Archive for the ‘Mario Rinvolucri’ Category

I’ve been ruminating on for several years of how Continuing Professional Development like observations, workshops and being given responsibility for a supplementary file or two often start off seeming like an opportunity and then gradually come to seem like just unpaid work that benefits the school more than you. While I’ve been thinking, someone else has been writing- and has summarized the situation in a simple and very direct letter in this month’s Humanizing Language Teaching Letters Page:

“Dear Ms Kryszewska

I wrote to you sometime ago - after I had been enthused by Mario Rinvolucri - and told you I’d be submitting to HLT. You very kindly sent me back the guidelines. I apologise for not getting back to you sooner.

I’ve since received your hand-out: “13 Reasons Why You Might Want To Write For HLT” which you circulated via e-mail to all the readers of HLT.

Unfortunately, as always in this exploitative industry of ours, there is no question of payment for this extra work. This is not your fault. I’m sure, as always, there is no budget for this in my school.

However, I have already produced many worksheets for my school and taken several teacher-training sessions without payment, and, to be frank, am sick and tired of not being remunerated for my time and effort. I can’t feed my family by “raising my profile in the company”.

As it happens, I already share creative ideas and infect my colleagues with enthusiasm on a day-to-day basis out of an feeling of basic human solidarity, which the people with their hands on the purse strings in our industry would do well to emulate. Perhaps I am harking back to a golden age of the 1970’s when teachers originally set up schools as co-operatives which have since been taken over by mercenary, corporate EFL barons who place cost effectiveness over pedagogy every time.

I object to a premiership elite of pop star EFL methodologists being handsomely rewarded, while the rest of have to slum it in the lower leagues on casual contracts and insulting rates of pay, wondering whether we’ll be timetabled out next week or not. With the greatest of respect to Mario Rinvolucri, whose work I admire immensely, I think it shows insensitivity and disrespect to expect others to produce for gratis what he does for love and money.

Instead of a school asking teachers to contribute for free, one sure way of avoiding the kind of de-motivation and stuck-in-a-rut-ness, would be to stop undervaluing our contribution every day of the working week by paying us a decent wage in the first place.

Yours ”

(End of quote. Name not published, but I would put money on this person working for International House, as this almost exactly echoes what people who worked for them in Madrid who did my DELTA with me used to say)

My twoyenworth on this matter,  slightly changed since I’ve been in Japan, is:

(more…)

There is a rumour going round that the ever-increasing practice of EFL publishers based outside English-speaking countries (especially Greece and Spain) pretending to be more English than the Queen’s tea has reached silly new heights.　

One Greece-based English language publisher (although you wouldn’t know it from the address on the back of their books, which is the address of someone’s Granny’s shed in Buckinghamshire), long infamous for using fake names for its (Greek) writers has lost a potentially ground-breaking deal with Mario Rinvolucri (King of Humanistic Language Teaching) after asking him to write his next book as ‘Mark Richards’ because they ‘don’t want it looking like some Italian wrote it’.

So, Thierry Henry finally going to Barca, eh? And in the season when everyone had got so bored of the rumours that they had almost stopped talking about it. So maybe British Council Jeddah really are going to swoop for me, pay the escape clause in my contract and make me a 4 year 8-million dollar offer.

I guess there’d have to be whatever the English teaching equivalent of the medical exam is (get me to teach a lesson from inside a CAT scan machine?) before the signing on live television, and obviously I’d want to know who else they are planning on signing (I hear rumours that Pilgrims might try and cash in on Mario Rinvolucri before he can leave on a Bosman transfer next year and that Jeremy Harmer is looking for a player manager post).

Or maybe I will just continue being paid the same as every other teacher, however good or bad they may be, and just take my extra reward as the number of comments I get on my blog… It’s not like English teaching is the only profession in the world where you get no reward for extra work, and it might not even be the only one where people get paid more just for having an MA. More ranting on the world of the EFL MA coming up…

Come to think of it, I’m pretty much the same kind of teacher as I am football player. Anyone else?