Header pic: Me on my last day of teaching with some students in Busan, South Korea, eating fire chicken (buldak).  2007.  Oh, and that’s way back when chicken didn’t make me want to vomit.  

When I find myself in times of trouble, there is no Mother Mary.  There are only the ravaging, demonic memories of bygone decisions that altered the course of my professional life and rendered me a spat-out husk in my forties.  

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I became an ESL teacher.  I can’t!  

This is a stern PSA, a hefty warning, a shaking and wagging index finger, a surreal cautionary tale, all delivered from a sweaty woman past middle age whose hair is springing free of its elastic moorings strand by strand, whose teeth are crumbling from her bleeding gums one by one, as the recollections bombard her with all the subtlety of a firecracker under the pillow, rendering her a quivering, panicked, unbathed wreck of compromised humanity.

That woman?  That woman is me.

Never do what I did.  What’s that, again?  Why, become an ESL teacher and destroy yourself professionally.  

It’s time to revisit the infuriated blog that I started many years ago, when I finally walked away from the ESL industry and was spilling over with fresh disgust and not a single nickel to my name.  Here we go:

I want to make sure I cover a lot of the basics, the nuts-and-bolts of the physical aspects of teaching in this hamster wheel of a farcical industry so you have a very accurate picture.  Again, I will add that some things change from school to school, but having taught at several of them in British Columbia–as well as around the world–there is definitely a consistency.  The most inarguable consistency, of course, is the fact that the people who own these language schools are utterly, egregiously money-hungry, treating the very people (the teachers) who prop their business up and keep it going much the same way my cat treats mice that she has found in my apartment [this was written when Annie was still a bloodthirsty kitten].  I watched my sweet-faced plushball once bat around a tiny little field mouse for 45 minutes, taunting it, slashing it, slowly mangling but keeping it alive, sometimes acting as though she was disinterested and the rodent was free to go, only for the cat to pounce once again and engage in more atrocities that would have done Josef Mengel proud.  After a while, I couldn’t bear it, and let the mouse outside: punctured, bleeding, one ear missing, tail nearly ripped off.

…and the best part?  These deranged, greedy goblins somehow make it seem as though they are doing you a favour.  Prior to every lesson, I’m surprised we aren’t made to bend over, spread our butt cheeks as wide as we can, take a thorough rogering, and then thank the owner for the privilege.  [Crude this was indeed, but I stand by the sentiment.]

Teaching Supplies

Apart from the antiquated material available for use, there is also a bizarre dearth of necessary teaching items in the resource room, such as whiteboard markers and erasers, for starters.  These are the two main tools in the classroom–if the photocopier has crapped out again, or you can’t find a single thing to copy anyway, at the very least you can put everything down on the board.  

As one of the basic rules of language instruction is to highlight items with different colours for better comprehension, a black, a red, and a blue marker are more than sufficient (besides, apart from green, I have never seen Expo whiteboard markers in another colour).  Therefore, why most of these schools either hoard the markers and dole them out grudgingly, or allow only dried-up ones to be up for grabs in the resource room, is something I have never quite understood.  I have worked for exactly one school that was generous enough to always keep drawers full of fresh Expo markers for teachers to take as needed–however, this was also a school that had a minimum of 20 teachers employed at any given time, so being miserly with the basic of basics would not have allowed them the pleasure of being among the most successful schools in Vancouver.  

The trick is to stash whatever ink-having markers you can locate in a pencil bag, and take them home with you.  This is to say nothing of the years-old, rarely-replaced whiteboard erasers in the classroom, which–being crusted with eons of erasable ink and having the texture of coal–often don’t have much use apart from smearing your fresh ink around on the whiteboard canvas and covering your board in giant, filthy swirls.

The Games and Resources

We have the resource room–which might be anything from a single shelf to a few bookcases lined with moth-eaten tomes–where you may stumble across a few commercial card or board games to play in the classroom.  Games that are as well-maintained, up-to-date, and effective as the available resource books and their endless references to US President Ronald Reagan.  They are always the same games, and they are rarely, if ever, intact.  

