It’s time.  It’s due time that I finally tackle the topic of The Worst Decision I Have Ever Made In My Life.  And holy Christ dangling from the cross, have I done some weird stuff. Like, I mean–

I’ve dropped acid probably a dozen times. As a highly-emotional and empathetic person, this caused sheer terror and trauma.  Yet I didn’t stop at one dose.

I once flew from Berlin to Pennsylvania to stay for two weeks with a man I didn’t even know.  He was a quasi-celebrity–at best–and startlingly earnest, but he was nuts, just like most men who are drawn to me.  That’s the truth (and I loved them all). 

I did the open-mic circuit in the late 90s and early 2000s where I haughtily played my homemade songs, one of which was called “You Leave Me Drippin’ Like A Tap.”  It’s hard to believe I had this sort of self-confidence.  I am far more at home hiding behind a drum kit.  

I went to Brazil after nearly a year and a half in Costa Rica to stay with a former student and lover of mine, all because he asked me to.  We really didn’t know each other at all, which was made very evident once I arrived in Rio and then went on a road trip to his hometown of Belo Horizonte.  He was one of the aforementioned nutty guys who were drawn to me, but took it to another level. Guilherme was pants-on-head insane.  I have no idea how I didn’t die down there.

I once agreed to do this thing at the PNE back in 2001 where some bored minimum-wage kids strap you into a harness, lift you several dozen feet above the pavement, release you so you do a “free fly” and plummet almost to the ground, then swing wildly in huge arcs back and forth.  I did this not once, but twice in a row.  I’m not sure how I didn’t splatter onto the asphalt.  

I know there’s more, but those are some of the immediate recollections I have of very stupid decisions I’ve made.  None of them, however, hold a single candle to my worst-ever life choice: after graduating from university with a degree in English (already we’re well into retard territory), I got my ESL teaching certification, thinking this would be a decent job while I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Absolute dogshit.  Absolute bollocks.  Absolute waste of time, money, prospects, sanity, energy.  Just the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.  Had I known somebody in the industry, I would have asked for an honest rundown of what venturing into the field was actually like and almost certainly had my mind changed.  Had anyone in my life been even slightly in the know, I could have had a pair of concerned hands placed on my shoulders, shaking me like maracas and telling me to snap out of it.  But I didn’t get any of this. 

I blame my very good, beautiful, wonderful, lifelong friend Sarah.  Sarah, I don’t know if you’re reading this, but I’ve got an index finger aimed squarely in your direction.  I’m also having a great deal of difficulty holding myself accountable for this one, so you seem like a decent scapegoat right now.  Sorry.  

When I graduated from university and went to visit Sarah one afternoon (she lived very close to SFU, even though she attended UBC), I believe I mentioned that I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.  Law school was something that always appealed to me, but my (now-retired) attorney father took on a look of complete disgust and horror when I mentioned the possibility of being a lawyer:

“No.  No!  You can’t!  I take Ativan almost every single day to deal with this shit!  This is not a profession meant for creative people like you and me.  All I wanted was to be an artist, but I got into law because of the prestige involved.  It’s all bullshit!  You think it’s going to be like it is on TV, or in the movies?  Courtroom drama and histrionics?  It’s not!  Not even close, goddammit! It’s paperwork, it’s phone calls, it’s reaching an agreement with the other party before it even hits the courts, it’s mundane, awful, and soul-draining.  Do not go to law school, Nadz!  I don’t endorse this!  One-hundred-percent nyet!”

Sure, but I still should have gone to law school.  Anything was preferable to being an ESL teacher.  Sarah told me that she had done her TESL certification, and wouldn’t this be the greatest thing to do, especially since I just majored in English? Wouldn’t teaching our native language to foreigners be a totally worthwhile profession?

Sure thing, Sarah. Thanks for ruining my entire life, gurl (again, I haven’t forgiven myself so I am blaming you). 

