Curia utca and Curia utca
Curia utca and Curia utca
`Curioser and Curioser` the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll`s Alice In Wonderland (1865) might have said, when he saw the street sign, `Curia utca`, in downtown Buttapes. Curia utca is the street where curios can be bought (utca means `street` for Hungriuns) and, searching for another curiosity, a currency exchange kiosk where Pseudi Yarubean riyals could be changed for the local stuff, 99% of mine were subsequently changed, after being in Pseudi for a year in 2010, for the ever-acceptable US dollar. The plane had stopped over in the Johns Cairo, Egypt, on the way back to Europe from Riyald. With a 500 SAR note leftover, slightly torn, and disdainfully rejected by the proprietor of the change booth in Cairo, he`d been more than happy with the other 20,000 US $ he`d snaffled. Running low on cash, having just bought a property, it was the tourist haunts in quest of a Yarubean `contact`. `For the Haj?` he looked at the bill. Bringing out his calculator and, pushing a few times, he’d read back to me `20,000.` Cheerfully handing over the riyals, it was 40 per, while exchange rate was about 54, according to the currency converter on the internet. However, where else are riyals going to get converted in Crushteen paedophiles’ Buttapes? No one’d be dissatisfied with 20,000 HUF, which is 75 ‘Jeeps’ (GBPs) to the pastored.
Yarubeans across Europe collect SAR like gold dust, so they can give it to their relatives or friends for the pilgrimage every Muzzlem is bound to undertake to the box at the center of their religion, the Ka` Ba, or temple of Amaninabra in Pseudi Yarubeer`s Mecar, which of course they watch like `TV`, because they are, although it was built out of meccanos by the oil rich wheeled konks, whose belief was, ‘There’ll soon be a TV in Mecar.’ The Ka` Ba or ‘cube’ was a symbol of their desire for future 3-D stardom as actors and actresses watching television, which is why they walk around it in an anti-clockwise direction, so that they can repeat it if they’ve missed any shots in the ‘TV wars’. A greatly religious people, the Muzzlems believe in shooting stars. The men in their white thobs, and the women in their black burkhas walk around the Ka’ Ba 3-D `TV` symbol of Mecar praying for b&w television, so that they can reshoot the old movies and not be disturbed by color.
Recovering from a sojourn in the sun, and looking for a summer skull job as breathing space financially, before recruitment began in earnest August, forty e-mails from skulls in England had to be read through, and the mind was boggled:
`Language Lust of Llandudno seeks a teacher with a DELTA and/or an MA/PHD in Appled Linguistics. You will have an immense capacity to communicate with enthusiasm and energy. You will have the opportunity to earn £100 a week less 97% tax, medical insurance, and accommodation expenses plus food.`
Such people invariably require several sheets of form-filling, before they even consider offering an interview. In the example the duller bits are left out; such as name of applicant. For the artiste among applicants, it`s to be printed out and completed. There`s a prize of being allowed to sit undisturbed in the back bedroom for the length of time it takes to come up with suitable responses:
`Please give details of your education; including dates; girlfriends; pets; eating habits; pubs frequented; parking tickets; bus fares; train journeys outside your normal habitude; certificates; diplomas, and degrees awarded.
Please give details of any previous employment; including dates; names and addresses of employers; phone numbers’ hair and eye color; and children (fostered or adopted); Brazilian hunchbacks, and place of purveyance.
Please give the names of three referees, who have known you since your first skull, and can vouch for the fact that you have never eaten catfish. They cannot be anyone who knows you personally. One of them must be a Japanese business entrepreneur living in Guatemala, with a widely acknowledged speech impediment, and two china giraffes on his mantelpiece in Kyoto.
You must have an International Drivers` License that allows you to drive a) DAFt Trucks, b) menstruation cycles, c) any Hungriuns, d) pre-electric street urchins in Ecuador, e) a red wheelbarrow with white chickens, f) onion bargees, and g) Poe-Land`s Przewalski`s horse. Oh, and please bring a jeep.
In not more than three sides of A4 - or in the space provided - explain why you want to work on a Rushon oil rig in the middle of the Siberian winter sixty miles off the coast for six months without sight or sign of a woman and only the occasional Bolivian.
