The best of English Teacher X Part Two

1. “I was overcome with panic and wanted to run. . .but I’d already run, and here I was”

English Teacher Q on his first ever English lesson, after trying to escape it all in Bangkok

2. “I walk into his classroom one Saturday afternoon.  He is manically chattering to his class, who are all sitting grinning ear to ear and giggling.  On the white board is an enormous swastika with the words “Third Reich”  under it.  The words “Death Camp” are to the side of that.  The words “mutant” and “mutation” are under that, and a cartoon of a drooling boy with flippers for arms and legs.  (English Teacher Q is a swell cartoonist.)  I deeply regret that no photo was taken of this.  “So, what was the focus of today’s lesson?” I ask English Teacher Q.  “We were just talking,” he says.”

3. “Whatever happened to the good old days when telling an English teacher a place was dangerous was a good way to pique their interest in the place”

4. “Three teachers gone in a month, none of whom gave “proper notice,” protesting the horrendous schedules and snappy treatment at the hands of management.

“Don’t you think that means something?” I ask the Administration Girl.

“They were bad teachers and bad people, obviously. Why should we change any policies to accommodate people who are just going to leave in the middle of the night?”

“But what about the teachers who are staying? You could change things for them. ..”

“They are staying, obviously they are happy enough the way things are.”

“Yeah, until they leave in the middle of the night.”

“If they leave in the middle of the night, they don’t deserve anything.”

“What about the teachers who DO give proper notice, when they leave?”

“If they give proper notice, they were obviously happy enough the way things were, and there’s no reason to change anything.”

“What about all the complaining they do to me?”

“They can complain all they want, but the scheduling system is obviously described in the contract. If they don’t like it, they can go.”

“So they only thing they can do to protest is to leave in the middle of the night?”

“Yes.”

“And if they do that, they we shouldn’t consider it a proper complaint because they weren’t good employees anyway?”

“Yes.”

I suppose, looking back, it was rather naive of me to think I could change the system from within; like somebody thinking that becoming the General Manager at McDonald’s meant he could institute table service and a wine bar.”

5. “I have seen this profession change greatly since 1995. From a profession composed mainly of untrained yet freewheeling adventurers with a penchant for whoremongering and alcoholism, I have seen it develop into something resembling the migrant labor situation of the 1930’s in America”

6. “Any white person that could stand upright could get a job there. And many did that couldn’t stand upright for very long.

Then the other teachers arrived. They were mostly unattractive women in their twenties who immediately began complaining about everything and preparing for their classes – this consisted of making six hundred photocopies of twenty different activities and then cutting them all up into little pieces.”

Kudos to Onestopblogs for listing English Teacher X, btw, hardly the kind of thing you’d think Macmillan wanted to be associated with. I plan on testing exactly what you can get away with and still be listed on there sometime soon…

As I can’t possibly finish a blog post without at least two random asides, might I also point out that a Best of … Blog is another perfect example of 1001 Lazy Blog posts, and that you can quote from me as much as you like on yours providing

1) You actually do some selection (e.g. boiling my 70 Characteristics of a Good Grammar Presentation down to ten- which it could really do with!- rather than just copying and pasting the whole thing as at least 10 people have done- how does that improve on a link??)

2) You can find any Best of to nick (I tried for my 2nd anniversary and gave up…)

 

English Teacher X is here, and this is a continuation of Part One (funnily enough), which is here

Tags: Humour, Quotes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 10:51 am and is filed under Englishteacherx, Teaching English in Eastern Europe, Teaching English in Russia, Teaching English in Thailand, 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.