existent quality, no national tradition of business ethics. Anything goes.

2.       They keep screwing up my teaching schedule. Yes, sigh, that too goes with the territory. Scheduling is infernally complicated and difficult, and so schedulers nearly always take the easy way out, drawing up schedules that place a teacher in every classroom, but without any consideration for the individual teachers bound by those schedules. So you’ll end up with, say, a two-hour class in the morning, a 90-minute class at 4:30, a two-hour break, then a 7:45 to 9:45 class. Thus you will have done five and a half hours’ work which is all very nice, but it’s spread over a thirteen and a half hour period. Now the annoying thing is that classes are being held in that two-hour evening break, during which you’re sitting around the staff room staring at the walls. If your morning class were to be dropped from your schedule, and a class allocated to you for that break period, your 5.5 hour stint would have taken up 5.5 hours of your day. Sure, you’d have done three classes back-to-back, but most teachers would prefer that to the time-consuming spread-out schedule. But try pointing that out to the scheduler and see how far it gets you.

3.       My classes are made up of students of varying levels. Uh oh, that perennial old problem. Schools will blithely mix levels within a class for a variety of reasons: the placement testing system is faulty, the student insists on naming his/her entry level, a student is promoted in spite of poor showings in the previous level’s final test, or there’s no class of the correct level currently underway.  Mixed levels make for virtually unteachable classes, which leaves all the students dissatisfied, but it’s an expedient way of getting maximum revenue, and that, for the management, is the overriding consideration.

4.       I’m forever getting demands on my free time. I’m expected to attend meetings, workshops, school functions and outings – all of them unpaid. Yes, once again par for the course. You could flatly refuse, of course, but that’ll leave you in bad odor. Some schools will levy fines or trim your paid hours as a punishment for your intransigence. How come school managements have the temerity to expect you to willingly, happily devote hours of your leisure time to unpaid activities? It’s normal in countries where there’s huge numbers of unemployed. Locals fortunate enough to be holding down jobs know that unpaid work is expected of them, and that to refuse to do it could end up in the loss of their jobs. Thus your local worker will meekly agree to the outlandish demands on their time. In such work environments, your bosses will expect the same of expat workers, and react with offended astonishment when their demands are refused.

5.       My students are unwilling to talk. Yes, you’re experiencing the back-lash of the Asian educational system. Your students will have been given English language classes at school from the age of ten or so, but those classes were heavy on grammar, vocabulary and reading, but light on listening and speaking. Especially light on speaking. Their classes were just too damn big to allow time for individuals to speak, and anyway the teacher’s speaking skills were in all likelihood woefully lacking. So students will sail through three or four years of English language tuition without ever being asked to open their mouths and utter a sentence in English. Now here they are in a private language school, and you the teacher are expecting them to come out with an English utterance or two every half minute. Ouch. I’ll just avoid the teacher’s eyes and hope to hell he doesn’t pick on me to say anything.

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My new book, EFL minus the B.S. (soon to be available on Amazon) is my take on the English teaching game world-wide. From applying for a job, living overseas, work permits, management and mismanagement, classroom dynamics, teens’ and children’s classes, to sex and the single teacher.