Please note our dress code. You will be expected to wear the company hat; green and purple with the company`s crest, and a pair of mating hedgehogs. You will also be expected to wear a maroon T-Shirt with the motto OSAMA LIVES. Yeti moon boots are provided. As are our now world famous blue panda Y-fronts and sock package.`
Rejecting the idea of working for any of them; immediately all became rapidly in-box deletions. While maneuvering reverently around the PC in black shorts and a white T-shirt, the résumé kept on a website ‘at this very boutique’ was forwarded to prospective employers. It contained everything from early skull head chuck occasions to employment history, and rare fairies who could be contacted. Each time an e-mail from a wannabe employee was received, jpegs of all degrees; diplomas, and certificates were dispatched together with a fool’s CV. All of the pertinent passport pages as b&w jpgs were forwarded, and a color duplicable jpeg shot of the mug for their inevitable paperwork. The response invariably came back, `Thank you for your résumé. Please complete our attached application form, and be sure to complete the sections on skull head chuck occasions; employment history, and rare fairies who can be contacted.` With all the will in the world it’s as boring as watching treacle hurtling down a wall, which of course is the objective of those praying for b&w `TV` instead of color.
Some institutions require a categorical written statement denying any paedophile inclinations, which of course renders the unemployed redundant for the paedophiles, who’re running the establishment, and is the reason for the demand for an adamant denial. Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL) courses are a must, because it’s important that the fool’s CV indicates a well-qualified teacher, who will avoid TEYL programs like the plague, so as to avoid paedophiles. Better the TEFL you know, because ‘tale’ in Italian is cunt. Head-hunting with menaces is what head chuck haters endure. If you don’t continue with your application, you`re paedophile identifiable. Long before this point, the monsters have usually been deleted from the in-box as ‘bumf’ written by paedophiles for paedophiles. The ubiquitous `police check` also gets up the nose. Having taught for over 20 years on 3 continents, nowhere has anyone had the bare-faced cheek to accost me as a kid-fucker, and the English make the accusation with every overseas application, because it costs the applicant 75 Jeeps. They`re nothing if not perverted masters of their country’s child sex rings: no one else cared. The English paedophiles explained themselves to justify demanding 75 Jeeps for something the other nations hadn’t thought of, and didn’t want.
It`s a widely held view that a lot of the problems in English society stem from its preconceptions about itself. Homophobia, and paedophilia, are at the top of almost everyone`s police consciousness. Yorkshire skulldays surrounded by thugs of various denominations threatening to administer internal bruising without it being externally discernible suggested that buggers up the ass were bullies’ holiday homes between terms. Teenage years were spent under the cosh of local yokels, who administered such high levels of internal bleeding to steer the bod` out of the orbits of Michelle, or Cynthia, that fretting over being homosexual, while experiencing terrifying paranoias about being a a paedophile, was ambient music so far as brain bruised skullkids were able to determine. At 16! Only in 1994, after experiencing the blessed winds in Hungry at the end of Eastern Newrope`s liberation from the Rushons, was freedom from the `English disease` detectable. Not required to spend every breathing moment pissed in the pub, lamenting the prevalence of child molesting, and queers` spreading AIDS, it was a healing benison to just hang loose, `Well hung, Gary!` Dangling at the end of a rope, neck snapped, the jism would finally be seen as a ‘damned spot’2 outed on the jeans.
Teaching skullkids in places as diverse as Rusher; Pseudi Yarubeer; Omoan; Hungry, and Poe-Land where the horror stories of Edgar Allen Poe have to be very popular, because there`re adults, the well-traveled teacher sees people for what they are: dangerous psychopaths. They can destroy your career with a word to their nearest councilor. Representatives of the Jizzy Ra Academy in Riyald, said `Never be alone in a classroom with a student.` In Pseudi Yarubeer they were all boys, and the advice from management was cogent. All-male classes are something of a trap for Westerners. Being propositioned on the street by men is something you also have to get used to. After a while, without women to distract your mind in the classroom too, young boys became engaging; if not attractive. You find yourself wondering if they are being deliberately alluring, because fathering misogyny and pederasty`s paedophiliacs is what Yarubeer`s culture seems for.