I’m going to copy-paste from my extremely stagnant, yet very acrid blog from a decade ago on the matter. Here’s how it went:

“I’m a teacher.”

“Oh, so you must make pretty good money.”

-An exchange I have had at least 2,456 times

In Canada, public-school teaching is a government job, and the pay is quite nice.  So nice, in fact, that a few friends of mine who are teaching in public classrooms have expressed their frustration over other staff members–well beyond their prime, and certainly beyond the mandated retirement age–who refuse to step down and give their jobs to newer, younger professionals in desperate need of permanent placement.  Why?  Probably due to having nothing else to do, most likely because they are getting gorgeous, tenure-ensured salaries for doing little more than pointing out pages in a textbook and leaving the students to their own devices as they absorb the latest issue of Macleans magazine. Frankly, I felt like a fraud when I told people I was a teacher, even though that’s technically what I was supposed to be.  

First of all, a full-time ESL teacher does not work 40 hours per week.  Well, not a paid 40 hours, anyway.  Most classes finish by 4:30, at the very latest, and those are just the “elective” classes that come and go with registration, and which are not guaranteed whatsoever to all teachers.  Your teaching hours are broken up into segments–as per the curriculum–so that your mornings are in the 9 – to – noon range and your afternoon class might be two hours, tops.  You are not paid for coffee or lunch breaks, which are almost always used for preparation and marking.  On average, your teaching day is about 5 hours in total, and Friday classes usually finish by lunchtime, as most language schools like to start the weekend early.  This sounds nice until you realize that you have been exerting a minimum of 40 hours’ worth of energy in a 25-hour paid work week.  Also, that you are struggling to make ends meet constantly.  Your wage–and I’m ballparking it here, as I refuse to pick up a calculator right now–averages out to something like $12 an hour when all is said and done.

What of that hourly wage?

When I first started in the business in 2003, I got $18 an hour–the most I had ever made in my life at a job.  Ten years later, in one of many desperate attempts for income despite being utterly burnt out on the business (but unable to find any other kind of work thanks to my voluntarily limiting myself), I took on a part-time job at a school that started me at $20 an hour, despite full knowledge of my experience, background, training, and references.  This is also the same hourly wage I made in 2008 at a different school, and to this day, is not altogether unusual.  The most I ever made at a school was $25 an hour, and this was the same language empire that made sure its many teachers had fresh whiteboard markers.  Needless to say, the teachers at that school have clung onto their jobs with teeth-baring ferocity, and turnover was remarkably nonexistent; I took a job there again in 2013, five years after my original post in 2008 (when my traveling was wrapped up), and the staff had, shockingly, virtually remained the same during those years.

Now, you may argue that it’s still a decent wage, and at one time, perhaps it was.  When I first got into the business, many of the teachers had nothing more than a high-school education, but they also had many, many years of experience teaching English abroad for five, ten, even fifteen years; this is a line of work that has existed for a very long time and has only recently been turned into the money-grubbing racket it currently is.  In the mid-to-late-nineties, for a globetrotting, well-cultured, tri-lingual individual to come back to their hometown and find an $18 or even $20 job at one of the smaller language schools was a pleasant reward and reasonably liveable wage for the quantity of experience they had accumulated during their overseas travels.  Vancouver, prior to the dreadful 2000s, had a cost of living that was entirely sane, and you could work at a vitamin store for $9 an hour (as I did) and share a two-bedroom apartment in the west side, with some money left over for some theatre or a perfectly reasonable restaurant.  $18 an hour almost ensured you could afford a modest West End apartment, with the added bonus of being able to walk to work.  

I am finally of an age where I can harrumph: Those were the days when you could look through the newspaper for a job and find yourself hired within a day or two.  Those were the days when you could think of a neighbourhood in the city you hadn’t explored yet, and find a place to live without providing a credit report, bank statement, and social insurance number.  

