It's Official: TEFL Still Sucks

So those who dare oppose English Teacher X usually claim that my experiences are unusual; that I have worked at only low-quality places that employ the bottom of the barrel, ergo my perception of TEFL is colored by my own personal depravity.

Well, here I am now. This is undoubtedly the highest-paid English teaching job in the world; I have never heard of any jobs that pay more. (I make $8000 a month, without accomodation, but there are "direct hire" guys here making $12,000 a month, WITH accomodation.)

The teachers are all highly-qualified; CELTA, DELTA, at least 3 year's experience minimum. There are a considerable number of Master's Degree's and even a PhD or two.

We work for an enormous state-run company; our students are new employees -- trainees, actually -- who do a sort of "prep year" thing of English plus training in whatever job they specialize in -- and the guys we get are quite often security guards, fire men, and low-level machine operators.

(In other words, people who really have no need of English in their jobs at all.)

And what do we do in class?

We stand there, while the students refuse to work.

Many of the students can speak English fairly well, actually, but they quickly learn that there is no reason at all for them to work, because they will all pass the course. The multiple-choice final tests are so easy they can usually guess their way through them, and the worst case scenario is doing the exact same test several times until they pass. There is no award for getting high marks as opposed to just barely scraping by.

There are individual assignments -- writing assignments and speaking presentations, which are about 20 percent of the final grade -- but basically, we're not allowed to fail anybody on these. I learned this in the second month, when a student basically read a few words off a power point slide and demanded a passing mark of 70 for it. He argued with me until I marked him absent; a senior teacher brought him back and told me that if he said anything at all, I should pass him.

(The other side of that coin is that we're not allowed to give anybody a 100 on these things; if we do we have to write a report about why we thought it deserved a 100.)

And basically, if you try too hard to make them do stuff, they'll probably complain about you until they get a teacher who DOESN'T try too hard to make them do stuff.

There are several rules we ARE allowed to enforce strictly -- students have to LOOK like they are studying at all times, in case any high muckety-mucks decide to walk through the place.  No sleeping, no phone use, proper uniforms, etc.

But as long as the students are doing those things (or not doing these things) nobody gives much of a shit what else they do in class.

You can try to throw them out of class for not working, but generally administration will not support the teacher in this case. Plus, the students have several ruses for that -- they'll either circle answers at random, copy them from the smart kid in their group, or get the answers from the internet or another class, so that it looks like they did the work.

You can of course try to bring in your own "interesting" activities -- but pair work speaking almost always devolves into the students speaking Arabic together. They simply have no desire to do it; they want to get through the program as quickly and easily as possible so they can start getting their full salary. (They get paid for this training, of course -- something like the equivalent of $800 a month. Throwing them out of class costs them money, which is why it eventually causes serious problems.)

In addition, quite a few topics are banned, of course. You're not really even supposed to talk about their families in class (for religious and tribal reasons. Rivalries between tribes are even worse than the usual Sunni vs. Shiite thing.)

Now of course, doing nothing in class wouldn't be so bad -- except for the fact that we have to do written lesson plans for every lesson, and there are occasional random observations. So you do nothing most of the time, but you do have to have an emergency back-up plan of doing something. 

There will always be those few mouthy hip young dudes who want to talk about your life with you -- especially whores and Bahrain and alchol and that sort of thing. But other teachers have warned that, while it's a decent way to get them talking English for a bit, it's not a good idea because they will occasionally try to record their teachers talking about untoward shit on their telephones for blackmail or general revenge purposes.

 I've found competitive games often work to get the students engaged; but these almost inevitably devolve into students shouting at each other in Arabic during the whole thing and producing a very minimal amount of English.

So here we are, the well-trained, seasoned veterans: standing there doing nothing while the students sit and speak Arabic. We console ourselves by counting our money, and trying to go somewhere interesting for the weekends and the holidays.

Meanwhile, at small private language schools all over the world, full of motivated and enthusiastic students who really need English for their jobs?

They're getting barely-trained backpackers and dropouts and retirees and PUAs, who get paid $5 an hour. And the usual fallback for those guys is talking about their lives with the students.

Ironic, eh?