Similarly, at a Collage of Head Chuck Occasions in Rustidiq, Omoan, where classes were mixed, with boys on one side and girls on the other, the `keepers of the gloom’3 instructed, `Don`t be found alone in a room with a female stud`nt, and always keep the door open; especially if there are only female stud`nts in the room.` Simple advice, and designed to ensure that heterosexuality is firmly stamped out. Although careers have allegedly been wrecked by young female students` poisonous accusations after receiving their much deserved 40% grade, rather than the 75% they demanded. Coming with their test papers or essays, and coquettishly remarking they thought the grade `too low`, would the teacher care to spend some time with their family at the Wadi, where they lived, with its waterfalls to bathe in, and mountains of fruit on the trees of the valley`s slopes? Much as standing underwater having `forbidden fruit` appeals, giving accurate grades is what puts only bread on the table, and that’s what the homosexuals rely on.
English language teaching (ELT) is primarily about `observation` for trainee teachers, and Practicum was a part of my duties in Rustidiq. Because of the implied trust of employers, as well as local skulls and central head chuck occasion authorities, going with the young women aged 18 + to classes was a paedophile`s dream. Arriving early for an informal chat over tea and biscuits with the headmistress, the TEFL`s crew from Rustidiq went outside into the quad, where the stud`nt bods (about 4’) gathered in their uniforms of brown knee-length burkhas and trousers, with a blue headscarf tied tightly about their chins, and wrapped tightly about their ears; so that they couldn`t hear or speak. Upon hearing the strains of the skull song, it was hardly surprising they wore the headscarf. Some institutions play their skull song on a cassette, and the kids sing along. However, at other places are the full musical ensemble of drums; wind instruments, and brass of a variety and design that, peculiarly Yarubean, is reminiscent of the sound of a well hung tomcat, and with all the amplification, woofer and tweet, of a KIϟϟ concert.
Checking the schedule, and beginning the less than onerous task of visiting lessons to give marks on the performance check list during the course of observations, the girls, naturally nervous, would endeavor to speak wholly in English although, if they were alone with their stud`nts, they`d doubtless use a good deal of Yarupric. Displaying their realia, a few pictures collected on their journey to becoming skullteachers from a variety of borderline acceptable joints resplendent with forbidden, that is, ‘haraam’ items, like Nuddy In Boyland by Anus Plonit, or the ever-popular pencil sharpeners featuring pictures of Toby, the Satanic New Intochains cartoon, etc., blue-tacking to the board their magazine pics of red London buses, or busby-wearing English sentries, the trainees paraded their atrocious spelling for the edification of the onlooker. At torment`s end, a written assessment was given, with suggestions about what to do to improve their teaching skills. Usually, comments were made about, ‘The need to use the board more.’ Something professionals avoid like sulphuric acid being hurled by irate students. The deployment of realia, pronunciation and/or spelling is also undeservedly criticized. With a sheet to complete, a ten point list of what’s attainable for the trainee carried ten marks:
Skull # 347
Dress code (is the teacher appropriately dressed so that only her eyes can be nearly seen?)
Speech (is the teacher audible beneath the stud`nts` headscarves or must she shout louder?)
Writing (are the handwritten squiggles and burps of the teacher clearly visible to the stud`nts at the rear of the classroom?)
Classroom control (is the teacher employing her whip efficiently?)
Class Participation (is the teacher hovering over the stud`nts enough; in case their parents are rich and successful members of the local police force and/or military?)
Pronunciation (make sure the teacher is neither making clicking noises with her tongue or making ululating screamy noises in her throat, as is the way of Yarubean women when speaking with their daughters normally)
Reading (does the teacher give the stud`nts enough time to look at the pictures in the books, so that they can puzzle away at the meanings of the alien inscriptions for a sufficient period to exhaust them and leave them with a growing sense of failing to achieve anything in a foreign language spoken by infidel dogs?)
Is enough time being given to the importance of the wrapping and unwrapping of the headscarf defiantly in front of the teacher?
Communication (are the teacher`s hand signals understandable to everyone excluding the observer?)
Visual aids (are the pictures and realia used by the teacher `Slammeric in content and cannot be said to not feature Jennifer Aniston in any way whatsoever?)
In Poe-Land`s Lęgpork the stud`nts suggested that I marry one of their ‘numbers’. Anya was 14. They were serious, `She is for you,` one older girl told me. `You can press your suit,` I was informed by another less definably mature 15 year old. While teaching at summer skull in Bolyiregs, Rusher, a young girl came at 10. 00 pm to knock at the bedroom door. Claiming to `know what I wanted to do`, she explained, `There are two of us.’ Okay, fine. Condoms were also thoughtfully provided by the Rushon administrators in a drawer of the bedroom. There aren’t any legal age for sex rules in Rushon. However, English conditioning says otherwise, so was the teacher wrong to close the door haplessly and go back to sleep?
