A big thank you to TEFLers everywhere

I hope my lack of posts on the whole Paul Lowe saga hasn’t made anyone think I have either been silenced or am ungrateful for all the help I get. In fact, I am overwhelmed by the response my I Am Spartacus campaign appeal got, which has totally restored my faith in humanity and the TEFL world. Now that the rumours of Paul’s personal circumstances have cleared up and the continuation of his attacks have cleared away the sympathy those rumours stirred in me, it is time for me to give a big gushing thank you to all those who aided me in my quest to show that attempts to silence TEFL teachers have the opposite effect, a quest that I would say has been 66% successful so far:

The biggest success is that anyone searching for Paul Lowe and Windsor TEFL will find that he is a man who uses vague threats of legal action and worse to silence his critics, and that those critics are many. The campaign has spread like wildfire and involves not only the “blogging friends” I have built up over the last 9 months, but also friends of friends and some people whose connection to me and TEFL I don’t even know. The best thing about this campaign is that the fact that there has been no stooping to name calling or libel means that he couldn’t even successfully sue one of us, let alone everybody.

The second success is a continuation of the first. We have shown that the TEFL blogging world can show solidarity and maturity, and get up there at the top of Google in a flash. I also have the feeling we are on the cusp in terms of getting the mainstream press interested in the things we all write about.

And so to the lack of success. Paul Lowe of Windsor TEFL has somehow come to the conclusion that the best way of dealing with the fact that he threatened to sue me for something I had never published was not to apologise and hope that fact was forgotten about, but to go on the attack and threaten to sue more people who had never published anything by me about him, and mostly nothing about him at all. This started off as an attempt by him to make websites to take down free TEFL teaching articles I had on their sites, and then spread to demanding that blogs and forums I had given teaching advice on take that down as well. He got so little response to this that he at last decided to drop the threat to sue and then threatened to have me and some of the unconnected sites who had published my worksheets prosecuted for “race hate” and now apparently a “hate campaign”. 

Although I hardly think the British police are going to be wasting their time with such things, I should say perhaps that I have not been running a ”hate campaign”, mainly because I do not hate Paul Lowe. Sometimes I even feel sorry for him, as he clearly has some (self confessed) mental health problems which stop him dealing with constructive criticism in a rational way- which would be here, I repeat again, to admit that he threatened to sue me before I had even mentioned his name, apologise for that, and stop the pathetic but time wasting attacks on me and most of the rest of the online world.

My sympathy is limited by the realisation that most bullies and worse have personal issues that make them do the things they do. It is also limited by a lack of patience, something that might eventually make me stop this restrained position of just repeating the same facts over and over and move onto publishing some of the emails he has sent people and the other stacks of documents that people have offered me since they found his name on my blog. Quite frankly, I’d rather get back to helping people with teaching tips and amusing stories for light relief. If I get accused of a hate campaign just for insisting on the right not to be sued for something I didn’t write, however, there seems to be no other option but to go on the attack. I’m predicting that the limits to my patience and the pointless firestorm that he will no doubt launch in reply to this will make it about a month until I write again on Mr Paul Lowe. In the meantime, any more mentions of the man and my campaign to save myself from him would be very gratefully accepted.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 1:01 amand is filed under TEFL certificate, TEFL certificate- Windsor TEFL, TEFL course- Windsor Schools, TEFL news, TEFL villains- Paul Lowe, TEFL working conditions, Teaching, Windsor Schools, Windsor TEFL. 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.