My TEFL tribe
My mauling by the Rave’s ESL Au Lait mob has reminded me again of why I dropped out of my MA and have avoided TEFL academia ever since. It’s all so bitchy and territorial and everything is taken personally. My favourite all time “avoid the ESL academics” moment when was Stephen Krashen (yes, that Stephen Krashen) did the electronic version of storming off in a huff slamming doors from a discussion in an English Teachers in Japan group because people kept on asking him questions instead of just accepting what he said. And these were all questions from people who were very respectful (after all we were all Japanese or had been in Japan a while) and genuinely delighted to have a celebrity communicating with them.
(A bit off topic, but Rave Spelling himself is a bit of a prima donna, famously completely abandoning a much anticipated workshop in TESOL Spain with the room already full of punters because the equipment wasn’t set up perfectly)
My own “get me out of here” moment was with Professor Jenkins of Pronunciation of English as an Internationalanguage fame. She told us less than 2% of the British people spoke RP (Received Pronunciation) and so it had no relevance to language teaching. We were surprised and asked her for her definition of RP. It was ill-defined, but different to what any of us had ever heard before. I said “Anyway, if all British people moved towards RP when they “speak posh” on the telephone/ in job interviews etc, then surely it would have some kind of relevance beyond its use by people who speak pure RP”. She blanked my question completely, the only reaction being a look that I interpreted as ”I am Prof Jenkins, who the hell are you?”, and from then on I was the naughty boy of the MA class. Three weeks later all the lecturers set us essay tasks that no one was ever going to read for which no original thought was obviously necessary and probably not welcome, and I dropped out.
I’m not saying avoid people with MAs of course (though you might want to do that, just to be on the safe side*), but avoid people who say, or more often write on a forum, “Listen to me, I have an MA/ PhD/ am a DoS/ have been here for 10 years/ work in a university”. Also avoid people who use correction of people’s grammar or spelling as an counter argument, or who include more than 2 or 3 quotes in a reply.
So who are my TEFL tribe- the people I would employ in my own school or invite onto my own forum? This is who they are:
- Have respect for qualifications, but more respect for good ideas
- Were not originally naturally talented teachers with a calling, but have developed their skills over the years
- Are constantly changing their ideas about teaching and the country they live in, and will quite happily abandon their earlier assumptions
- Are never too proud to ask a question
- Are grateful for any opportunity to think about their teaching, even if what they get out of it was not what they expected
- Treats everybody equally but differently
- More…
Anyone want to join my TEFLtastic tribe?
*joke
August 16th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Maybe it’s a little idealistic, but I agree with a lot of what you say - particularly the forums/types of poster best avoided.
Maybe you should consider starting your own small forum or email group, to see if there are enough like-minded folk around, and if there is any constructive idea-swapping & discussion to be benefitted from?
After all, I’m a DoS, so you’d better listen to me
August 16th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I’d add to that list: People who spend more time thinking about how to tweak classes and less time about padding their resumes with meaningless publications. Then again, this is Japan, home of the padded resume. I’m sure we’ve all got similar horror stories. Mine might be titled “MA Thesis: Revisions from Hell.” But not ALL people with MAs (or PhDs for that matter) are egomaniacs. There’re a few brighter lights out there. Oh, and thanks for dropping by my blog the other day, by the way. Kudos on yours! Where do you find the time?
August 16th, 2007 at 8:06 am
S- there is already a TEFL.net forum, of course, which I really should use more often. There could also be a TEFLtastic one I guess, if there is enough demand for it and I haven’t asked the site editor any stupid technical questions for a while.
Ellen- Good addition to the list. My favourite ever CV when I was DoS in Spain was 14 pages (we counted), listing every translation they had ever done for anyone- for a teaching job!
As to finding the time, it’s easy- I do it when my fiancee is watching Japanese television, which otherwise I refuse to have on in the house. So we are both happy. At least for the first 45 minutes of so, then she starts asking “Who’s Ellen??”
August 16th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Funny. Tell her Ellen’s husband is also watching Japanese TV, which I, similarly, avoid like the plague. It served its purpose for language learning, but now those trendy dramas just seem like a gaping hole of ennui. And don’t even get me started on the ‘news’. American TV isn’t much better, but at least there’s a bit more variety. And sarcasm. Can’t live without that.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:47 am
If you miss sarcasm, I highly recommend the links I put up yesterday. Plus I like the way “Trivia” takes the piss out of the whole Japanese game show world. And for more serious stuff, Shin Silk Road is good but comes around very irregularly. That’s about all I can stand of Japanese TV, but didn’t find the slightly-adapted Japanese version of Planet Earth (BBC) too annoying.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:04 am
where do i sign?
Seriously though, forums are the bane of the online world I’ve come to decide. Trying to communicate via a text based method with no possible way to truly put across things like body language or emotion = sure fire way to never actually get anywhere most of the time.
Or as a friend put it ‘going on a message board is a lot like walkign into a room full of pissed people you’ve never met and would never want to talk to ever’.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:39 pm
There are different MA courses and different lecturers, of course. Which MA do you dislike the most - the British one or the American? The British one - which can be varied - is taken after a number of years of teaching experience. The American one is typically taken before ever teaching, and often counts as the American version of CELTA.
Me, if I was to design an international TEFL course, I’d include the classroom management and other practical aspects of RSA with the understanding of SLA typical from American TESOL schemes. Both are strong in those areas but weak in the other.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:54 am
Appy Linguist- sounds perfect not sure who’s going to pay for a one year CELTA though! I have plans to tackle the whole 1 year against 4 weeks thing in more detail, but I think 1 year is too long to study before taking your first TEFL job, let alone before stepping into the classroom- whatever it is you study.
In a PGCE nowadays you are basically working as a teacher long before the first year is up. They have the option of then stepping back out of the classroom because it is publically funded, but I believe there could be ways round that in a slightly redesigned CELTA or equivalent. Details coming soon….
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:04 am
Sounds interesting - look forward to reading it.
I can only imagine some kind of standardised MA/MEd (but how?), which starts with something CELTA-like, to be followed by a long period of teaching, and then at a later stage to be completed (either on campus or by distance).
But there are problems with that even, as CELTA in its current state isn’t academic enough to be part of a Masters. Perhaps it should be some sort of re-vamped PGCE.
I believe there was a PGCE in TESOL for a while until the early Nineties, when it was scrapped because people who took it then sodded off abroad! The current reworked version is just a mess, with information hard to come by.
Of course, a PGCE is almost meaningless without Qualified Teacher Status, which people in the UK get after teaching in a state school for a year after doing their PGCE. That’s impossible to arrange within ELT, though, I’d presume.