Adventures in Tefl 2: the course

The TEFL Course for a Certificate from Cambridge University takes one month of intensive classes for eight hours a day and currently costs roughly 1200 euro spondoolicks.

For those of you wondering what I am yathering on about, I'll explain. Several months ago, myself and La Senorita Birdbath decided that we had had just about as much as we could humanly stomach of living in the south of England.

The Senorita was living in the stinking, fetid Megalopical hell-hole that is London. I was residing in Brighton, gay capital of the Universe and home to every goat cheese eating, tofu munching, right-on krustie wanker that ever hugged a tree or complained about fossil fuel consumption.

I like to think of myself as quite the liberal but these people were beginning to produce a distinctly Margaret Thatcher streak in me which I was becoming concerned about.

"Hiiiiiiiiiiii. I'd like the tofu saus-a-gezzzzz, with the fair trade coff-eeeeeee and the soya mi-iiiilk and the non-genetically modified orange juice, but only if it came from an orange that wasn't harmed while it was being pi-iiicked..."
"Oh order your fucking breakfast your stinking turd of man!"
It was time for a change.

So, we decided on TEFL. For those of you living on Mars, that means Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Also known as ESL, EFL and a batch of other idiotic acronyms too tedious to mention.

The idea is to teach English to non native speakers using only English and through a particular method which involves games, activities and total physical response. In plain, well, English, that means me jumping around the room like a demented simian whilst bemused spanish teenagers stare at me and curse their parents for making them learn this 'fucking language'.

To teach, you have to be trained and qualified. There are lots and lots of mickey mouse, half-assed courses that you can do in a week, weekend or just read off the back of a packet of Valencian orange juice. Most of them are only good for wiping your arse with. We were advised to do the Celta course. This is a certificate from Cambridge University, which is recgonised globally. The course is not cheap. It cost over a 1000 euro to do and means a serious amount of work. It was a month long, intensive learning experience which I never ever want to go through again.

A class of 12 students are trained in teaching methodology, teaching practice and, wait for it, grammar. Oh yes. Grammar.

I find it difficult to speak of this without a faint queasiness overcoming me - a general nausesous miasma which threatens to engulf me where I wake four hours later, face down in a pool of puke, piss and half-digested Paella. In a nutshell, grammar was unpleasant. Indeed, so unpleasant, that I cannot even abide the word anymore. Henceforth, it shall be referred to as the unpleasantness.

Each day of class commences with an hour and a half of the unpleasantness.This, they claimed, was because we were supposed to be fresh in the mornings. In reality, I think it was because we were too weak to protest. Then at 10.30 am came the teaching practice which began on day two. That's right day two. The students were Spanish guinea pigs getting free classes (usually the unemployed and plain bored). At first you only do 20 minutes. Then you do a half hour. Then 40 minutes. Then you work up to an hour, all over the duration of a month. Truth be told, this was the most fun part of the day, as at least you got to have a laugh with some of the students.

After that came teaching methodology (a.k.a 100 ways to make an arsehole of yourself in front of foreigners). Then lunch...

Following lunch, you get input (a.k.a. savage criticism) of your TEFL Mojo. Finally you make lessons plans for the following day, get home at about nine and collapse in to bed exhausted.