It was about two years into my time in ESLand–that would be 2005, if you’re keeping score–when there was suddenly a sweeping reform among the language schools, and all candidates for a teaching position needed a proper, accredited TESL certificate, as well as a legitimate bachelor’s degree, no matter what their major.  Standards, if you want to call them that, were being strictly enforced by TESL Canada, and thus I saw colleagues of mine who had been successfully teaching English in British Columbia for many years–with no TESL certificate or university degree, just their own tried-and-true methodology cultivated from years of language instruction abroad–forced into obtaining these documents if they wanted to keep their jobs.

This was, depressingly, a major reason for my staying in the industry: It seemed as though, along with standards and prerequisites, wages would increase and the field would continue to develop and become legitimized.  I don’t really need to say much more about that very faulty logic, apart from the fact that the flavour of this blog is as bitter as a grapefruit peel.

…so the standards for being an ESL teacher abruptly skyrocketed, along with the cost of living, except this did not reflect itself in the way of increased wages or unionization.  In 2003, I could decently exist on my $18 an hour–meaning more money than I’d ever had before, when I was accustomed to a whopping $11 or even wealthier $12 per hour.  Being a lifelong Poor, this meant that I had more liquid cash to waste on nonsense and bad habits, and what ended up happening was that I developed an unprecedented habit of drinking alcohol.  

However, by 2010, the year of the Winter Olympics, which found the city spending 500 million dollars on a new roof for the stadium that lay a few blocks south of the most poverty-stricken neighbourhood in Vancouver, the extra one or two dollars tacked onto that hourly wage amounted to nothing that would make a substantial difference.  Everything, simply everything, became unaffordable in an extremely short period of time.

Whew.  I clearly typed that out in a fit of rage and fuelled on Ritalin, which I openly admit to abusing during 2013 in a bid to stay very skinny.  I was indeed very skinny, but I also went loopy due to the amphetamines wreaking havoc on my serotonin and overall equilibrium.  Jesus, have I ever done anything right?  Anyway, I was mad.  Very mad.  Justifiably livid, in fact. I had been absolutely bent over and buggered beyond recognition by this industry, and while I’ve been out of the ESL field for many years now, I still find myself “triggered,” as the Gen Zedders like to say.

You’re not “triggered”, kidz, you’re PISSED OFF.  You’re ANGRY.  It’s OKAY TO FEEL THAT WAY.  And you are ALLOWED TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS IF YOU THINK THAT’S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO EXPRESS YOUR INDIGNANCE.  In short: embrace those turbulent emotions, and actually be a real human being instead of a nonbinary washcloth.

And boy, was I actually complaining about the cost of living in Vancouver circa 2013?  Because those were the salad days, whatever that means.  I think it’s a Shakespearian term.  What would any of us do to spiral back to 2013?  We could whimsically buy ourselves lemons without wincing at the price tag.  Presently, lemons are one dollar apiece at Kin’s Market, and one-dollar-nineteen at any of the existing Loblaw’s outlets that are owned and controlled by Galen Weston, Junior.  Galen can totally go fuck himself every single way from Sunday, and I support any movement to boycott him, publicly flog him, humiliate him, or set his gated community on fire.  Yet it’s even worse knowing that I share a birthday with him.  December 19?  Day of the Hellraisers?  Okay, Galen Weston, Junior.  You freak.  I found my own way of manifesting that destiny, and I guess you did, too.  

There is someone reading this who knows what I’m talking about.  Hellraiser I am; Hellraiser I will forever be.  That’s apparently your title when you refuse to compromise, you stand your ground, you will not accept the unacceptable, and you don’t buy into cultish thinking or toxic hive mentalities.  I am a proud Hellraiser, and I don’t delude myself into believing I am legitimately preeminent, either. Or give myself nicknames that laud my dubious “genius.”

