Ten years of reflection: who becomes a teacher and why?

‘What is all the toil and bustle for? What are people aiming at with their ambitions and their frenzied pursuits of wealth, power and preeminence? Are they looking to supply their basic needs? No. The wages of the poorest labourer can supply those. What then are they after? They want to be treated well. They want to be attended to. To be taken notice of with sympathy, kindness and approval.’

(Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations)

May 2005: Part 2 of my ‘this time 10 years ago’ reflections

The Celta was done and dusted and it was goodbye to new friends and onwards and upwards towards the start of a new adventure.

Where would that be? What would be the first step, my first destination?

But first comes the emotional turmoil, the heartbreak.

I return home, Belfast at the time, pondering the next step. Even though I’ve spent my whole life moving around every 3 or so years, saying goodbye to old friends and having to meet and make new ones, my heart weighs heavily. I wonder if I’ll see my Prague-era Celta friends ever again, wondering whether those four epic, magical weeks will ever be re-kindled or re-created elsewhere. I expect more adventures are in store, but to start out on such a high?* Will anything in the future ever come close to matching it? What do I want out of all this?

What do any of us want out of all this?

Over the past couple of years I’ve done a reading activity with various classes taken from an article, Jobs confidential: 15people reveal the truth about their work. The article is illuminating in its own right, but what is sometimes even more revealing are the illuminating insights that students reveal about their own jobs or the comments they make after the activity. Inevitably, they ask me – not always, but more curious classes certainly – about the secrets of my work. What I reveal tends to depend on my mood on that particular day, as well as how well I know the class and how much I want to share.

Why become an English teacher? Who becomes an English teacher?

In the teaching English world, there are native speakers and non-native speakers. My first Director of Studies back in Lviv (September 2005) always disparaged the term ‘native speaker’, saying it conjured up images of scantily-clad, half-naked creatures clutching dictionaries and grammar reference books with spears and nose-piercings, beating their chests, slaying their non-native enemies, torturing their students by talking them to death with their exotic foreignness. I’m not here to get into that realm in an actual teaching sense, but I am going to put teachers into two categories: foreigners and locals, for the purposes of this analysis.

(Why this is far from merely a semantic delineation: I’ve taught in English summer schools with Brits, Poles, Germans, Spanish and Italian teachers: we’re all, in effect, foreigners; I’ve taught in Spain with loads of Brits and Irish and a sprinkling of Czechs and Slovaks; again, we’re all foreigners – the key thing here is that we are away from home.)

Generalisation, lazy stereotype alert!

What follows is the way I’ve perceived this over the years, and my experience of things; I should also point out, for transparency’s sake, that much of my thought process is a bit dated in that I’m basing much of this on my interactions with friends and colleagues from before I came to Kyiv in August 2010. But that also makes more sense, and fits my narrative better.

What gets bandied about: teachers are slackers, avoiding real work, escaping from something, running away from real responsibility; we’re rogues, philanderers, rakes, drifters, scallywags, guttersnipes thirsting for adventure in exotic locales; we speak English, that’s good enough to be able to teach (how hard can it be?), we can just rock up to any old language school and waltz into a job without knowing a thing about methodology; this is a chapter for that book we want to write at some point; we’re trying to ‘discover’ ourselves (cringe)… 

Teaching English is a lengthy ‘gap year’. It’s not a proper job…we’re not sure what else to do, might as well get a cool job where we can be abroad at least, we’ve just finished university or spent a couple of years toiling away in a dead-end office job or we’re putting off bigger, more serious decisions for later…some of us may have a ‘passion’ for the language, but…

If you’re a local, perhaps – a big, big perhaps - you look at it differently. Perhaps you have a linguistics, education or philology degree and have studied for 3+ years. Perhaps, from the get-go, you take it seriously and plan on it as your career. If you’re a foreigner, more often than not, you studied history, literature, criminology, economics, international relations or some other type of liberal art. You always thought of teaching English as a sort of backup plan, a fall-back option. Or as a bit of adventure before trying your hand at a proper job.

But a career? No way.

My first three directors of studies never intended to get that far. They all intended to teach for a couple of years before working out what it was they really wanted to do. They never thought they’d spend many years in the business, let alone become directors of their schools. They all told me the same thing: nobody says they want to do this as a career. They just end up doing it.

