Why should I be a professional in my unprofessional school?
So, you’ve come in early to cue the tapes and you still have to desperately search for the place on the tape while the students are looking because when it becomes time to rewind and play again, you realise that the school has bought CD players without a counter on the tape
or
You’ve finally finished your further TEFL qualification, and then the person employed as your new boss hasn’t even got the last one you did
or
Your lessons have got better but your wages have got worse due to exchange rates or the idiotic business decisions of the company HQ in Sweden
or
You’ve spent hours typing up worksheets for your new class, and 30 seconds after stepping into the classroom you realise that the level and language they need to cover has no connection to what you’ve been told
or
Your student evaluations come back, and for every positive thing they say about your lessons there is a negative comment about their host family, the heating in the classrooms or not reaching completely unrealistic level they’d been told by the agent or the school
And so you really have to wonder, as Sandy MacManus’s leaving blast on his last blog had it, “What is bloody the point?”
It’s a question I’m still struggling to find answers to, but perhaps one is that doing the job badly with the (realistic?) idea that there is no point doing it well is going to make you a whole lot more unhappy than being an unrealistic idealist and working hard like an idiot for your fascist boss- quite apart from any positive effects it might or might not have on your career and your students.
I certainly can’t claim that I have never been in a rage at the working conditions and unprofessionalism that my “profession” has thrown at me over the years, and I’ve even had my times of silent protest by getting slack. I seem to have found a way through it, though, however temporarily. To me, the TEFL trade is something that brings me and my students together, to do the best we can for both their benefit and mine. Luckily, most of the things that make me happier in my classes if I push myself to do them, like experimenting and getting to know my students as people, make my students happier too. And most of those things that make them happier make them learn. My school and wider profession may occasionally approve of what we do in the classroom too, but that is quite frankly irrelevant.
This freedom to create my own definition of professionalism and the realisation that the working conditions my schools and industry off me give few obligations to accept their ideas on my job role means that when I sometimes do something in the classroom just because I need a break or do something that is more relevant for my own personal development than it is for that class of students, if it fits into my wider philosophy (in development) of professionalism, there is no need to feel guilty about it. And that quest to find my own sense of purpose in my profession, whilst sometimes a pain in the arse compared to being given a gun and being convinced you are saving your own family by shooting foreigners, is certainly more interesting than a quest to find a new way to teach the Present Perfect Continuous.
As I said, philosophy very much a beta version…