You will be missing many Scrabble tiles, or you will find that all the Z’s, X’s, and Q’s have been removed, or you will discover mid-game that someone took the liberty of neatly printing the letter E on the blank tiles.  You will find that your Scattegories box is missing the 20-sided letter die and the handmade replacements won’t suffice.  You won’t even glance at Hedbanz, as no matter how bitter, resentful, and indifferent you have become, you cannot bring yourself to force your adult students (many of whom are university-educated, or practicing professionals in the fields of law, medicine, and engineering in their home country) to don plastic red headbands outfitted with clue cards so they can play 20 questions and figure out that there is a cartoon illustration of a badger on their forehead.  Not even your blackened heart will consent to this.  

A few places I worked in actually had a box or two of Scruples, which I remember my parents bought for the family back in 1983.  There is no board nor any game pieces involved, only cards, and is a great means of generating discussion in the classroom and discovering the genuine mental workings of your assembled students.  However, you absolutely must go through the cards carefully before playing with your students, as some of the situations are prehistoric enough for them to cause utter confusion (“You are using a pay phone when, suddenly, quarters start spilling out of it…do you keep the money?”) or outright shocking for all the wrong reasons (“You discover your coworker is gay.  Do you tell anyone?”).  

I have, however, in many moments of utter blankness, hauled out the Scrabble box no matter the limited number or condition of the tiles, because you can still create a good, educational activity for every level.  I would estimate that I have introduced about 80% of the students I had over the years to this game, and it invariably kickstarts some primal competitive streak that is, apparently, universal.

A surprising number of teachers actually create their own games and activities, expending unpaid quantities of energy making cards, slicing them up with the modern-day guillotine known as the paper cutter (which is, 9 times out of 10, dull and unable to work its way through more than three sheets of paper at a time), sometimes going out of their way to laminate them, and hoping that pasting these little scraps on the walls, tables, and ceiling of their classroom will flawlessly teach their students the fundamental principles of the future perfect tense.  I admire these teachers in a sense, as teaching ESL is more similar to being in charge of a kindergarten class than anyone would actually believe, except with each ascending level of English mastery, the students are equipped with a degree of fluency and eloquence that allows them to flawlessly articulate their complaints, feelings of boredom and fatigue, or confusion regarding a particularly heinous verb rule.  Keeping them happy with games and props is one of the most selfless acts an ESL teacher can engage in, as–indicated earlier–there are virtually no ready-made games for use in the language classroom.  

There are many books with photocopiable pages containing game boards and their accompanying cutouts; however, these games are often paired with nearly-incomprehensible instructions, or are quite simply ineffective and short-lived when put into practice…and it still takes at least 15 – 30 minutes to get one of these games prepared.  

Most of the time, however, as noted above, teachers will just take matters into their own hands, painstakingly handcrafting original material and investing about an hour’s worth of their own time (at home, usually, or after classes are done) into no more than 20 or 30 minutes of activity.  Incidentally, game-playing is hardly a break for them, either, as the babysitting and monitoring that is de rigueur in the ESL classroom cannot cease for even a moment.  If the kids are hunched over their tables, rolling dice and asking each other personal questions, you must still be involved: you must wander around, lean over shoulders, smile encouragingly, laugh at their answers, answer token questions about pronunciation and vocabulary, spur them on, and join if they are lagging.  

You are never off.  You are never allowed to be off.  Not ever.  Just try to sit down and have a breather.  Inevitably, and at breakneck speed, one of your students will approach the administration and complain that you were sitting around and doing nothing all the livelong day.  The students–who are, in fact, customers–learn very, very quickly that they are in complete control of the place.  One indication of dislike will send a teacher packing, and this is no exaggeration.  It takes one customer to mention that their teacher was one minute late for class, or didn’t explain the grammar properly, or doesn’t holepunch their handouts, to get that hapless teacher fired.  I wish I were embellishing the truth, but I have seen it happen repeatedly and regularly in my dozen years in the field.  Suffice it to say, and almost needless to say, I have seen teachers get fired on the spot because a student wanted more games in the classroom and found actual instruction boring. 

It is difficult to be an embittered ESL teacher and not have a generous portion of those negative feelings directed towards the overseas customers.  When you have 17-year olds from monstrously wealthy families roll their eyes at you, sigh and make bored facial expressions, whisper to their classmates throughout your carefully-planned lessons, show up late and unapologetic, and then have the perversely admirable temerity to whine to the “director” that you weren’t trying hard enough, feelings of extraordinary hostility begin to fester.

