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(photo from Marc
ter Bogt)
London’s Daily Telegraph today published a scathing indictment of the
Dowbrigade’s chosen profession. Within the much maligned and downtrodden
field of Education, the teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages
(ESOL or ESL or EFL) is held in particularly low repute. Reading this article
filled the Dowbrigade with self-loathing, and made us realize we are really
the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth, and a member of
a
peripatetic
and pariah-like
Fraternity
of
the Damned. Who knew?
The Dowbrigade fell into the Field of Teaching English to Foreigners
when, while researching a Master’s Thesis at the Institute of Latin American
Studies at the University of Texas, in the field of Physical Anthropology,
entitled "Differences in Birth Weights
Between
Babies Born
in the Coast,
the Mountains and the Jungles of Peru, and their Implications for Pre-Natal
Nutrition," he fell in love.
Quickly despairing of finding work in Peru as a Physical Anthropologist,
the Dowbrigade took the only job available for a Gringo walk-on in much
of latin America – teaching English. 25 years later, after teaching
stints at Harvard and Boston University as well as a stretch as the English
Department Chair at the Espiritu Santo University in Ecuador, we figure
it’s time to move on. Here
are some of the reasons why….
The job is tedious, the salary appalling and the prospects nil. Sebastian
Cresswell-Turner laments that ‘no one with a scrap of ambition’ would
choose to teach English as a foreign language
So while teaching English is fine if you want to spend a year abroad,
and great for meeting pretty foreign girls, considered as a career
that might offer some degree of professional fulfillment, it fails
on every count. No one with a scrap of ambition can possibly consider
it. As the philosopher Alain de Botton says: "You become a TEFL
teacher when your life has gone wrong."
Some TEFL slaves have been so thoroughly defeated that they don’t
even realise what has happened to them. I can sniff out the "lifers" a
mile off . . . scruffy figures, utterly out of synch with the modern
world, any style or sex-appeal they once possessed squeezed out of
them by years of drudgery, exploitation and poverty.
Geez, we hadn’t realized what scum we were until The
Telegraph woke
us up. As we prepare to drag our sorry ass back into the classroom tomorrow,
after being off on paid inter-session since December 19, to begin an
exhausting 6-week semester of 5-hour teaching days, followed by three
more months
of paid vacation, we are seriously considering taking Mom’s advice and
getting a "real" job…..
from the Telegraph of London
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