On the Road: Adventures of a Teacher Abroad

Teaching English as a Foreign Language – you've boggled at the various options; you're ready to up and leave for warmer climes. But what's life as a travelling tutor really like? We receive a dispatch from Tokyo

Feature by Sebastian Fisher | 29 Jul 2014

I write this as Typhoon Neoguri sweeps into the Kanto Plain, hoovering up stray umbrellas as it rips among the giant pinball machine of Tokyo’s towers. Thunder booms. The Japanese call it kaminari – 'God's sound.' I learnt it off a cleaner who I smoke with. She would use the word as we huddled on top of the skyscraper watching the rain slash the concrete black.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language – 'TEFL' for short – has become a multibillion pound industry worldwide. The economics of the world’s insatiable desire for English gives the newly embossed neophytes of the ‘real world’ a tempting out card: if you have a degree and grew up in the UK, you can get a job as a teacher abroad. Casually flick over websites such as tefl.com and eslcafe.com and you will find a frothing sea of opportunities in every distant corner of the globe. First rules: always look a gift horse in the mouth; seek references from their previous employees; and never, ever pay to get a job. Many positions will ask for a CELTA, which we’ll discuss later, but it’s possible to get a job in Asia without one. That’s how I started.

It was a matter of panic rather than enterprise. I had a week to go before my student tenancy expired. I’d already gotten myself embroiled in a few grim telephone interviews with call centres. The choice between a recruiter offering me the ‘breadbasket’ of China and the Longbenton Industrial Park seemed clear. So, two weeks and some unnecessary rabies vaccinations later, I shook off the surreptitious neo-colonialism and was on the plane.

On arriving in China, I found I’d pitched up in the equivalent ten thousand industrial parks stitched around rice paddies. Highway by highway, my dream of timber houses, incense reveries and Zen was crushed under the roars of endless trucks ferrying consumer goods to nearby Hong Kong. The driver of the minibus kept gobbing phlegm from the window at every second junction as though he was leaving a trail of saliva crumbs to help him navigate back to the airport should I not be deemed fit for purpose. I arrived, and was taken to my kitchen-less apartment. I shrugged it off in exhaustion and tried to sleep.

Six hours later, a knock on the door. I was to be presented to the school; a microphone bundled into my hand, “Speak about yourself.” I was escorted to the front gates where three thousand yellow-shirted preteens had assembled. They bellowed “HELLO” as one. My jet-lagged brain crumpled. “Um... Hello... I’m Sebastian. I like... swimming.” I hate swimming. I’d been a teacher for all of 30 seconds and I’d already lied to them. I was whisked away to cheers, and told I had two weeks off before my first class. I blinked at that, and was left alone to explore the urban-wild and meet the locals.

In China, they will approach you with a breathtaking gumption – everyone seeking their English friend. The problem with this instant friendship is that hacking through the vegetation of low-level synonym creation and navigating semantic pitfalls can be exhausting after having already spent your day doing just that. However, embrace it – and the hospitality will go on and on. One evening, a brief cafe conversation got me a four star hotel for the equivalent of one five pound note. Another stray yes got me bundled into a Ford Mondeo, where I was greeted by two wide-eyed children who looked like they wanted to devour me and slurp the English speaking blood from my corpse. Fourteen sing-alongs to Thriller later, our expedition was chugging through the dusky foothills and I spent the evening in a bamboo shack sampling snake soup and binging on rice wine.

As for work, the novelty of your presence will get you through – the fact that the pupils enjoy it is enough. In state schools in Asia, you are mostly a government-enforced spare wheel, the product of a policy that mandated native-speaker presence in the hope it would rub off on the young. You will be treated with respect, but you will not be looked upon to achieve much beyond being happy and present (and the latter of the two is not always a requirement – I had a lot of spare time). Yet you may want to actually have control over the direction of the class – and looking for new jobs in dedicated language schools confirmed that if I wanted any real freedom, either travelling or in the classroom, I’d have to get qualified.

Type in TEFL and you will be stampeded by a bewildering array of acronyms that make the US Federal Government look positively verbose: TEFL, TESOL, ESL, CELTA, DELTA, TOIEC, TOEFL. The most intensive are the CELTA, by Cambridge, and the Trinity Cert TESOL. They are equivalent, but the CELTA has a slightly better name-cachet around the world. They both cost around a thousand pounds, both last four weeks, and both give an astonishingly thorough grounding in how to teach for a living for so short a course. Most of all, they’re great fun. I’ve not met a single teacher who hasn’t said theirs wasn’t one of the most enjoyable things they’ve ever done, as well as one of the most difficult. Getting the top grade of the CELTA is hard (a tiny percentage achieve it) but if you do the work you should pass the course.

Unfortunately, the majority of language schools spend more on glossy leaflets than teachers’ pay, but they are the engines that drive the nomadic life. The teacher is the disposable peon – they should be thankful for the Italian sunshine as they take the creaking train to a town the Renaissance obviously missed on its way through. Language schools are businesses, focused on trying to grind out the bottom line. Some are stellar, some are not. You are required to keep students happy and entertained as well as helping their English.

A classroom of boisterous, middle-aged Italian students, however, is quite a system shock compared to young Asian children – suddenly piping up such questions as “What’s the third conditional?” apropos of nothing. Keen to please my new charges, I started chalking the words, “If I had have been...”, realising as I approached the verb something was wrong before hearing an “Are you sure?” at my back. No, I’m not sure, and you’re going to sit there while I desperately mutter my own language under my breath until I am, aware the whole time that you paid thirty euros an hour for this experience. ‘Blackboard-blindness’ is a real thing. Spelling words such as 'accommodation' transcends from awkward to a Sisyphean hurdle of consonant rearrangement, your hands dusty with chalk as you hastily swipe away your last attempt. Halfway through the tangent, one of the students demanded that we skip the whole question altogether because, actually, gerunds were on the upcoming test (which I hadn’t been informed about). Cue ten minutes of frenzied, breathless arguing in Italian among the students. Not exactly the holistic English environment I was striving to create. Your qualification gives you the weapons – but the classroom time sharpens them.

After class, though, that same pugnacious student ushered me onto her scooter and we rode along the coast, the midday sun sparkling off the Adriatic. At the fish market, she helped me select a fresh octopus for lunch, shouting the cooking instructions over her shoulder as she took me back to my apartment, then left me with “Ciao! See you tomorrow!” and a kiss. Students, who will often be your age or older, will become friends. You will learn as much from them as they learn from you. Teaching abroad offers many rewards, but it is the students who make the experience what it is.

Typhoon Neoguri has now abated. I watch the evening sun slide down the skyscrapers and join the crowd migrating homeward. Teaching abroad gives you a sense of place not found in two-week monument-dashes. I play ping pong in the park at dusk, join friends for sushi and sake, and slip into the arcade at nightfall – knowing that tomorrow I will wake, again, as a resident of the city.