… Trinity, surprisingly. Details from Guardian TEFL here
Including such motivational gems as:
“Once people sit down and look seriously at the time and cost that will be involved, that will focus their minds wonderfully,”
“we can’t say that it is going to help you up the employment ladder.” and
If you don’t believe me, before you buy one of language courses for just 100 dollars* have a free trial of one of our other “…in just three months” ® courses, for example:
- Anyone can learn to run 100 metres in 10 seconds in just three months
- Anyone can learn good taste in just three months
- Anyone can learn to speak in a squeaky or ridiculously gruff voice without being embarrassed in just three months
- Anyone can learn to accept a language that assumes different gender roles in just three months
- Anyone can gain a Meryl Streep- like ability to mimic accents in just three months
- Anyone can learn to settle down for self-study every evening rather than turning on the TV in just three months
- Anyone can train themselves to learn something just because they are told to in just three months
- Anyone can become charismatic in just three months
- Anyone can overcome memory loss in just three months
- Anyone can expand their vocabulary in their own language by 5000 words in just three months
- Anyone can learn perfect pitch in just three months
- Anyone can become interested in inane chatter at house parties in just three months
- Anyone can train themselves to prefer books and films they don’t understand in just three months
- Anyone can learn to abandon Hollywood films and news from back home in favour of knowledge of the local obscure culture in just three months
- Anyone can stop preferring a good book to pointless small talk with strangers in just three months
- Anyone can learn delayed gratification in just three months
- Anyone can lose the desire to express complex thoughts in just three months
- Anyone can overcome their natural human weaknesses in just three months
- Anyone can learn to relate to people who they have nothing in common with in just three months
- Anyone can drop all their cultural baggage in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be word perfect in reciting a 5000 word book in just three months
- Anyone can reverse their ideas of what it means to be polite and impolite in just three months
- Anyone can learn to prefer vocabulary lists to ice cream or sex in just three months
- Anyone can learn how to never give up on something once they have started it in just three months
- Anyone can learn never to doubt the usefulness of what you are being taught in just three months
- Anyone can learn to sustain an interest in something they chose on a whim in just three months
- Anyone can learn to reverse all their normal body language in just three months
- Anyone can learn to never be distracted in just three months
- Anyone can learn to resist all temptations that could get in the way of studying in just three months
- Anyone can learn to never think of excuses for procrastination in just three months
- Anyone can learn enough Physics to enter an undergraduate course in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be a saint in just three months
- Anyone can find a meaning to life in just three months
- Anyone can learn to be a perfect parent in just three months
- Anyone can drop all their annoying personal habits in just three months
- Anyone can learn to enjoy studying in just three months
- Anyone can learn to stop asking for colour, decent illustrations, lack of typos and other reasonable production standards in their self-study materials in just three months
- Anyone can learn how to spot an outrageously ambitions claim for self-study materials in just three minutes
- Anyone can learn to stop trusting a newspaper that has advertorials for this kind of crap in just three seconds
* Price of monthly payment when paying for the course in the usual 360 monthly instalments
I must be the least likely blogger of all time, being neither technically savvy nor generally interested in online content- I’d never read a blog before I started this one, and I still reckon most of the best stuff is still in books. Anything from Zoltan available on the web? I thought not.
Once in a while though, I do stumble upon some good stuff. As that gives me even more stuff I want to read, I usually don’t find time to even mention it here, so here goes while I still feel a little recharged from my summer hols:
Some very thought provoking stuff, and perhaps a lesson to me that blogging less frequently produces greater quality… Two recent ones that particularly took my fancy:
Building Nations with the Cunning Use of Foreign Languages
Language Learning and Weight Lifting
Back in the world of TEFL, the other Dave is going through some highlights from his articles and he has chosen well, particularly:
In Search of a Word: Can Ambition Survive in TEFL?
When is it too late to get out of TEFL?
If like me you were stimulated by the ELT World articles but irritated by having to have a Google ID to comment, feel free to leave your comments here instead:
While I’m on the subject and have to make the most of Favourites on this PC (it’s staying in Japan when I go to Korea), here is a list of TEFL, linguistics and Japan related sites I most often end up at, in approximate order:
1. Dave’s ESL Cafe international job forums (the pointless bitching makes it more memorable somehow, maybe it’s the Dynasty of TEFL sites)
2. The TESall.com TEFL news ticker (including links to the forum discussions that are actually worthwhile)
3. The TEFL tradesman (as foul-mouthed and crusading as we’d all like to be)
4. The TEFL Blacklist (does exactly what it says in the title)
5. EL Gazette digital (a real TEFL newspaper. Click on the link on the main page to subscribe for free)
6. An Englishman in Osaka (just very funny, and so beats all the much more informative Japan blogs, of which there are many, in competing for my online time…)
7. Guardian TEFL (some real journalism would be nice- see EL Gazette for that- but a good way of keeping up with TEFL press releases anyway)
8. The Life of Mike (some odd changes of direction, but some thought provoking and entertaining posts)
9. Notes from the TEFL graveyard (hits the funny yet practical, cynical yet enjoying the life balance that I struggle with on my blog)
10. Teacher in Development (would probably be around number 2 if there were more posts)
11. Metatesol (pithy, to the point and almost inactive- this one would also be higher if this little bit of prompting results in more posts)
If I was a better person the list would probably be different, and Rave’s ESL Au Lait wouldn’t even be in the list let alone at the top and Insights into TEFL , Humanising Language Teaching and Developing Teachers would be in there, but like my irrational desire to eat cheap gyudon, that is where I really end up. End of confession- how many Hail Mario’s for absolution?
With all the problems I have had with TEFL teaching dossers (especially dossing DoSes) over the years, I have to admit that their philosophical position does at least have logic going for it- if they are going to be treated like a child and paid like someone in MacDonalds, that is how they are going to do their job. Perhaps the classic example was a teacher in Spain who thought he was owed a job with us due to having been out drinking a few times, and was so incensed at the idea of being asked to write a CV, that he typed up this one line resume for us: (more…)
With my recent troubles with Mr Paul Lowe (see below), there were moments when I wondered who I or other troubled TEFLers could turn to for help. The UK government aren’t interested unless it touches on immigration, and the TEFL celebs seem to think a new warmer is more important than job security. It seems our only hope is investigative journalism. And it is being done, and being done well- by the EL Gazette. I don’t know how a trade journal became our last line of defense (I can’t imagine Double Glazing Monthly does many exposes), but I am very glad they have at least partly taken on that role.
Meanwhile, what has everyone’s favourite you-couldn’t-be-as-radical-as-us-if-you-tried left wing “quality paper” The Guardian been up to? (more…)