In my first five years of this gig, I can recall only a single colleague who set out to make a career of English teaching after university. Just one.

In San Sebastian, a few of my fellow colleagues went against this norm, in a roundabout way. They had aimed to become school teachers in the British state system and spent anywhere from a year to a few toiling away before jacking it in and opting for a career teaching English abroad, where things were lot less stressful and frenetic. There you go again – can’t hack a real job? Then teach English!

As they say, those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And now, those who can’t teach, go abroad and teach English.

And where you go – and the kind of school you teach in – says a lot about the type of teacher you are. In Spain, everyone was much more serious and grounded, establishing roots from an early point, not really looking to move on (though I did not enjoy living in San Sebastian, the quality of life there is outstanding and it’s a comfortable, easy place to be). I think Western Europe attracts a different type of teacher. The further East in Europe you go, the crazier you get, and I mean crazy in a good sense.

The big gap in my knowledge is South and Southeast Asia. Central Asia – my only stint being 8 months in Kyrgyzstan – is a different beast from the Far East, more akin to Eastern Europe in who it attracts. My time in Kyrgyzstan was spent with the motliest crew of teachers anywhere (a compliment).  Plenty of colleagues have moved onto parts further east, and I obviously have interacted with a great number of teachers who have worked in those more far-flung destinations, but overall I feel under-qualified to comment in any greater depth. Let my lazy, inchoate generalisations remain. 

And there are certainly those who are attracted to an area because of history, culture, language and politics. That is, after all, how I ended up in Lviv nearly 10 years ago. This is why a lot of people end up in Eastern Europe. Those heading to more comfortable climes are – perhaps – more after a comfortable lifestyle and better pay. Eastern Europe might be the worst place to teach English if it’s a decent salary you’re after.

Many years ago, before I got into this gig, the world of Tefl proliferated with rogue, cowboy outfits that might have attracted the more adventurous, care-free set. But the more established the school you work in, the more serious the job. There are less of the helter skelter reckless adventures and more of the drippings of the corporate world. And once you’ve spent a few years in this world, you feel less and less of the carefree stuff and more of the serious stuff. The longer you spend, the further you advance. The further you advance, the less it feels like teaching and the more it feels like business.**

The first two years are the honeymoon period. You can get away with taking the job itself less seriously. That’s why many people start at the less established schools.

But after those first two years, time to start taking it seriously, or get out of the business.

There are three or four paths people take:

1 You do it for a couple of years, have some fun, get the experience you’re after, then go back home and regale your friends with tales of your epic adventures. Get out while you’re ahead. Nip a potential career in the bud before you get too mired in and can’t escape.

2 You could drift around and flit about from school to school, striving for mediocrity and easy living, keeping the honeymoon period going as long as you can. To hell with your professional development, you just want to prolong the fun and lack of responsibility.

3 You realise that the lifestyle abroad suits you, you enjoy teaching, you’re comfortable enough to get by, and you’re perfectly content with how things have panned out.

4 It’s 10 years later and you can’t believe you’re still teaching.

For the umpteenth time in these pages, let me mention that this was all supposed to be a ‘2-year plan’.

For the umpteenth time in these pages, let me mention this is a scattershot one-size-fits-all generalisation.

I refer you back to that article Jobs Confidential. One of the jobs was call-centre worker, and she said this:

‘After a shift you crave a normal conversation. All day you’ve been having these prostitute conversations, where you’re not saying the things you want to say and nobody wants to listen. You crave realness.’

I’m deliberately not getting into the minutiae of this job, the positives v the negatives, the pros and cons…But ever so briefly, I will say this: replace call-centre worker with English teacher and you’re not too far off. But one big, whopping, massive positive is that you can, for the most part, bring your natural personality into the classroom. Sure, you have to say a lot of things you don’t necessarily want to, but most of the time you can say whatever the hell you like, consequences be damned. And yet, often nobody either wants to listen or does listen. It does feel artificial, but…

…I’m straying from the point of this particular post. The main thing to take away from this: one bright teenager about a year ago, when we were discussing this article (insight to non-Teflers: with an article like this, we tend to turn into a jigsaw reading – divvy up the parts, give each student a few minutes to read, digest and summarise their piece, and then let them mingle and share what they’ve read), asked me if I felt like a prostitute in this job. The conversation went something like this:

Her: Don’t you feel like a prostitute in this job, sometimes?’

