How TEFL taught me not to trust the Guardian

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? Well, they’ve also been busy. They’ve had a series of articles written by someone from Cactus TEFL, an organisation that hardly needs help in dominating the Internet- each article next to a little Cactus ad of course. They’ve also set up an online languages service (Guardian Languages) that some people who have more patience with calculations than me have suggested pays at around the British national minimum wage. That apparently depends on how you calculate it, but as the Guardian have been known to demand the minimum wage be raised, doing that themselves so there is no ambiguity might be worth a try! Socialist Utopia it is not- not sure even New Labour is quite that money obsessed.

But, why would I be surprised- the Guardian sticks up for the people who pay it money. That mainly means the middle class readers for whom the depiction of gay couples in textbooks is more important than paying teachers a living wage (how many Guardian readers earn under the national average wage, let alone on or under the national minimum wage like some summer school teachers?), but also means the advertisers in the job section that, come to think of it, is probably the only reason a few token articles on TEFL that took 10 minutes to commission exist.

So, keep up the good work EL Gazette, and thank goodness I’m in a country where the Graudian is not and in a profession that keeps me real and taught me why that’s actually a good thing.

PS As a former Graudian reader myself, I am not in any way anti-gay (you couldn’t be working in London!) and even have a pang of conscience teaching the family values claptrap that is Headway and Communication Games- period TEFL materials myself. I picked on this point because it was part of a looooong discussion from everyone’s favourite gay TEFL pin up a few years ago that particularly stuck in my mind for being self-indulgent and irrelevant- the TEFL celeb in person being someone who also invented the most self-indulgent and irrelevant teaching methodology ever, and who I am not aware has ever used his status to talk about the real conditions of teachers in his own (or at least original) country. And that’s all the clues you get…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 3:23 amand is filed under Cactus TEFL, EL Gazette, Guardian TEFL, TEFL blogs, TEFL celebs/ TEFL heroes and villains, TEFL villains- Paul Lowe, Windsor TEFL, links. 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.