Team Unteaching

Robin Usher, Hungary

Dr Robin Leslie Usher Ph.D wrote a doctoral thesis `Jungian Archetypes in the work of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein`, 1992. He has been a teacher of English language and literature since 1994. He has taught in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman and Libya. He is a science fiction writer, 'All For Naught Orphan Ufonaut' in Shelter of Daylight, Sam's Dot Publishing (2010). He published in the British SF academic journal Foundation, `Male And Female He Created Them Both: Beyond The Archetypes` (112), and the Hungarian Institute for Educational Research`s Educatio, `Learning To Study`. E-mail: robika2001@yahoo.co.uk

Team teaching is big in the countries of the world that want to learn English, or do they? In places as disparate as Khartoum and Tripoli, Yours Truly has encountered the phenomenon of team unteaching, where the classroom workload has been divided between a native speaker and a non-native speaker, usually reading and writing for the native and listening and speaking for the non-native. Having obtained the TEFL certificate from the devil board of examiners, team unteaching was obviously the next occult phase of teacher training for the experienced professional plagued by demons wanting to glean information from the expert and teach instead of Yours Truly after possessing themselves of his knowledge and dispossessing him of his liveleihood. At the King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Yours Truly was team untaught when given responsibility for reading and writing while another teacher had listening and speaking as his responsibility. Sojourning in the sunshine for a semester or so, Yours Truly wintered in his accustomed abode before sallying forth after signing a contract to teach once more at the Saud. Cooling his heels at the local desert oasis, the Azizia hotel along Abdulaziz street, an entire semester passed by without Yours Truly being called to the Saud for anything other than a perfunctory interview about the teacher`s happiness on his arrival. Beaming joyously, Yours Truly advised the board of the Saud that his cup was brimful and it was beyond nice to be once again in the hearty bosom of the Middle East`s premier educational establishment.

Amongst the educational equipment to be gleaned from the developmental psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is the knowledge that the human psyche is comprised of four functions, which in undifferentiated form are associated with eye, ear, nose and mouth. When actuated or differentiated into conscious functionality, eye, ear, nose and mouth are associated with `Sensation, Thinking, Intuition and Feeling` respectively, which Carl Jung calls the four functions of consciousness mediated by the central conscious awareness he and other psychologists refer to as the ego. In English Language Teaching (ELT) the four functions of Jungian psychology, that is, `Sensation, Thinking, Intuition and Feeling` (Jung 1921), are represented by reading and listening, and writing and speaking, where reading is associated with the eye or `Sensation`, listening is associated with the ear or `Thinking`, the sense of smell is `Intuition`, which is imagination and writing, and `Feeling` is associated with the mouth or speaking. Because team unteaching usually focuses upon two of the four functions, that is, reading and writing, which are `Sensation` and `Intuition`, or listening and speaking, which are `Thinking` and `Feeling`, removing the teacher from the responsibility of teaching two of those is a means of handicapping the functionality of the teacher.

Before my happy stay unmolested at the cheerful Azizia hotel along Abdulaziz street for an entire semester of contractual fulfilment without making an appearance at the Saud at all, I was immensely relieved and brimful of gratitudinousness towards the kind Arabians who`d allocated me the role of substitute in their educational machinations. The last time Yours Truly had been there he had been responsible for reading and writing, `Sensation` and `Intuition`, but had lost two of the functions necessary to the individual teacher because of the team unteaching program. Signs of team unteaching were everywhere at the Saud. Huge lecture halls full of my fellow untaught agog at the plethora of seminars and workshops on team unteaching surfaced each day while Yours Truly endeavoured to maintain functionality as a human. At the end of a semester riddled with skulking and apologetic demurral whenever the subject of team unteaching came up, Yours Truly left the Saud with but two functions instead of four; `Sensation and Intuition` (eye and nose) thanks to his tenacity on behalf of the students, who wanted to learn reading and writing. Gimping on but one leg instead of two, Yours Truly had returned to the Saud as per contract for a further semester, but team unteaching had decided to remove the other two functions, `Thinking and Feeling`, that is, ear and mouth, which symbolically represent the capacity of the teacher to teach listening and speaking, in the belief that, although deaf, dumb and blind, Yours Truly, the TEFL exponent, would still be able to smell good. If he could intuit the whereabouts of the shower who might know where the bathroom was. Gimping through Riyadh airport on his way home, Yours Truly could but reflect on the warmth of the sun and the omnipresence in Saudi of `kapsa`, the traditional chicken and rice delicacy of the Arabs, which still smelt good, even in the imagination, when the functionless teacher returned to his wintering abode and a more homey shower.