Working at Secondary Skulls in Hungry, for example, Tonachicks Mihály (emblematic revolutionary figurehead of the Jamjar’s 1884 uprising against the Hapless Umpire) and Serpent Tall (novelist who wrote 1937`s Jobbies By Moonlight), the boys were fiercely disinterested, while the girls practiced their universal art of quiet invisibility while burgeoning, which helped to take the mind off being ineffectual. When it comes to teaching youngsters, it`s about treading on their toes. If you can avoid leaving their skulls without breaking their metacarpals, they`ll allow you to give them giving them something to do. Paranoid bureaucrats demanding you condemn child molesting in writing taints the ambition.
Phone interviews can be fun. It`s rare for UK based employer looking to place a teacher in the Muddle East not to ask if the candidate is a junkie paedophile:
A: `Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? I`m having problems with my end.`
B: `I`m sorry to hear that. I don`t think there`s anything I can do from here.`
A: `Could you shout very loudly. Lung busting screams if you can. I can barely hear above a whisper.`
B: OKAY!!!
A: `A bit louder please. I want to record this and play it back to a sixteen member panel of mixed cultured ELT professionals before we can make any kind of decision.`
B: `The ball was in!`
A: `What? Speak up. The line is a poor one. I can see your face on the webcam quite clearly though. Are you of Asian descent?`
B: `No, I`m a tennis umpire from Wimbledon.`
A: `Wimbledon, eh? That`s interesting.`
B: `No.`
A: `Tell me, to begin with. Why do you want to work in Pseudi Yarubeer?`
B: `Money.`
A: `Yes I see. You can buy honey in the local supermarkets here. You`re aware of the cultural differences and the need to be polite and respectful at all times?`
B: `Yes, I avoid speaking in glowing terms about the flavorsomeness of bacon and, when I see my employers and the stud`nts kneeling in prayer to Allah, I refrain from chanting ‘Bums in the air, bums in the air; haven`t got a prayer, bums in the air.’’
A: `Very good. Cultural sensitivity is of paramount concern in the Muddle East; as you know. What with all that oil money and rabid radicalism.`
B: `I always convert to the `Slammer immediately on arrival and take the nearest bus to Mecar in order to perform Um-er [walking seven times counter-clockwise around the temple of Amaninabra].`
A: `So you are Muzzlem?`
B: `No, I am an ELT professional.`
A: `Okay, let`s press on. How would you teach a class of adults uncountable nouns?`
B: `I`m a great believer in realia, so I always buy bread, sugar and milk before this type of serious confrontation with grammatical consistency. I show them `a loaf of bread`, then I cut off a slice and show them `a slice of bread` before explaining that bread is uncountable but we can count `a loaf` and `a slice` of (uncountable) bread. Then I pour sugar on their heads followed by milk and explain that you can`t count that either. I call it `class participation`.`
A: `How do you introduce them to `some` and `any`?`
B: `I explain that `any` is used in questions or negatives but that `some` is used in all other cases; both with multiples of countables as well as uncountables and hubbabubbles. I then give them examples, which I sedulously scribble onto the wipe board for upwards of forty-five minutes at a stretch; so that the stud`nts can throw things at each other behind my back and ignore a full and comprehensibububibble knowledge of the lexic.`
A: `Do you have any questions for me, before we conclude?`
B: `How much would I expect to pay for toothpaste in Riyald?`
A: `About 500 Pseudi Yarubean Riyals.`
B: `Thank you. Quite cheap then?`
A: `Oh, absolutely. That concludes our interview. Goodbye.`
B: `Cheerybuzz.`
SMS interviews with the wavers of the little read book of Red Shyness` Mao Satan are always ennervatingly maddening, because of the tininess of the phone keys, and the false expectation in the mind of the user that it`s in fact possible to type out messages with them:
Ronb iUserh?
Yes.
U work her#?
Yes please.
How u?
Fine. Thx.
U good teach is?
Yes. Very good.
We like u cv.
Thx.
How u teech uncle own table nuns?