I hate that I share this birthday with Galen Weston, Junior, one of the most insufferable pipsqueaks that Canada has ever sprung from its aching loins.  But Galen Weston, Junior, despite his billions, is just a garden-variety nincompoop.  You don’t need a fortune to slip into that title.  He is loathed, and when he dies, he just becomes one with the dirt that he is actually made of.  You can’t take it with you, Galen Weston, Junior.  You also might have a monument constructed in your dishonour that acknowledges how much of a rapacious, miserly bastard you were.  But Canada is so passive-aggressive, I just can’t ever see this happening.  Bitch and Shuffle Along is the unofficial national motto.  

 *   *   *   *   *

Becoming an ESL teacher.  We are back here once again, and it’s quite obvious that I am furious. It’s all just such an endless quagmire of nonsense and exploitation, I don’t even know how to sum it up.  The book that I have been outlining–and which I have finally begun separating into titled sections and for which I have written so very much–can address a lot of this in chronological order.  It’s a memoir, and I start from the very beginning (a very good place to start).  But to kind of tackle it here?  Almost impossible.  We are talking about a decade and a half of this life.  Yes, I found myself in South Korea, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Germany, but so what?  Those adventures certainly did not improve my professional life, or enhance it, or pave the way for greater things to come.  I learned a lot and overcame a great deal of ignorance by living in several different places, but I found myself starting from scratch every single time I returned to Canada: no apartment, no partner, no job, all my stuff in storage and having to rebuild my life yet again.  The only employment I could eke out after each single domestic arrival was, unsurprisingly, teaching at an ESL school.  I would never get 40 hours per week, and I would not make anything close to a living wage.

It was only around 2016 that I walked away from the industry altogether and decided to get into administration.  After all, there would always be jobs available where you sat on your butt all day, had a snack drawer, entered nonsense into a data platform, gained weight, and pretended to care about rich clients.  I can definitely give ESL credit in that I was very active, very fit, and I was always on the go: you had to be perpetually “on,” entertaining, creative, funny, and enthusiastic.  You almost never had coffee or lunch breaks, so frantic you were with dashing to the teacher’s lounge for resources, for photocopying, for lesson outlines, for contingency plans, for new ideas.  Everyone in charge of teaching was wired to the teeth on caffeine, hung over, in fear of their jobs, and very much stuck in a rut.  Racing around trying to make the students happy was the only thing that informed your every move.  The academic directors?  They were doing the same thing.  A single complaint from a student could result in suspension, but mostly, it resulted in being fired.  

These were not actually students, but customers.  They paid an enormous sum of money to come to Canada and study English.  If they only knew how very little their teachers were making.  If the teachers only knew how much the students were paying.  None of us looked into it.  None of us really understood that ESL is a private industry that is mostly dominated and controlled by businessmen (yes, men) rather than educators.  They were on the hunt for customers, we were the salespeople, the competition was ferocious, and we were replaceable.  Things like health insurance or job security were wispy daydreams, never to be achieved.  In all of my years, I believe only one school offered extended medical benefits; and even then, you had to work there for a year before they kicked in.  Everywhere else?  Not a chance.  Good luck.

It made sense, then, that a number of women I worked with over the years seemed to be doing this as a means of passing the time, or as a hobby.  They were married to very financially-comfortable men and thought it might be nice to make some extra cash teaching ESL.  Their livelihoods, lives, and expenses were not dependent whatsoever on this job.  Their husbands were contractors, or lawyers (hey, my pops was a lawyer and he wasn’t rich), or worked in finance, or were medical specialists, and they brought in tons of dough.  One teacher insisted on having a potluck at her house, and we all showed up at what was a veritable mid-century mansion, decorated to within an inch of its life with antiques and pianos and paintings and oriental rugs.  To this day, I still feel she should have sprung for the eats instead of having all of us bring food.  

And if you care, I chopped up crudites and sliced up some focaccia and threw together a very garlicky dip.  I remember that, too.  

To be continued forever…

(Reach me at nadya@nadzvera.com)