9 Things You Always Wanted to Know About the TEFL Racket
*but were afraid to ask*
What's with all the damn acronyms? TEFL, CELTA, ESL, FCE, DELTA... all these have something to do with teaching English. TEFL, incidentally, stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
Learning English is Big. Big like Whoa! It should be no surprise, then, that teaching English is big business. I've heard Language Link --my employer -- referred to more than once as 'The McDonald's of language schools.'
In fact -- and this is where it begins to get Russia-specific-- demand is growing furiously, leaving the supply of teachers soundly in the dust.
As with other big industries, chain schools naturally move towards product uniformity. In this situation, that means that one or two certification processes have become the gold standard, and sine qua non of teaching English. CELTA is the chief of them all. It stands for Certificate for English.... something something something...
So what do you do when you run out of certified English teachers? Any company worth it's salt will find creative ways to meet the demand. Language Link solved this by soliciting people who lacked Certification, seemed to have some faint whiff of competence and hiring them as 'interns' for less pay. (I don't mean this bitterly... It's a better deal for me to do this then drop $5000 on a damn CELTA course).
But... you might think this would make a difference in one's responsibilities. You would be wrong. Here, the only distinguishing thing about interns is their paycheck. (That and they have quarterly 'projects' whose satisfactory--ie. >60th percentile -- completion is a prerequisite for pay increases.
'But Peter,' you ask, 'Don't the students care whether they are being taught by an experienced teacher rather than an inexperienced schmuck like yourself?' They may, but on this, where possible, they are kept safely in the dark. Teachers are tacitly encouraged to keep the lights off, as well.
But what if it isn't possible to keep the client in the dark? In my area of employment -- 'In Company' teachers who go to corporate clients -- most of the corporate clients demand resumes of their prospective teachers. On this I have nothing to say... Only that, I might have heard of some occasions where a teacher found out from independent sources that unbeknownst to him, he had become 5 years older and earned a Master's degree in Linguistics, according to his CV. Or, I might not have heard that...
I can't complain, though. The new Russia is a hard place to work, and they make this whole process damn easy. If you can't stand the grime (and Language Link is most certainly that... quite possibly the grimiest in Russia, which would place it high in the running for grimiest worldwide) find someone else to clean. If not...
Forget it Jake, it's Russiatown.
Learning English is Big. Big like Whoa! It should be no surprise, then, that teaching English is big business. I've heard Language Link --my employer -- referred to more than once as 'The McDonald's of language schools.'
In fact -- and this is where it begins to get Russia-specific-- demand is growing furiously, leaving the supply of teachers soundly in the dust.
As with other big industries, chain schools naturally move towards product uniformity. In this situation, that means that one or two certification processes have become the gold standard, and sine qua non of teaching English. CELTA is the chief of them all. It stands for Certificate for English.... something something something...
So what do you do when you run out of certified English teachers? Any company worth it's salt will find creative ways to meet the demand. Language Link solved this by soliciting people who lacked Certification, seemed to have some faint whiff of competence and hiring them as 'interns' for less pay. (I don't mean this bitterly... It's a better deal for me to do this then drop $5000 on a damn CELTA course).
But... you might think this would make a difference in one's responsibilities. You would be wrong. Here, the only distinguishing thing about interns is their paycheck. (That and they have quarterly 'projects' whose satisfactory--ie. >60th percentile -- completion is a prerequisite for pay increases.
'But Peter,' you ask, 'Don't the students care whether they are being taught by an experienced teacher rather than an inexperienced schmuck like yourself?' They may, but on this, where possible, they are kept safely in the dark. Teachers are tacitly encouraged to keep the lights off, as well.
But what if it isn't possible to keep the client in the dark? In my area of employment -- 'In Company' teachers who go to corporate clients -- most of the corporate clients demand resumes of their prospective teachers. On this I have nothing to say... Only that, I might have heard of some occasions where a teacher found out from independent sources that unbeknownst to him, he had become 5 years older and earned a Master's degree in Linguistics, according to his CV. Or, I might not have heard that...
I can't complain, though. The new Russia is a hard place to work, and they make this whole process damn easy. If you can't stand the grime (and Language Link is most certainly that... quite possibly the grimiest in Russia, which would place it high in the running for grimiest worldwide) find someone else to clean. If not...
Forget it Jake, it's Russiatown.