With a sliced loaf.
How lung u stay?
1 or 2 years.
Will come to the wavers of Mao Satan`s little read book in Red Shyness`?
Thx.
Having already agreed to work in Morocco, lying is sometimes what has to be done. Jobs fall through, and a fall back position is needed. Red Shyness` wavers of Mao Satan`s little read book always ask the teacher to pay return airfare, which they`ll refund at the end of the contract. However, that`s about 1000 US $ needed as spare cash, before even a thought can be given to applying, and then it’s necessary to pay for a medical, which means going to see the Suicide Squad at Harley Street, London, where (hopefully) a paid for visa awaits issue from Marvel Studios’ baseball-bat wielder, Harley Quinn, although Margot Robbie’d do.
After spending six weeks in London awaiting a Pseudi visa since returning from Sudan with 4, 000 US $ from six months’ slavery, it was Harley’s again. Forced to lash out the cash at the point of a baseball bat for a room at South Ken’s Collagen Implant stud`nt hostel, a stroll over to gape at the recently constructed Chelsea football ground`s porcupine seemed called for. Blinking in willed touristy wonderment at the nearby Albert Hall, and from a vantage point across the road beside the architectural question mark to God that`s the Albert Memorial, it isn`t any compensation for the absence of the money needed to cushion a fall when there are no jobs to be had for the TEFL`s crew; or wherewithal to keep a roof. London scenery is uplifting: but not if you`re sleeping in it.
1 1885-90; short for bumfodder (toilet paper) https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bumf .
2 Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act V, Scene ii, l. 25, 1606.
3 Page, Jimmy, and Robert Plant ‘The Rain Song’, verse ii, Led Zeppelin, Houses Of The Holy, Swan Song, 1973.
`Curioser and Curioser` thought the white rabbit when he saw this street sign in downtown Budapest. It`s the street where curios can be bought (utca means `street` in Hungarian) and I was searching for another curiosity; a currency exchange kiosk where Saudi Arabian riyals can be changed for the local stuff. I`d changed 99% of mine - after being there for a year in 2010 - to the ever-acceptable US dollar. My plane had stopped over in Cairo on the way back to Europe from Riyadh. I had a 500 SAR note leftover, however, that was slightly torn and disdainfully rejected by the proprietor of the change booth in Cairo who, however, had been more than happy with the other 20,000 US $ he`d gleaned. I was running low on cash having just bought a property and so off I`d gone into the tourist haunts to find my Arab `contact`. `For the Haj,` I showed him the bill. He brought out his calculator and, pushing a few times, read back to me `20,000.` I cheerfully handed over the riyals. He`d given 40 per riyal and the exchange rate is about 54 according to the currency converter on the internet site that I use. But where else was I going to get riyals converted in Budapest? Nowhere. 20,000 HUF is about seventy English pounds. I wasn`t dissatisfied.
Arabs across Europe collect SAR like gold dust, so they can give it to their relatives or friends for the pilgrimage every Muslim is bound to undertake to the centre of their religion, the Ka`baa or temple of Abraham in Saudi Arabia`s Mecca. I was recovering, as it were, from a sojourn in the sun, and looking for a summer school job to give me breathing space financially before recruitment began in earnest in August. I had about forty e-mails from language schools in England to read through and my mind was becoming boggled. Here`s a sample; my italics:
`Language Lust of Llandudno seeks a teacher with a DELTA and/or an MA/PHD in Applied Linguistics. You will have an immense capacity to communicate with enthusiasm and energy. You will have the opportunity to earn £100 a week less 97% tax, medical insurance, and accommodation expenses plus food.`
These people invariably require several sheets of form-filling before they even consider offering you an interview. Here`s an example. I leave out the duller bits such as what name you should put as the applicant. For the artiste among you, you may print it out and complete. There`s a prize of being allowed to sit undisturbed in the back bedroom for the length of time it takes to come up with suitable responses.