TEFL teachers beware of the team unteaching, because team & TEFL teaching often don`t agree with the goal and ambitions of the Christian teacher insofar as one is concerned to rid oneself of both devil and demon teaching, which interferes with the development of the students as well as that of the teacher in the classroom. Team & teaching is lauded to the skies by institutions concerned to promote their own non-native speaking professionals at the expense of your own career, but education teems with unprofessional back biters and back stabbers who will seek to embroil the perfectly adequate teacher in team unteaching activities that have little or nothing to do with either the students` progression towards passing the required examinations or assisting the ELT expert to pay the mortgage and put the kids through school by remaining in employment, rather than being wasted in interminable seminars and workshops, led by team unteaching glitterati from outsourced big name corporations with highly qualified personnel paid to assassinate good teaching because dumber students make life easier for whatever remains of the teaching profession after the team unteaching has been to teem & teach at your place of work.

Life at the Azizia hotel oasis on Abdulaziz street wasn`t fun but it was comfortable. I had a bath of my own that was peculiarly Arabian because it had a seat for a woman to sit and bathe her child while the bath itself was far too small for a human, but it cost me an additional 1000 SAR and I was willing to pay, as the shower is never reliable in the Middle East, but then the shower at home aren`t very pleasant either if you want to live without one.

My first hotel had been the Al Hamra, which means `red`, presumably because I`d been an orange the last time I`d left the King Saud University. In the `traffic light` assessment system for examining teachers, green was for those teachers who`d been seen at a sufficient number of seminars and workshops to be awarded a license to continue with the team & drive a class of students into the examination room. I was an `orange` because I`d yet to master the team & drive a group of students on from the e-podium waving my ruler as a symbol of office and showing them I was with the smart board by tasking them with the meaning of the projections.

According to Jungian psychology the student learns by developing their functions mediated by the soul or anima, but although one function is superior and two are auxiliary and ancillary, the fourth is inferior or contaminated by the student`s feelings of inferiority due to what Carl Jung terms the shadow component of the psyche, which is usually present because of projections whereby the teacher, for example, is perceived as a no good half wit because the student is. Whatever the teacher projects from the board to task the students is there for what Jung terms shadow-recognition, that is, in completing the tasks, the students achieve functionality and individuation, which is individual growth of consciousness through self-actualization. By differentiating the four functions of consciousness associated with eye, ear, nose and mouth, that is, `Sensation, Thinking, Intuition and Feeling`, in the course of solving problems relating to reading, listening, writing and speaking, the students become entirely self-sufficient and aware as adult humans.

Staying at the Al Hamra, red hotel, wasn`t a good augury if you expected to make it beyond life as an orange, I felt, so I left for the Azizia after the first month because the company paying the salary of Yours Truly made it optional for employees to keep up the rent or debark for fresh climes. The roadworks between the location of head office and the red hotel meant that a taxi was required if the couple of hundred metres between hotel and language institute were to be negotiated successfully in under an hour. Built on what seemed to be a dual carriageway, the red hotel afforded one convenience store and a laundry, before the logistical brain of the ELT professional had to be brought into play in order to map out a course of action that would permit of the barber and bank, with least expense and mileage for the veteran linguist used to having his back broken in various public and private transports in and about Riyadh, because of the interminable raised bumps in every road placed there to slow down Arabian racing drivers in 4 wheel drive General Motors` pick up trucks wanting to break their land speed records.

The bath at the Azizia helped ease the vertebrae, but was too small to stretch out in, so I had to place my feet against the wall far up it while I soaked in some soothing crystals. Having been at the Azizia before, I knew I could cross the road on Friday, the day of rest in Arabia, because the traffic was too busy to cross on any other day of the week, but no! The local authority had built a wall across the dual carriageway and so I had to take a taxi to the other side now if I wanted to have the laundry done, which meant a huge circle of almost three miles before I could be redeposited outside the hotel frontage at 6 GBP for the taxi and 3 GBP for the weekly wash. Walking against the traffic at the side of the road to do the weekly supermarket shopping was a chore but the hardy travelling ELT journeyman knows to keep it simple.

A box of oranges, a big roll of salami and a half dozen loaves of bread keep body and soul together. A barrel of water for the room can be had from hotel service, and extras are coffee and sugar for energy, with a wifi internet provided by the hotelier if you`ve a laptop, and a mind to use it. My recommendation for newcomers to Saudi Arabia, who need to find their feet before going on, is don`t be a tourist. If you have a place to stay and you`re alone, find what you need close at hand and, if you need to venture further afield, keep your hotel address with you at all times, and have the address of where you want to go with you for the taxi driver, because few speak English and rides about the city aimlessly can seem endlessly expensive and fierce arguments with local taxi drivers are life endangering. Arriving at the Al Hamra, the red hotel, as an orange, I got the green light to leave Saudi. `Still life with the old orange jet!` I mumbled as I boarded the plane that would jet me home, or was it, `Still life in the old orange yet.` I strapped myself in with the safety belt provided and waited. The old orange was just about ready to jet off, I thought, seeing there was still life in me as I attractively ogled the giggling stewardess.

References

Jung, Carl Gustav Psychological Types (1921) Vol. 6, The Collected Works, Princeton Bollingen

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