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TEFL  changes your life! You have been warned!

Jenny Lovell, UK
General

 Taking the plunge into English language teaching changed a lot about my life and about me, too.I came late to TEFL, as many people do, via a clearing bank and the civil service. It’s surprising how many UK EFL teachers will admit to a past in Customs & Excise or, as in my case, the Inland Revenue.  Try asking around your teachers’ room.  It makes a change from discussing phrasal verbs or fighting for a place in the queue for the photocopier.)  I also did a stint as a full-time mum and helping my husband run a small business.  Then I saw this ad in the local newspaper inviting me to do a CELTA course and the rest, as they say, is history.

Things were different in the good old days.  I would leave work at the end of the afternoon and forget all about it until the following morning.  On a Friday, with two glorious free days ahead to savour, I could be sure that difficult taxpayers and bouncing cheques would not rear their ugly heads above the parapet before Monday morning and even then, not until after a chat about the weekend.

But times have changed. I’m not talking about lesson preparation, that bane of all teachers’ lives.  After all, that usually becomes less of a burden with experience.  No, I’m talking about the way the job never really goes away.  Ideas for lessons pop into your head without any warning.  Listen to the radio and you’ll hear the words to a song that would be perfect for getting the use of future continuous into students’ heads.  “By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be ………. etc.   Listen to an interview.  Aha, what an opportunity for introducing reported speech!  And how about those indirect questions?  Could be a lot of mileage there.  Hear a new quiz show.  Can it be adapted for the classroom?  Course books do it and so can I.

Then there’s television.  Watching commercials on the box becomes terribly frustrating.  Gone are the days when you could ignore or enjoy them as you liked.  Suddenly you see the ideal way to illustrate a grammar point or develop some new vocabulary but it’s no good unless you can get it onto tape and recording adverts is a hopeless task because you never know when your particular commercial is going to be screened.  You could fill a whole 240 minute tape without a result.  And why are the short ten-minute programmes always shown in the middle of the morning or in the early hours when a clean-living EFL teacher should be asleep?  You can spend hours programming the video to record stuff that turns out to be absolutely useless.

While we are on the subject of slumber, there is the problem of waking up in the middle of the night.  Can’t get back to sleep?  Start counting sheep fast or you will find yourself just casually thinking about tomorrow’s lesson and having an absolutely brilliant idea.  Better get it down on paper quickly. You’ll have forgotten it by morning as sure as eggs is eggs. Now you are really wide-awake. But avoid going back over today’s lesson, which was not the success you had hoped when you were thinking about it in the wee small hours of last night or you’ll still be awake when the birds start singing.  The only way out of that one is to turn on the telly and see if there are any short programmes worth videoing.

Watching films has changed for ever.  No longer is it possible just to enjoy being terrified by a good thriller or to sit down happily with a box of extra-soft tissues to watch a weepie romance.  Suddenly you are wondering whether this scene could be used as the starting point in a drama class or for practice in reading body language.  You find yourself turning off the sound or running the video back to watch a scene again and check it for its teaching potential.  These last two are particularly unpopular with the rest of the family by the way.  Just a friendly warning!

As for relaxing with a good book, well you can forget that.  Reading is no longer the carefree activity it once was.  First paragraph?  You could use that for a lesson on narrative tenses or perhaps the past perfect.  Newspaper?  You’ll need a red pen to mark useful articles for retrieval later when the rest of the family have finished with it. They tend to get a bit tetchy if they find gaping holes in the middle of the gossip section.  Holiday brochures, guide books, flight information?  Lots of potential there!
Planning your holiday will never be the same again, believe me.

Even eavesdropping on conversations between strangers on buses or in the supermarket (a rich source of material for comedians and writers) has become a teaching resource instead of a mildly amusing way to pass the time.  I find cryptic notes on odd scraps of paper or my shopping list, reminding me of a lead-in or a quick filler for the end of a lesson.  One of my favourites was overheard in a pub.  “What are you drinking?” “Oh, that’s very nice of you.  It’s a vodka and tonic, thank you.”  “No, no, I wasn’t offering you a drink.  I was just wondering what it was!”

I said at the beginning that I had changed too.  That was a much more gradual process which I didn’t notice for quite some time.  It had to do with having confidence in myself and losing some of my natural reserve.  I wasn’t unfriendly exactly and if a stranger spoke to me, I would answer happily enough but I would never, ever begin the conversation.   Now, because chatting to students and initiating most exchanges is all part of the job, I find myself doing it outside school as well, talking to the supermarket cashier or the plumber or another patient in the doctor’s surgery in a way that I never did before.  That’s how I come to be writing this actually.  Talking to a stranger in a queue for sandwiches and coffee at a teachers’ seminar.  So don’t say I didn’t warn you.