Me: What do you mean?

Her: Well, you have all these classes for a few months with all these people, and we’re paying money to be with you and you just tell us all these stories and teach us this stuff and some of it we remember and most of it we forget and it’s all a bit artificial and then eventually you say goodbye and then forget about us and then you move on and do it all again with another group of people.

Me: Great, so I’m like a prostitute?

Her: Well, basically, yeah, I guess you are.

Fleeting and ephemeral are good words. In those heady early days of teaching, it all feels so light and innocent, and it’s one prostitute-like experience after another. Some things don’t change – in many respects, this element is similar. The difference is in how seriously you take things.

That first job, those first couple of years, it is all about the experience, the adventures. But I think once you move onto years three and four, and you realise you might be in this for the long(ish) haul, then it takes on greater gravity. You seek justification for your career choice, you search for meaning, something more substantial than the flippancy and levity of experience abroad. Maybe it doesn’t hit you fully in those early years: this isn’t an ‘experience’ for those who have invested time and money to learn, so it’s better if we treat this as more than mere ‘experience’ too. Time to take it a bit more seriously, while not forgetting to drag our personalities along for the ride.

For some, there might even be a feeling that we are ‘doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates [our] progress.’ (Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language)

There’s a certain amount of enthusiasm and euphoria in those heady early days. And then there might be jadedness and cynicism later on. Bitterness even. It’s not that we’re unhappy, just a bit perplexed that’s it come to this.

In a world where status means so much, and where we constantly strive for meaning out of things, English teachers are a different breed. I don’t think we crave status so much. We might compare ourselves to our accountant, lawyer, architect, journalist, science teacher or engineering friends back ‘home’, and we get anxious about the financial insecurity or the known unknowns that lay ahead of us. We know we’ll never get rich – nobody gets into this business for the money, that’s for sure – but we’ll hopefully have enough to get by.

But we also tend not to worry about the trappings of corporate life (as much), or the feeling of being too weighed down (as much), the mortgages, the taxes, the mundane realities of everyday life that being in a foreign country often shelters us from. We just get on with things, while our friends all envy us and marvel at how fortunate and lucky we are.

Luck is the residue of design.***

It’s not luck. It’s a choice. Perhaps not a well-thought one, but a choice nonetheless.

Whether it’s the best one, who knows.

Because once those early carefree years of existence vanish, maybe we start to question whether we can make enough money to actually retire one day. Can we actually afford to buy a house? And if you end up in a place like Ukraine…well, no need to re-hash the past couple of years or so, what with the plunging currency and all.

And then there’s being far from family, friends and loved ones and that gut-wrenching anxiety that can lead to. On top of the money, on top of potentially precarious political situations, on top of feeling guilty about being so far away, there’s perhaps a sense of existential uncertainty floating around. It certainly isn’t easy and it fills us with anguish, but again, none of us were forced into this. It was our choice.

But that doesn’t mean we’re immune to the realities and trappings of the ‘real’ world. We have the same worries and anxieties as everyone else.

Whatever image you have of the life of an English teacher abroad, it’s probably far from the real picture.

And my image is probably far from the real picture.

But that’s just it: you never know what’s going on in our heads. In many ways, deep down we’re all tortured souls of varying degrees, though thankfully not in a Gogolian sense.

Not yet, anyway.

May 2005: Belfast

I’ve said goodbye to some good friends, and now it’s onto the next step. Teaching jobs only start in September (right?) so I have to fill the time between now and then. So I apply for some local non-Tefl related jobs, just to get a bit of money together. I’m not really sure of any other alternatives, but then I have barely looked.

* Speaking of starting out on a high: when I studied at Edinburgh I was a scotch novice and could barely stomach any type of whisk[e]y. But then I joined the Water of Life Society and I was right away hooked on the good stuff.

** One more secret: English teachers like to complain. A lot. Probably more than most other professions I’d gather.

*** I am aware that I used this same quotation in a post from many years ago, and at the time I attributed it to Milton. Dr Wasabi Islam was the first to draw my attention to it. But it has also been attributed to Branch Rickey and von Clausewitz.