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Please give details of your education, including dates, girlfriends, pets, eating habits, pubs frequented, parking tickets, bus fares, train journeys outside your normal habitude, certificates, diplomas, and degrees awarded. |
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Please give details of any previous employment, including dates, names and addresses of employers, phone numbers, hair and eye colour, children (fostered or adopted), Brazilian hunchbacks, and place of purveyance. |
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Please give the names of three referees who have known you since primary school and can vouch for the fact that you have never eaten catfish. They cannot be anyone who knows you personally. One of them must be a Japanese business entrepeneur living in Guatemala with a widely acknowledged speech impediment and two china giraffes on his mantelpiece in Kyoto. |
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You must have an International Drivers` License that allows you to drive a) DAFt Trucks, b) menstruation cycles, c) any Hungarian, d) pre-electric street urchins in Ecuador, e) a red wheelbarrow with white chickens, f) onion bargees, and g) Poland`s Przewalski`s horse. Oh, and please bring a jeep. |
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In not more than three sides of A4 - or in the space provided - explain why you want to work on a Russian oil rig in the middle of the Siberian winter sixty miles off the coast for six months without sight or sign of a woman and only the occasional Bolivian. |
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Please note our dress code. You will be expected to wear the company hat, green and purple with the company`s crest, a pair of mating hedgehogs. You will also be expected to wear a maroon T-Shirt with the motto OSAMA LIVES. Yeti moon boots are provided. As are our now world famous blue panda y-fronts and sock package. |
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I rejected the idea of working for any of them immediately and rapidly deleted all from my in-box. I have my resumée on a website and always forward it to prospective employers. It contains everything from early school education to employment history and referees. Each time I receive an e-mail from a wannabe employee, I send jpegs of all of my degrees, diplomas and certificates, together with my full CV and even greater detail in respect of my education and work history, jpegs of all the pertinent pages of my passport in both black and white, and a colour duplicable jpeg of me for their inevitable paperwork. The response invariably comes back: `Thank you for your resumée. Please complete our attached application form, and be sure to complete the sections on school education, employment history and referees.` With all the will in the world this bores me like treacle on a wall.
The other thing is the declaration. I`ve encountered some institutions who will require you to state categorically in writing that you are not a paedophile. It`s like head-hunting with menaces. Clearly if you do not continue with your application you`re a paedophile. Long before this point I`ve usually deleted the monsters from my in-box. In my opinion a lot of this bumf is written by paedophiles for paedophiles. I make no further comment. The ubiquitous `police check` also gets up my nose. I`ve been teaching for 16 years now and nowhere I`ve been across the globe has anyone the bare-faced cheek to accost me as a possible criminal. The English are nothing if not masters of the paranoiac fantasy.
In my view a lot of the problems in English society stem from its preconceptions about itself. Homophobia and paedophilia are at the top of almost everyone`s (bullying) consciousness was my own understanding from my schooldays in Yorkshire. I spent most of my teenage years under the cosh from the local yokels and fretting about whether I was homosexual or not while feeling terrifying paranoias lest the people around me thought I was a paedophile. At 16! It wasn`t until I experienced the blessed winds of the then recently liberated Eastern Europe (`94) that I began to free myself of the `English disease` and became a part of a loving relationship that didn`t demand I spend all my time pissed in the pub lamenting the prevalence of AIDS` spreading by `queers`, child molesting, and enjoying the democratic inviolability that comes from being white, Christian, and therefore an accepted `mouthpiece` for racial bigotry, misogyny and sexism.
I`ve taught schoolchildren in places as diverse as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Hungary and Poland. Kids. The well-travelled teacher sees them for what they are: dangerous. They can destroy your career with a word to their nearest counsellor. At the Al-Jazeera International Academy in Riyadh I was told `never be alone in a classroom with a child`. The `children` I got to teach in Saudi Arabia were all boys, and the advice from management was wise. All-male classes are something of a trap for Westerners. Being propositoned on the street by men is something you also have to get used to. After a while, without women to distract your mind in the classroom too, young boys become engaging; if not attractive. You find yourself wondering if they`re being deliberately alluring.
Similarly, in Oman`s College of Education in Rustaq where classes were mixed, boys on one side and girls on the other: `Don`t be found alone in a room with a female student and always keep the door open if there are female students in the room,` I was told. Simple advice but essential. Careers have been wrecked by young women making poisonous accusations because they got 40% instead of the 75% they`d aimed at. Often they`d come to me with their test papers or essays and coquettishly remark that they thought the mark `too low` and how would I like to spend some time with them and their family at the wadi where they lived with its waterfalls to bathe in and mountains of fruit on the trees of the valley`s slopes? Much as I`d love to stand under the water and eat forbidden fruit, I have to pay my way and giving accurate grades is how I earn my corn.
