English Teacher X vs. American Woman with MA in TEFL

[njdesi]

If you've never read English Teacher X, he is an American who has taught English in New York, Korea, Thailand, and Russia. Probably would be considered a drunken sexpat by most. Funny as hell, and anyone who has worked in the sleazy TEFL industry can relate. http://www.englishteacherx.com/

A naive American girl who read his website posted this harsh response on her blog.
http://kinseikun.blogspot.com/2005/12/disheartened.html

The responses are hilarious, especially her discussion on "hoes" and X telling her she dresses like a roadie for Blink 182.

Personally, I don't think she would last one month in Korea, even with her MA in TEFL. Correction, just browsed through her site, she actually did a four week stint in Korea. But she did say(in a now deleted post), she will only teach TEFL in the US.

[Marmite the Dog]

American women, eh?!

[dirtydog]

The MAN Who FaiLED The CELtA TwiCE: EngLiSH TeACHer M16

A truly astounding story of Cowboys versus Professionals, English Teacher M16 tells us about his experiences in Korea and Brazil and failing the CELTA course TWICE. Even more stressful than a gun in his face, he says. Whoa. Read on.
How long have you been teaching, and where?
In total? Just over 6 months, I first taught in Korea for about a month. I actually ended up as a ‘midnight runner' (the owner broke the ‘contract’ the first day I was there and tried to keep my passport by hiding it underneath a photocopier.
Then I moved back home for a year and took CELTA again and went off to Brazil for 6 months. .

What made you decide to get into teaching, if it's not to painful to talk about?
Not at all, I had just graduated Police College and wanted a short vacation before I started full-time into the military police. One of the cadets I knew mentioned that I should try to get a TESOL certificate and teach English in Mexico. He told me that I had the perfect personality for English teaching and how all his students, especially the women, treated him like a king. He was a popular guy and we got along really well so I figured he knew what he was talking about.
I searched on the internet for TESOL and found something called a CELTA which was touted as the best certificate in the world so I decided to try it out, I didn’t think it could be any tougher then hell week at the academy. After my great ‘experience’ at CELTA, I got my GLOBAL TESOL certificate and was of to Korea the very next week.
The owner of the school had me teaching kids and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as it related to English.
Well whatever I wanted translated into Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, Break dance & Self Defense lessons and some other wicked stuff, it was a helluva lot better than anything I’d done in the academy or any other job for that matter, I started with 5 students and by the end of the month I had accumulated 5 more. Parents even gave me food, drinks and tips after each lesson. I don’t know if you know anything about policing but when you show up on scene, rarely is anyone happy to see you and you have to go in expecting the worst.
Well after spending a few weeks teaching these kids, I realized that I loved it, the job was almost too good to be true, It was like I was meant to be a teacher, I would have done it for free, I knew at that point that I would be an English teacher for the rest of my life. Believe it or not, my high-school job placement test told me that I would be a teacher even though I was expelled from my first high school, spent every other day in detention and frequently flipped off my teachers, telling them how much bullshit that placement test was...I hated everything about school.)