Anyway, I rarely employed the game technique.  I never found it worth my while to spend even more of my unpaid time making games, and–let’s be frank here–compared to other people doing this job, I was lazy.  This isn’t to say that I was a lazy teacher, because I was not.  There is no way to be a lazy teacher in ESL unless you are a native-speaking white male and your class is small and comprised of females (yes, men have the absolute advantage in this industry, for reasons that can be summed up in two words: patriarchal societies).  I quickly discovered that one way to keep one windpipe above the water was to deliver lessons in a state of rhapsody, taking some life-numbing topic such as, I don’t know, passive sentence forms and crowing about them as though standing at the pulpit of an evangelical church.  If you appear (remember, appear, because the entire job is theatre) to legitimately give a toss, basically, the customers kind of do, too.

…back to present-day.  Yikes, not exactly a happy recounting of my time in the field.  Seems as though I was trying to break things down into components and categories, but my ire and extraordinary resentment kept hauling me back down into their murk.  And how could this not have been the case?  After all, I was not so much stomping and spitting upon the industry itself, but instead, wallowing in blinding regret like it was a bathtub full of rusty thumbtacks.

*   *   *   *   *

Why I Did What I Did

While wading through this vitriol, you are likely asking yourself some exasperated questions. 

“Nadz, what were you thinking?”

I wasn’t.

“Did you even want to be a teacher?”

No.  I wanted to be a journalist, a playwright, a lawyer.  

“Why didn’t you walk away after a year or two of doing this?”

Because I’m dumb and didn’t think ahead.  Also, the cost of living was entirely decent in the early days, my wages were fine for the mid 2000s, and I couldn’t have predicted that ESL salaries would never increase as Canada became a gated community for the wealthy.

“When your friend suggested that you take the TESOL course and become an ESL teacher, why didn’t you really, thoroughly research what you were getting into?”

See my answer to the previous question.

“Is there anything about teaching ESL that you actually enjoyed?”

 Most of my colleagues were great.  Some of the students were pretty funny. I ended up dating a couple of them, in fact, well after they ceased being my students (I taught adults, you sicko).  This is not uncommon; there are many–and I mean, many men–who get into this field in order to obtain girlfriends, preferably of the East Asian variety.  I have watched this happen more times than I care to count.  A Chinese acquaintance of mine referred to this as “yellow fever.”

“Did you gain anything valuable from your many wasted years doing this job?”

An alcohol dependency, a couple of urinary tract infections, and unpaid student loans.  Also, an unhealthy, pedantic focus on punctuation, spelling, and grammatical errors in anything I read.

“Who were the worst students?”

I can’t necessarily say that some were better or worse than others, but I will say that my Japanese and Korean students were the kindest and most hardworking; my Latin American students were the most fun; and my Saudi Arabian students were the laziest but the most charming…the men, that is.  The women still cloaked themselves in hijabs and abayas despite being freer in Canada than they could have ever imagined, and were quietly devoted to language acquisition and piety.

“Did your students or colleagues know that you were half-cut during that last year of teaching?”

If they did, they didn’t say a word.  I was burnt out, sick of being a glorified entertainer, and fed up with repeating the same lessons again and again over the years.  Drinking actually gave me enthusiasm and energy, allowed me to care about what I was doing, and allowed me to be animated in the way that the job demanded.  So long as the students were happy–and they were–it didn’t make a bit of difference.  In fact, being stone-cold sober meant that I was angry, hostile, impatient, and outwardly, evidently annoyed, with all of my eye-rolling and sighing and sarcastic quips.  Having quick chugs in the bathroom stall (followed by loads of cinnamon Dentyne crammed into my mouth to mask the odour) throughout the day meant that I could approach the onerous tasks that lay ahead. 

I’m not proud of it; I’m being completely honest.  And just so you know, I read plenty of things about people who consume alcohol on the job, and it’s far more common than you believe.  I won’t betray my fellow recovering addicts (or addicts in general) by revealing the cues, but if you know what the signs and the signals are, you will be able to tell pretty much right away.

How Did You Finally Leave?

