English teaching professional?
“A professional is one who emphasizes public service, has high standards of performance, has a broad knowledge of his or her field, and participates in professional conferences and associations.”
Quote from The Japanese Police System Today (pg 33), not the most typical source of quotes for a TEFL blog I’m guessing, but as someone who has contributed a fair amount to English Teaching Professional (ETP) magazine over the years but always had a slight doubt about what the title of the mag was supposed to mean, seeing a definition of “professional” really caught my eye. So I decided to give myself a English teaching professional ranking, a quest you can join me on if you fancy:
“A professional is one who emphasizes public service”: I still spend a lot of time on preparing my classes despite the fact I could get away with zero prep after 13 years of teaching (ranking looking good!) and that certainly doesn’t improve my pay in any way. Ditto this blog (ranking still climbing). To be honest, though, I’m not sure I don’t do both the blog and the lesson prep because I know I would get bored in a minute if I let myself get automated in the classroom (ranking dipping?), and I certainly haven’t spent a moment choosing my students and classes by which ones me teaching would do the best for the country or the world (ranking not looking so good anymore), and I choose topics for class 100% by their ability or inability to promote conversation and language learning, and never by trying to educate my students in other ways. ETP Score for this section: 5/10, or if even Mother Theresa was doing everything for the same selfish motives I’ve admitted, I’ll give myself a 6.
”A professional… has high standards of performance”. Wow, this is another good one to promote a bit of philosophical navel gazing. As my boss’s performance criteria for us are secret if existent, I’m going to have to go with the first things that pop into my head here. Students happy, trusted with difficult and important classes (yes, yes, I rule!), paperwork so so, can get distracted from revision and steady progress by a new game idea (hmm, I still rule my living room), stick to needs analysis and syllabus (…and my kitchen), but lose interest in any kind of class the minute I can teach it well (okay, back to the sofa then). ETP Score for this section 6/10.
You get the idea (and stopping here is not just an excuse to avoid mentioning dropping out of my MA and my dubious feelings about JALT). Anyway, I can summarize my ETPism with one simple line, maybe my TEFL motto:
“I’m (already) more professional than they have any right to expect me to be”
If the (very well paid with a job for life) Japanese police can be ranked in my book as less professional than doctors or high school teachers, the big question as an English teacher is where your job conditions should place you on that scale. More on this “thing that makes you go hmm” on my CPD= exploitation post.
February 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Ooh dear…
“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…
February 8th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Glad you were joking!
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…
February 8th, 2008 at 1:58 am
This is a topic I’m developing as I write, hence the self-indulgence of the post, but here goes with English teaching professionalism:
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…
February 10th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Let me an example of what I am talking about (slightly fictionalized, and two separate experiences mixed together, to protect the incompetent)
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…
March 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Just found this blog by googling ETp. I work for the magazine so I like to see what teachers think of it. Glad to see a blog has been formed from the title and I’d just like to say, as a non TEFL but someone who’s been in the industry for some time, that you are all professionals. That’s the point. All too often people make flippant comments about the EFL/ESL/ESOL etc market being full of gap year students and part-timers. The reason that we bring out ETp (among others) is that we know teachers are usually left with no materials, get ripped off with meagre salaries, and have to rely heavily on each other for help. The fact that you’re still in the industry with so many hurdles makes you the most professional industry. In our eyes at least. P.s (this isn’t the reason I added to this blog but thought I’d spread the word anyway) Please take a look at our new social networking site - http://www.myetp.com - we welcome your blogs.
March 18th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
A social networking site for Teflers? The heart sinks…