You said that you failed the CELTA course, not once, but TWICE. Tell us about it. What was the first course like?
The first class was held in a small room of 6 people, myself included. There was a film & art student, an editor for some independent newspaper, a recent university grad and two obese women, one had just comeback from teaching in Japan and the other worked at a shopping mall down the street. I was the youngest at 23 y/o. The course covered all kinds of good material: ESL rods, grammar, phonetics, and classroom techniques. They even had us teaching classes of up to 30 people, mostly women my age. I thought it would be great.
What were the instructors like?
I got stuck with two extremely politically correct women both of whom had graduated university with honors in English, this turned out to be a big problem later because I wasn’t taught much about politically correct anything in policing.
The first week everything seemed to go smoothly, but gradually they became very rigid and started picking on everything I did, with frequent after class sessions discussing my ‘inappropriate behavior’.
What were the other candidates like?
They were all university grads that were looking for ‘new intellectual pursuits’. At one point during the class one of the obese women even said that she couldn’t believe CELTA would admit someone without a degree, and was appalled that and I quote ‘SOMEONE LIKE YOU’ would eventually be representing ESL, referring to my lack of university accredited education.
I don’t know what her problem with me was but one time during a break between classes a few of the Brazilian students (girls and guys) took me aside and were showing me pictures of women in bikinis from their country on the internet, nothing pornographic. Anyway the same obese woman was sitting across from us and happened to look over, get flustered and suddenly leave the room.
Before I knew it, I was called out of my class to have another ‘appropriate behavior discussion’ because the pictures had offended ‘someone’, but the instructors said they would be sympathetic at this point because they figured that ‘someone like me’ probably didn’t know much better anyhow.
I couldn’t believe these people were going to become teachers, 5 out of 6 of them were scared stiff of public speaking and treated the students like children. The artsy film guy would walk around the class during his teaching session snapping his fingers in front of people’s faces to get them to listen to him, but I had a behavioral problem…
We eventually had to have a class where the teachers were reminded that students were also people and needed to be treated with a certain amount of respect. Really? I never would have figured that students were also people…thanks for that.
What exactly did they seem to think you were doing wrong?
I was using very inappropriate words during my classes such as ‘awesome’, ‘cool’, ‘wicked’. I was overly enthusiastic and used too much body language. They thought I gave the students to much praise and it was cutting into my Teacher Talk Time.
Once I was talking about that funny dance the Russians do and one of my obese classmates told me during the break that she was offended by the words ‘funny dance’ and thought I should apologize to my students for using that term or she would tell our instructors. I didn’t and she did.
They also didn’t appreciate me calling my ‘communicative activities’; games, which they felt, insulted the intelligence of the students. Above all they were pissed because I was spending too much time fraternizing with the students outside school, especially the Brazilian girls. They said this was inappropriate behavior for a professional instructor.
What did you do after you failed the course the first time?
They actually asked me to leave half way through, I was pretty mad because they told me that I wouldn’t be able to teach English in many places in the world without the CELTA including KOREA and BRAZIL. I was fairly discouraged and figured I was a bit of a failure, but my parents had met a guy who had a friend that had no high school diploma and was currently teaching in KOREA
They also told me they’d help me pay for my TESOL if I still wanted to go. So that summer I took the TESOL course from GLOBALTESOL.com which my friend the cadet had originally taken and had a blast! The course was a lot of fun and I met a few guys and girls just like myself who I still talk to frequently.
We were taught to play games and have fun with the students, it was nothing like the CELTA and the TESOL diploma is also impressive as hell. The TESOL guys asked me where I wanted to go, set me up with a job the week after I graduated and I was on my way to Korea.
Why did you decide to take CELTA a second time?
Well I figured that I had already completed my TESOL certification, I knew what they wanted, had all my old assignments from the previous class and had loved every minute of teaching in Korea, so getting this next CELTA diploma should have been a cake walk.
Did you have to pay the full price again?
I took it at a different school and didn’t tell them anything about myself but yeah it was approximately the same, my parents helped me a lot though.
What were the other candidates like this time?
It was different this time; only 3 of the 5 others were academics. The three academics -- a man and two women -- were basically carbon copies of the people I had just finished the last CELTA class with. They talked about grammar, theatre and the million flavors of Starbucks coffee.
The other two consisted of a housewife and a foreign guy that couldn’t speak English very well somehow he graduated though. They were basically ok people and didn’t think to highly of themselves until the very end when they became ‘CELTA Profs’ and started kissing ass like it was going out of style.
What were the instructors like the second time around?
This time it was two guys and some fat chick, so I thought I was home free. I mean the guys that I knew were never ‘offended’ by anything, which was only a woman’s thing right? Wrong again. One of the guys kept calling himself a ‘Grammarian’, he also had a goatee which he frequently stroked during his more thoughtful moments.
The other guy, I thought was ok though, he and I got on pretty well for the most part. In the beginning everyone thought I was a natural at teaching and that I was meant to do this kind of thing. It seemed like I couldn’t do anything wrong.
What did they say you did wrong THIS time?
Sometime during the course, I was in a room putting some lesson together and one of the resident teachers from the CELTA School came in and made some photocopies. Then she left and came back in again and started looking at me funny. She must have circled my desk 5 times looking over my shoulder, so I figured she must be curious about the work I was doing or have some kind of crush on me…sweet. Then she spoke,
HER: “Where is my purse?”
ME: “What?”
HER: “Well I left it here on the table, and YOU were the only one in here?”
ME: “Excuse me?”
Then she ran out of the room and returned with the WHOLE staff plus the director who were all looking at me.
DIRECTOR: “So, ENGLISH TEACHER MI6, did you see where that purse went?”
Me: “Nope”
So everyone starts looking around the room for it and she says she has to go to the bathroom. Then returns a few minutes later.
HER: “WELL I FOUND THE PURSE, THE THIEF LEFT IT IN THE WOMANS WASHROOM”
DIRECTOR: “Was anything taken?”
HER: “Ummm No nothings missing…. It was just sitting there”
Then she looks at me and leaves the room.
So instead of admitting that she was a dumbass who left it in the washroom she lets everyone go on thinking that a POLICE CADET took her purse and put it in the women’s washroom but didn’t bother to rip off her credit cards or cash…. Hmmmm yeah. I was off to a good start at this school.