As I said, that last year, I was a broken, beaten-down woman, not teaching forty hours per week (no ESL teacher gets forty hours a week; the schools don’t run schedules like that, and Fridays are almost always half-days) and making less than a thousand dollars per paycheque.  This is a business that requires you to have a university degree and a TESOL teaching diploma, but still, to this day, continues to pay just above minimum wage and sees no issues with it.  Many of my fellow teachers were also burnt out: I knew they drank booze and smoked the devil’s lettuce every night, and you could see resignation and death in their eyes.  The older they were, the more unemployable they became in the real world.  I feared this greatly.

The other types of ESL teachers were smart: young, straight out of university, armed with a quick TESOL diploma, and only committing a year or two to this gig before they actually got grown-up jobs.  Many of them just wanted to travel and teach abroad for a bit before being intelligent about their life decisions. 

Another type (I mentioned the predatory ones already) were women whose husbands were quite financially comfortable working as contractors or engineers, as their wives just made some extra money teaching ESL and had something to do.  They lived in giant homes, had gardens and nice cars, and saw this as nothing more than a hobby that put bubblegum money into their pockets.  

I was none of those things.  I couldn’t do this anymore.  I was forty years old and needed to gain work experience doing almost anything else.  It had zapped my creativity altogether–I wasn’t writing a thing by then–and escalated my alcohol use and rendered me destitute.  It was only because I lived with someone that I could afford to get by. Man, I need a dual-income household again.  I’ll get there.  Not quite ready for a serious relationship yet, but I will be soon.

So in summer of 2016, after having two panic attacks within the last two months in the classroom, I told my director that I had to leave.  I gave one week’s notice, since we only ever got our schedules on a week-to-week basis, anyway–based on student enrollment and the hierarchy of teachers, some weeks you might only get a couple of electives in the afternoon, leaving you with about 12 – 15 hours of teaching time during those weeks.  It’s just a bullshit, horrible, unstable, unregulated industry.  

I went into administration.  Any administration.  And it could only be entry-level, because I had zero experience doing anything apart from using “It’s A Wonderful Life” to explain the third conditional.  I signed up with some staffing agencies, since my resume wouldn’t show anything apart from years wasted as a customer-service language clown; nobody would glance at it.  I was placed into some horrible jobs as a result, such as at ICBC and BC Housing, essentially doing data entry, and a couple of good ones, like working in the Humanities department of Langara College doing a range of administrative tasks.  Essentially, as I’ve written before, recruiting agencies own and pay you for at least five months; it is rare that these placements lead to employment with the place you’re working at, because those places want to actually hire someone full-time as soon as possible.

So it’s been many years now, and I can still only obtain somewhat basic administrative jobs due to having been so specialized in something that amounted to zilch. A guy I talked to several months ago said that his aunt, also an ESL teacher, retired and didn’t have a dime to her name. “It’s like giving aid in Calcutta,” he said. “You are changing lives, but it’s not profitable, it’s not a long-term career, and it should only be done as a stint in one’s life.” I wish I had met him two decades ago and heard these words.

So I’ve kind of borked my life, in a way.  I’m focusing a lot more on writing these days, and I now have a semi-regular column with a Vancouver online magazine that might increase in frequency. In working to improve my situation–and let’s never forget, I was supposed to get married and move to the UK last year, which would have been even worse for my life for reasons I’m tired of documenting–I have another interview tomorrow that I hope goes well; at least looking for other types of work have yielded some decent replies, and I’m focusing on all the freelancing I’ve done over the years to achieve my current goals.

ESL was the most colossal waste of time that I will never get back.  Would I change everything if it meant I didn’t get to live in South Korea, Berlin, Central and South America to teach English?  Yes, I would.  I would change the whole works.  But hopefully it’s not too late to get into a decent role; ageism is a thing, though.  I keep reading how companies prefer to hire Gen Zedders–those kids who don’t know how to mail an actual letter and keep claiming “mental health issues” to get out of doing work–because they can bugger them on the wage and train them how they want.  I’m too old, jaded, experienced, and cynical to go along with any nonsense anymore.  

Oh, hey: if anyone wants to throw some extra bucks at me, I’m a decent writer, I have done all sorts of administrative work, I can play the drums, and I can beautifully present examples of phrasal verbs and past participles that you’ve never even heard of.  

(I wish this was The End, but I’m actually writing a book about my experiences in this blasted netherworld.)

verainvancouver@gmail.com