The conundrums of being an ETP Part One

With all the problems I have had with TEFL teaching dossers (especially dossing DoSes) over the years, I have to admit that their philosophical position does at least have logic going for it- if they are going to be treated like a child and paid like someone in MacDonalds, that is how they are going to do their job. Perhaps the classic example was a teacher in Spain who thought he was owed a job with us due to having been out drinking a few times, and was so incensed at the idea of being asked to write a CV, that he typed up this one line resume for us:

“After working in MacDonalds and Burger King, I thought I’d try KFC”

MacDonalds being Opening, Burger King being Wall Street, and us being, according to him, KFC. We didn’t give him the job, but I have to say he had a point about Opening and Wall Street, a point that was not entirely taken away by the fact that he got sacked by both of them

I can’t imagine not working for us upset him too much, as long as he had enough money for a mini of calimocho and felt like he was living the dream and beating the system in some way, he was happy.

So what about us English Teaching Professionals (and borderline ETPs)? What philosophical basis do we have to sustain us when we are working in the same profession as such people, and sometimes even in the same schools for more or less the same money? Is the satisfaction of doing a good job enough, even when the main result of that is to give Jabba the Hutt (the school owner) more money to buy young virgins with? Or should we try to create another motivation by making a deliberate effort to divide ourselves as much as possible from the backpackerswhogotstuck by the qualifications we have, the schools we work for and the ways in which we teach?

I’m going to be looking at how we can motivate ourselves to be an English Teaching Professional in the real world, mainly by looking at the conundrums the whole idea throws up and then seeing if we can deal with them. I’d like to start with the first of the potential ways of dividing ourselves from the masses that I mentioned above, choosing different schools.

The conundrum in this case is that by choosing demanding and well paying schools with up-to-date materials and equipment, you are choosing only to teach the rich elite- perhaps not the reason you started reading the Guardian and teaching English in the first place! As the Guardian reports this week, the British Council is right in the middle of that little troublesome question by having certain minimum standards on how well it teaches and treats its staff that mean it is a charity that does most of its work with the wealthy.

For the British Council, I would say that the solution is to provide more free or cheap teacher training for local teachers while keeping its teaching philosophy the same. For those of us who the choice is to be treated like a slave while teaching the salt of the earth or be treated like the salt of the earth while teaching spoilt teenagers, I have no solution as yet. Maybe future parts of “The Conundrums of Being an ETP” will throw up more answers than questions…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 3:23 amand is filed under English Teaching Professional, Guardian TEFL, Opening, TEFL CV/ TESOL resume, TEFL career planning, Wall Street, finding good teaching jobs, links, the Language Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.