I once taught in a technical college that prepares students to study abroad. They were larger classes than I was used to with “adults”, so when they scheduled several unpaid meetings and training on teaching large classes. By the time the same thing came around a second time, though, my attitude was “Honestly, is my remaining problems dealing with teenage surliness the problem here, or is it the fact that you make them surly every year by promising Elementary students they can reach IELTS 5.0 in a year??” The result of which was that I still had to go, it was still unpaid, I went with a chip on my shoulder, I made myself stressed and angry and wasted an opportunity to learn something.

Hopefully it is clear from my tone that I hardly think my reaction was any kind of victory, but what can you do? Here are some other classic moments that have set off my “You want the TEACHERS to be more professional??”
-Being given a textbook that is riddled with errors
-Comments about your paperwork from schools that don’t give you a contract
The important question of course is how we should respond, which I will partly deal with in a whole post of its own…

You often hear “If you act like a professional, you will be treated like a professional”. I think not. Does the most professional nurse get paid more than the least professional doctor? Does the best teacher in IH get paid more than the most jobsworth university English teacher? The best you can expect from being a professional teacher in the job you are in is to be offered a promotion, but as most EFL management jobs pay less per hour than teaching even in the same school you’d be better off doing some English lessons in a cafe to supplement your income- again, not really the best pay and conditions for the most professional.

So how do doctors, lawyers etc. manage to get treated as professionals?

1. Make your job seem so technical and scary that the general public will only entrust you with it
2. Put lots of letters after your name and stop people without those letters doing the best parts of the job
3. Divide your job into lots of little specialisations that you don’t let people move between
4. Play golf
5. Buy a big car and Bulgari watch even when you can’t afford them

As I said, still working on my arguments here…

Seriously, though, somebody working in MacDonalds could read books, join professional associations and spend his freetime practicing in order to do his or her job better- but why should they? For the same reason, the crappy way we are treated in our profession means I do all compulsory teacher development with an attitude and so don’t learn as much as I could from it. My attitude to my feedback on my Diploma lessons was usually “You are absolutely right. I should do that, but I really don’t have time”. And yet still I keep on reading TEFL books, going to workshops and spending hours typing up worksheets for unmotivated students. All of which is another aspect of the complex relationship that I have with my “profession” which I am trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to communicate through my blog. I love my job, but sometimes I think I’m an idiot for doing so, which is one reason I can never get annoyed at teachers who treat TEFL as a joke.

And hence the name of the blog- it’s so enthusiastic that you couldn’t possibly take it seriously, but actually I sometimes mean it with hardly any irony at all…

“I’m (already) more professional than they have any right to expect me to be”

Are arrogance and conceit part of the ‘professional’ package too?

Just joking, of course…