During the ‘classmate input session’ I made jokes about my classmates so they wouldn’t get upset, all of us were really comfortable making fun of each other and having a good time with each others faults… but eventually they told me I needed to stop and get serious or I wouldn’t pass, that’s when all the in-fighting and back stabbing started.
The instructors wanted us to stop talking to each other and take the course seriously because this was ‘a serious course with serious consequences’, whatever that meant. So this drove a bit of a wedge between my other two partners and myself and from that time on they distanced themselves from me as much as possible and went for frequent ‘private’ discussion sessions with the Grammarian.
The CELTA instructors also said that they noticed that I was flirting too much with the students and some of them were beginning to complain, when I asked which ones, they said that they weren’t sure but that the fat chick instructor had told them so.
At one point during the course they told me I needed to smarten up but that I could still pass. Hearing this, I put my best foot forward and tried acting more like a CELTA person. Everything seemed to be going well until the end of the course when one of the assessors came in for a visit. She was a good friend of the ‘grammarian’ and he brought her in to see me. As luck would have it, it was one of the women who had taught me from the previous CELTA course. It happened something like this:
Me: studying at desk
In walks grammarian guy and assessor lady
Grammarian Guy: Oh ‘assessor lady’ meet….
Assessor lady: ENGLISH TEACHER MI6?!?!
Me: Oh My God! ….. uh oh….Geez….. hey….soooo… how ya been?
Grammarian: You two know each other?!?!?
Assessor lady: Uh… ya… I taught ENGLISH TEACHER MI6.
Grammarian Guy: You did? I don’t get it….
Assessor lady: Ya last year at CELTA institution #2
Grammarian Guy: What? Are you sure? ENGLISH TEACHER MI6 is brand new.
Me: uhhh…… ya… its ummm nice to see you again Assessor lady…. Awww crap....
Assessor lady: hmmm we have some things we have to discuss Grammarian Guy.
Busted.
At the end of the course they asked me if I would like to take an ‘incomplete’ instead of a ‘failure’, I asked for the failure. Grammarian Guy said it would be easier on him if I went with the incomplete because it was less paper work. I wanted the failure more than anything.
And what was your response? Did you punch anybody in the eye?
No but don’t think I didn’t want to…
What did you do after you failed the second time?
It wasn’t a total loss; I met a lot of Brazilians there that helped me find students later on in Brazil. I even had a student that I had taught, send a postcard to the school from Brazil asking me to come and stay with her, but it didn’t have a return address on it, so I never found out who it was. I’m sure it pissed them off though.
About 2 months after, I Went to Brazil, met a few South African gringos who were anything but politically correct. They really helped me out and showed me how to teach and conduct business properly; something no school teaches. They showed me that you can either work for a school making $10 an hour or work for yourself and make $50 an hour. One of them even took me under his wing and gave me a bunch of his students from Microsoft and the Unibanco (Brazilian bank). I thank god that I met them because I thought all English teachers were academic elitists…now I know only the stupid ones are.
Do you really think that you suck as a teacher as badly as they said you do?
Yep, No doubt about it! I think I would have made an awful ‘CELTA Prof’ but I’m sure I’ll make a hell of a cowboy-teacher.

What are your plans for the future?
I had such a good time in Brazil that I came home early with plans to put together my own school next year. I’m hoping to franchise it out all over Asia and South America, I’ll be hiring CELTA and university grads if you know any, and the going rate is 10 bucks an hour.
Thanks for letting me tell my story and yes its all 100% true… the CELTA experience was probably the most stressful thing in my life besides having a gun pointed at my face.

[Captain Sensible]

I think the man that failed was a totty actually dog but a great read all the same. Just goes to show, dont it? hehehe

[mad_dog]

http://kinseikun.blogspot.com/2005/12/disheartened.html


That is one crazy honkey bitch

[njdesi]

Damn,
She deleted all the comments. After all, we can't have information that challenges our assumptions be allowed. It may lead us to rethink our beliefs and develop as individuals. This kind of narrow minded republican bullshit thinking is what I revile most about Middle Americans. Thank fok I never have to work with these twats.

[mad_dog]

Damn, she took her pics of as well... would have made someone a fine avatar that ;(