Live a TEFL dream

A guest piece by the first person to take me up on my offer to be “exploited”, Stevie Jobbers of TEFL course provider EOLCI.

“Many people reading about TEFL think it is too good to be true that you can get paid to travel. Not only is it true, but you should totally ignore the negative people on TEFL forums and blogs who are just trying to put people off competing for their Life of Reilly. Luckily, new research shows the facts and data behind TEFL:

- 96.53% of beginning TEFL teachers like their new job so much that they are happy to spend 3.57 hours preparing for every one of their lessons
- Teaching in a third world country makes your life expectancy at least 5 years above the local average
- In Turkey, all teachers who returned the questionnaire ticked the box putting their annual pay as “millions”
- 23% of all TEFL teachers have better dating prospects than they did back home
- 45% of all TEFL teachers find that their career prospects are not damaged by a period spent teaching English abroad
- 92% of English teachers agree with the statement “The fact that the locals get paid worse and work even harder makes me feel at least a bit better”
- 37% of TEFLers agree with the statement “Being able to communicate with people all over the world in my slow and careful English makes up for not being able to speak normally for two or three days every time I go home for a holiday”
- 51% percent of the survey group agreed or strongly agreed that “My skills in the local language have increased slightly faster than the deterioration in my English”
- 65% of English teachers abroad ticked the box that said “Being able to correct my relations’ English grammar gives me a certain amount of satisfaction”
- Only 27% selected the option “I cringe every time I think about my lessons in my first year of teaching”
- 39% agreed that “How students describe me when we do the topic of appearance or personality makes me feel good about myself”
- Nearly 40% said that “Looking for good articles I can use in class all the time doesn’t ruin newspapers for me”
- 84% said “I don’t get as annoyed about stereotypes of my country as I used to”
- 57% chose the option “My present job isn’t nearly as bad as my last teaching gig”
- 45% selected “Friends and relations back home have never made unambiguously negative statements about my career choice and inability to settle down and get a proper job”
- 74% said that it was true that “I no longer worry about problems with keeping in touch with friends back home”, with reasons given including “We don’t have anything in common anymore anyway”
- 75% of British teachers said that “I no longer miss foods from back home like builders’ tea and Marmite”, adding tips like “Just drink half a litre of Coke for breakfast”, “Dissolving a ProPlus tablet or Thai slimming pill in my Lipton is enough to make it actually wake me up” and “Miso with a teaspoon of salt on toast is at least better than Vegemite”
- 92% said that they had “learnt a lot in this job”, giving examples like “How to keep 60 under 5s amused for 45 minutes”, “How to use hole in the floor toilets” and “How to instantly spot a high maintenance student or parent”
- And 97% of the 763 teachers who responded to our survey strongly agreed with the sentence “At least I’m not teaching kids back home”

Euro Oxbridge Lingua Colleges International (“English for Live”®) offers “accredited” 120 minute TEFL courses with guaranteed challenging and adventurous jobs in small “developing” towns in rural China teaching classes of 60 kids of all ages for absolutely anyone. Free medical and life insurance offered with all contracts.”

Tags: guest writers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under finding good TEFL jobs, first TEFL job, Teacher training, Teaching English Abroad, Teaching English in China, TEFL, TEFL career planning, TEFL certificate, TEFL qualifications, TEFL scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.