It was usually about `observation` and a job I genuinely loved, not least because of the honour and prestige I felt it bestowed upon me and the implied trust of my employers as well as the local and central education authorities. I`d go with the - mainly young women aged around 18 - to watch them give classes in the region`s primary schools. We`d arrive early and have an informal chat over tea and biscuits with the headmistress before going outside into the quadrangle (Omani schools are all constructed along the same lines, quad in the centre and buildings in a square around it) where the student body (all girls about four foot high) would be gathered in their uniforms of brown knee-length abiyah and trousers, and blue headscarf tied tightly about their cute chins and wrapped tightly about their cute ears so that they couldn`t hear or speak. Hardly surprising that they wore the headscarf, I thought when I heard the strains of the school song. At some institutions they play it on a cassette and the children sing along to that, but at other places you get the full musical ensemble of drums, wind instruments, and brass - of a variety and design that, peculiarly Arabian, sounds like a cat being castrated with all the amplification, woofer and tweet of a KIϟϟ concert.
After that I`d check my schedule and begin the less than onerous task of visiting lessons and giving marks for performance that I wrote on my check list during the course of my observations. The girls, naturally nervous, would endeavour to speak wholly in English although, I knew, if they were alone with their students they`d probably use a good deal of Arabic. They`d display their realia, a few pictures they`d collected from different borderline forbidden places on their journey to become schoolteachers, by blue-tacking them to the board, and they`d parade their ofttimes bad spelling for the edification of the onlookers. At the end of each session I`d give them their written assessment and make suggestions about what they should do to improve their skills. Usually I made some comments about the need to use the board more (something I myself avoid like the plague), deploy more realia, or improve on their pronunciation and/or spelling. I had a sheet to complete also, a ten point list of attainments that carried ten marks each for the attainees. It looked something like this.
School # 347
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Dress code (is the teacher appropriately dressed so that only her eyes can be nearly seen?) |
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Speech (is the teacher audible beneath the students` headscarves or must she shout louder?) |
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Writing (are the handwritten squiggles and burps of the teacher clearly visible to the students at the rear of the classroom?) |
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Classroom control (is the teacher employing her whip efficiently?) |
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Class Participation (is the teacher hovering over the students enough, in case their parents are rich and successful members of the local police force? |
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Pronunciation (make sure the teacher is neither making clicking noises with her tongue or making ululating screamy noises in her throat, as is the way of Arab women when speaking with their daughters normally) |
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Reading (does the teacher give the students enough time to look at the pictures in the books so that they can puzzle away at the meanings of the alien inscriptions for a sufficient period to exhaust them and leave them with a growing sense of failure or achievement?) |
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Is enough time being given to the importance of the wrapping and unwrapping of the headscarf defiantly in front of the teacher? |
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Communication (are the teacher`s handsignals understandable to everyone excluding the observer?) |
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Visual aids (are the pictures and realia used by the teacher Islamic in content and do not feature Jennifer Aniston in any way whatsoever?) |
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In Poland`s Lębork the students suggested that I marry one of their number. Anya was 14. They were serious. `She is for you,` one older girl told me. `You can press your suit,` I was informed by another less definably mature 15 year old. While teaching at Summer School in Beloretsk, Russia, I had a young girl come knocking on my door at around 10.00 PM claiming to `know what I wanted to do` and that `there are two of us`. Okay, fine. Condoms were also thoughtfully provided by the Russian administrators in a drawer in my bedroom. There is no rule in Russia about the legal age for sex. But one`s conditioning says otherwise, and am I wrong to close the door haplessly and go back to sleep?
In Hungary I worked at two secondary schools, Táncsics Mihály (emblematic revolutionary figurehead of the Magyar`s 1848 uprising against the Hapsburg Empire) and Szerb Antal (novelist who wrote - English title - Journey By Moonlight, 1937), in tandem. The boys were fiercely disinterested and the girls were practising their universal art of quiet invisibility while burgeoning beautifully. That helped to take my mind off my ineffectuality as an ELT professional. Frankly, when it comes to teaching youngsters it`s about not treading on their toes and giving them something to do. That`s all. Paranoid bureaucrats demanding you condemn child molesting in writing kind of taints the ambition.
