The Job Hunt Saga Continued...

It was our first English teaching interview! In fact, it was more of an audition as we were asked to be there from 3-8 and to teach some lessons. We arrived just before 3, in a bit of a sweaty rush after our long night on the pub crawl and countless conversations wondering what would be expected of us. We didn’t know if the school taught scripted style lessons (where you basically just read from a workbook and do activities all laid out for you) or whether we would be required to create our own lesson plans as we had practiced in our TEFL training course. We soon found out.

Shortly after arriving we were given about two seconds of instruction, a handbook, and an eagerly awaiting student. This, to say the least, was slightly intimidating. We decided to dive in and do our best, but we were both feeling uneasy and fearful that our student would have a grammar question that we were not prepared to answer. Unfortunately for our students, this did happen, and we could only do our best to avoid the question and move on cursing ourselves that we didn’t bring some grammar cheat sheets we saved from our TEFL course.

We did our lessons, spoke to some of the regular employees and decided that basically this school sucks. They do a sort of round-robin with their students, shuffling them from one teacher to the next for each lesson, which doesn’t make much sense because most teachers should want to monitor their students’ progress and know where to begin the next lesson. Also, each student uses the same workbooks, which can’t possibly meet the needs of every student. Imagine that you know a second language fairly well, and you want to improve your knowledge of business linguistics for that particular language; does it make sense that you should be using the same workbook as a 16-year-old who is studying to pass her high school exams? Of course not. There were a few students who we wanted to tell to go to Interlingue where they could get a proper English education.

In the end, we did what was asked of us to the best of our ability, and we were paid for our efforts, so we decided that if this school asks us to work for them, we are not in a position to say no simply for the fact that we need to eat. Of course, we are hoping other schools will call us for interviews soon, so that we at least have the option.