A Farewell to EFL

Paul Bress, UK

Paul Bress works both in the fields of personal growth and TEFL and has published very widely in both areas. His particular skill is an ability to see the ‘big picture’ and to help others to take practical steps to solve their professional and personal problems. Paul is a life-long, non-stop, learner – he learns more from everyday experience than from formal research. E-mail: paulbress@talktalk.net

I gave up teaching EFL in 2012. I suddenly realised that it wasn’t for me any more. I have no regrets at all about being involved in it for so long – although I drifted into the career (as did most people did at the time), I’ve enjoyed having contact not only with students from all over the world but also with my dear colleagues in a variety of institutions. Sometimes I’ve felt that the EFL classroom is a microcosm of what humanity can be, and I’ve felt privileged to have had that experience.

Although I’ve now stopped teaching, I don’t see the change that has occurred as being a line in the sand. After all, when I was teaching I went through a number of different phases: from raw trainee, to independent thinker and practitioner, to teacher trainer, to writer of resources ands articles. Most of the change that occurred seemed to come from working on the ground rather than by following a formal course. I’ve always believed that you have to spend thousands of hours doing something before you’re any good at it.

About twenty years ago I started to inch my way away from EFL. I was very interested in empathy and did my MA dissertation on the use of consciously applied empathy in situations of potential conflict. Subsequently I became fascinated by life coaching, counselling, and psychotherapy. – and I became a conflict management consultant. This allowed me to use my research in empathy to help people work more effectively together. Each time I offered this service, I always left the premises thinking that two fundamentals stop people from working well together: an inability to empathise and an inability to talk clearly. No matter how sophisticated the problem appeared to be, it nearly always boiled down to those two things.

About fifteen years ago I started writing ‘non-EFL’ things. First it was poetry. I was, in fact, having a form of breakdown (long story!) and found myself writing poetry as if it was a form of therapy itself. The first poem I ever wrote was entitled ‘Anxiety attack’, and it was written when I was waiting for a barista to prepare my coffee. The wait was interminable and insufferable.

Then I started writing short stories. These stories got longer and longer until you could call them ‘novellas’. This seemed to become my chosen genre. In a novella you have enough space to say something about humanity without populating the work with too many people or documenting too long a period of history. Of course getting a publisher (or, indeed, an agent) is well nigh impossible these days, but I’d put in so much time and effort that I treated myself to self-publication. I felt rather guilty at first, but times are a-changing, aren't they? I have a small number of fans, and that is surely better than having no fans at all.

In the summer of 2012 I went to an exhibition of work by the late Lucian Freud. I bought a postcard there (a self-portrait), and, on return to my home in Herne Bay, did an ink drawing of it. I found it extraordinarily absorbing, and I found myself, over the next few months, copying all the great masters. You might say that this period represented a kind of apprenticeship for me.

A few months ago, though, I decided the time had come to branch out. I started painting with acrylics (first in black and white, and then in colour). Once I had a canvas in front of me I found myself painting in a very singular style. Instead of starting in one place (say, the corner of the left eye) and continuing adding to what I’d done, I started painting in zones. What does this mean? I looked at my muse and thought “What do I see first?” Let’s say I saw a sunlit square centimetre of nose. I painted that in, then looked for other parts of the muse that looked the same colour/tone – and I painted them in too. The result was that I had a canvas with splodges of sunlight spread, unconnected, all over its surface. Next, I said to myself: “What’Uthe next thing I notice?” And I did the same with that. And then the same again. And the same again. Until my picture was completed.

Because I paint ‘zones’ I’ve called what I do ‘zonism’. ‘Zonism’ appears (to me, at least) to have the following odd characteristic: when you see a Zonist painting for afar it looks alive (perhaps because of the focus on what really strikes the observer?). However, if you go up close to a zonist painting it looks like a random collection of nonsense shapes. Why is this so? I’m not really sure. But I don’t think it applies to any other painting technique, and that’s why I think I’ve stumbled on something special, albeit courtesy of serendipidity. You might say that a zonist painting lends itself to the description of ‘hyperreality’.

Well, I hope this is not the end of the story. I feel like a newborn now, as if I have more than a lifetime’s worth of creativity to bestow on writing and art. And I certainly don’t want to squander it.

But, I repeat, I have only fond feelings about having been involved in EFL for so long. I’m just aware that the creative journey is a complex, multifaceted one.

If you are interested in seeing my paintings go to:
https://plus.google.com/109933931117306741526/posts

If you are interest in seeing the books I’ve written go to:
www.onlinepublishingcompany.info/content/paul-bress