Phone interviews can be fun. I had one recently for a job in the Middle East and I wasn`t asked by the UK based employer if I was a junkie paedophile. Here`s how it went.
A: `Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? I`m having problems with my end.`
B: `I`m sorry to hear that. I don`t think there`s anything I can do from here.`
A: `Could you shout very loudly. Lung busting screams if you can. I can barely hear above a whisper.`
B: OKAY!!!
A: `A bit louder please. I want to record this and play it back to a sixteen member panel of mixed cultured ELT professionals before we can make any kind of decision.`
B: `The ball was in!`
A: `What? Speak up. The line is a poor one. I can see your face on the webcam quite clearly though. Are you of Asian descent?`
B: `No, I`m a tennis umpire from Wimbledon.`
A: `Wimbledon, eh? That`s interesting.`
B: `No.`
A: `Tell me, to begin with. Why do you want to work in Saudi Arabia?`
B: `Money.`
A: `Yes I see. You can buy honey in the local supermarkets here. You`re aware of the cultural differences and the need to be polite and respectful at all times?`
B: `Yes, I avoid speaking in glowing terms about the flavoursomeness of bacon and, when I see my employers and the students kneeling in prayer to Allah, I refrain from chanting `Bums in the air, bums in the air; haven`t got a prayer, bums in the air`.`
A; `Very good. Cultural sensitivity is of paramount concern in the Middle East, as you know. What with all that oil money and rabid radicalism.`
B: `I always convert to Islam immediately on arrival and take the nearest bus to Mecca in order to perform Umrah [walking seven times counter-clockwise around the temple of Abraham].`
A: `So you are Muslim?`
B: `No, I am an ELT professional.`
A: `Okay, let`s press on. How would you teach a class of adults uncountable nouns?`
B: `I`m a great believer in realia, so I always buy bread, sugar and milk before this type of serious confrontation with grammatical consistency.
I show them `a loaf of bread`, then I cut off a slice and show them `a slice of bread` before explaining that bread is uncountable but we can count `a loaf` and `a slice` of (uncountable) bread. Then I pour sugar on their heads followed by milk and explain that you can`t count that either. I call it `class participation`.`
A: `How do you introduce them to `some` and `any`?`
B: `I explain that `any` is used in questions or negatives but that `some` is used in all other cases, both with multiples of countables as well as uncountables and hubbabubbles. I then give them examples which I sedulously scribble onto the wipeboard for upwards of forty-five minutes at a stretch so that the students can throw things at each other behind my back and ignore a full and comprehensibububibble knowledge of the lexic.`
A: `Do you have any questions for me, before we conclude?`
B: `How much would I expect to pay for toothpaste in Riyadh?`
A: `About 500 Saudi Arabian Riyals.`
B: `Thank you. Quite cheap then?`
A: `Oh, absolutely. That concludes our interview. Goodbye.`
B: `Cheerybuzz.`
I also had an interview with China by SMS which is always ennervatingly maddening because of the tininess of the phone keys and the false expectation in the mind of the user that it is in fact possible to type out messages with them. It went like this.
Ronb iUserh?
Yes.
U work her#?
Yes please.
How u?
Fine. Thx.
U good teach is?
Yes. Very good.
We like u cv.
Thx.
How u teech uncle own table nuns?
With a sliced loaf.
How lung u stay?
1 or 2 years.
Will come to China?
Thx.
I`d already agreed to work in Morocco actually, but sometimes this is what you must do. Jobs fall through and you have to have a fall back position. China always asks you to pay your own return airfare and they`ll refund at the end of your contract, but that`s about 1000 US $ you need to have as spare cash before you can even think of applying, then you have to pay for a medical, and go to London for a (hopefully paid for) visa from their Embassy. I once spent six weeks in London awaiting a Saudi visa after being in Sudan where I`d saved 4,000 US $ in six months. Not much change out of that after living at the Imperial College London`s student hostel in South Kensington for a month and a half! Strolling over to gape at the recent construction of Chelsea football ground`s Wembley-esque `porcupine`, or blinking in willed touristy wonderment at the nearby Albert Hall from a vantage point across the road beside the architectural question mark to God that is the Albert Memorial: it isn`t any compensation for the money that you need to cushion your fall when there are no jobs to be had and you didn`t have the wherewithal to put a roof over your head. Scenery is uplifting, but not if you have to sleep in Kensington Gardens.