I have a Twitter account @lennetenglish, an Instagram account (the QR code at the end of this post will take you there), I made some podcasts for my Japanese students (https://www.podbean.com/ei/pb-nf85r-bcade0) and a blog (which hopefully you are reading at the moment). I decided I wasn’t using them to their full potential, so last month decided to tweet every day for a month. I wasn’t too keen at first, but then quite enjoyed the activity. This month I’ve decided to blog every day for a month or at least reach 31 posts before the end of the month. In April, I hope to do the same with Instagram.
So, as the heading of this post says, this year celebrates my twentieth year in EFL teaching. During those twenty years I have worked in six different educational establishments. Before teaching, I had been working in the ‘overseas’ departments of different London banks for over twenty years. I didn’t actually work overseas, but in the non-domestic parts of banking, that were connected with international travel or finance (such as import and export business). By 2000, I had become disillusioned with the lack of progress in banking, despite my many years of experience and the constant repetition of the same process every day. Not every one who works in a bank earns great salaries as you might read in the media. In some places I worked, it appeared that the awarding of positions may have been quite nepotistic. I decided that I couldn’t work in that sort of environment until retirement (which in those day was a long way off).
A friend who was moving to Denmark told me she was thinking of taking a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course. She explained that knowledge of a foreign language was not a requirement for the course. However, we had been studying Danish at the same night school class, so that might be helpful to understand how adults would feel trying to learn a second language after a full day’s work. At the time, the British government provided a grant of about £100-£120 for further and higher education purposes, so that went towards the cost of the course. The grant was eventually withdrawn from the public as some people had abused it, by taking the money and not enrolling on a course.
Following the completion of my training course, my first ‘big class’ teaching experience was of Italian children about 12-16 years old in a summer school. The summer school was based in the campus of a well-known university a short bus ride away from where I live. The summer school was one of a number of offshoots of a highly established EFL school. The school has had to change its name in the past few years to avoid confusion with a more nefarious organisation. Think of how the river Thames is referred to in Oxford.
The summer school classes consisted of a maximum of fifteen students of boys and girls. From Monday to Friday, the mornings were language classes. For a novice, there were plenty of resources to assist in planning a lesson, but you were also encouraged to design your own activities. I appreciated this encouragement of creativity and enjoyed preparing my own worksheets. However, when I look at them now they seem quite basic (other teachers used to borrow them, so they couldn’t have been that bad). The afternoons and weekends were dedicated to leisure activities and educational activities. There was at least one visit to the British Museum every week, where the main focus for the children was the Egyptology department, main items of interested being the mummified corpses. We had to work at least one Saturday or Sunday at the weekend. These would involve the longer coach trips to St Albans or Cambridge. My favourite part of the coach trip was sitting at the front and using the microphone to point out all the famous buildings and monuments. Being a Londoner was quite useful here. Sometimes there were visits to Roman ruins. The children never really seemed interested in these (perhaps because they were Italian and may have seen enough of them in their own country). Cathedral visits were very interesting to observe. Even the most troublesome or noisy child paid respect to the statue of the Madonna at the entrance and seemed to undergo some kind of transformation.
If you’ve ever been sitting peacefully on a bus or train on your way home from work, then suddenly about fifty noisy teenagers board, accompanied by weary adults, it’s probably an EFL school trip. So, my first few weeks of teaching were spent with noisy, excitable Italian children. I thought, ‘Well, if I can gain their attention, perhaps I can teach anyone’. That’s not always the case. You expect children to behave like children. I’ve taught adult classes where the behaviour of the adults has been rather petulant and childish. After my first teaching experience, I had a little break then started in an adult EFL school where I would spend the next four years.
