Good days and bad? Put them into perspective.

As with any job it would be naive to think that all days will be good days. It took me a long time to work out that the job that I was doing previously was giving me less and less satisfaction and, if I'm honest, encouraged me to spend more time than I should have in continuing, and to put less and less effort into it. I had been inspired when I started on the road to becoming an area manager in the pub trade and benefitted from working with some incredible people, many of whom I am fortunate to still call friend.

In hindsight there were numerous other reasons for this trajectory as my personal life was in perhaps even more disarray than my professional one and trust me when I say that that's saying quite a bit!

Suffice it to say that it was a risk in leaving the UK and heading to Chiang Mai to take the CELTA. It could have amounted to an intense month spent learning the disciplines of the EFL teacher but with nothing at the end of it, or even worse the discovery that teaching was as equally demoralising as working in the pub/restaurant trade.

The CELTA was as tough as I'd been led to believe but I can unequivocally confirm that it, and the following 6 years that have brought me to where I am now, have been some of the best years of my entire life. Sure there have still been good days and bad days, there always will be, but even the bad days aren't all bad, are they?

Today has been one of those mixed days but the way it started was just the warmest justification for why I chose this new path. I arrived to find this photo on my desk and signed by the students on the back. Somehow puts everything else into perspective.

I was once told that if you have a bad day, write it down and it becomes the benchmark for all future bad days. If ever a day is worse than the one that you wrote down, that replaces your previous benchmark. I can heartily recommend this to anyone struggling for perspective and who wants to enjoy each day as much as they can...

"Takeaway beer" or "take away beer"?

Wandering around the internet looking for examples of extreme, crazy, or extremely crazy laws, I found these;

Only a qualified electrician is allowed to change a light bulb in Victoria, Australia

In Canada, by law, one out of every five songs on the radio must be sung by a Canadian

In Florida, it is illegal to pass wind in a public place after 6pm on Thursdays

In all of these instances, I find it hard to disagree. Anything electrical is potentially life threatening. Who among us hasn't screwed in that bulb only to get a vivid surprise when the bulb springs to life, indicating our lack of forethought where surging volts of death are concerned? Secondly, if we all started doing the jobs of electricians, they might be encouraged to take up secretarial work, or policing, that's not a good idea.

Canada has produced some awesome songsters. Leonard Cohen, Alanis Morissette and Joni Mitchell are just some of the amazing musicians from the land of maple syrup, so the chances of having to listen to Justin Bieber or Celine Dion that often seems within tolerance levels.

As for Floridian flatulence, well chances are that you're only going to be adding to the unnecessarily high methane levels if you go around casually bottom burping so maybe it should be enforced globally?

None of these laws would stop me from enjoying my time in these countries but that is where they differ from Indonesia's recent decision to remove bottled beer from sale in Minimarts.

The government of recently elected President Joko Widodo seems to be doing all it can to appease it's conservative coalition partners. To protect the morals of young people in a 90%-plus Muslim populated country by removing the temptation from the purchaser and the Minimart sales staff, is something I could live with. 

However, as far as I have been able to determine, the ban only applies to the "local store", not the supermarkets, even going so far as to specify that any supermarket with more than 12 square metres of sales floor area may continue to sell beer as long as it is located in an area next to the checkout.

So I'm perplexed at having visited the four big supermarkets in my local area this weekend; Hypermart, Farmers Market, Giant and Carrefour, to discover that they have all removed beer from their shelves and when asking a member of staff about it I was greeted with thinly veiled contempt. And laughter. 

 



It is not a need for alcohol on a daily basis that drives me, just the need to be able to enjoy a cold, frosty pilsner in the comfort of my own home whenever I feel like it. This is why I have less of an issue with the minimarts being banned from selling it. But why the need for supermarkets to jump upon the same waggon? 

Sure, beer is still available in restaurants, but at marked up prices and not the comfort of my own home. The agreement to allow Bali to be exempt from the law, on the grounds of disrupting tourism, is so shallow it resembles a beer stain. Tourism is a driver throughout the archipelago.

I also don't believe it's 'Creeping Sharia', a term that suggests Indonesia's slow move to that kind of  government. Rather, it's probably similar to visas and other red tape where the right hand refuses to take any interest in what the left is doing.

The darkest hour is just before dawn

Back in 1986, I'd just moved out of home into a pokey bedroom in a shared house on Bishopthorpe Road in York. My wings had already been exercised a couple of times in preparation for leaving home. When I was eleven, I'd deliberately missed the school bus one morning and turned round and went back home. Once there, I retrieved the rucksack I'd packed the night before, checked all of the essentials were in there; sleeping bag, pocket money, sheath-knife, and got changed.

Now dressed and having draped my school tie over a dining room chair as a reminder that I'd once been a member of the family, I locked the door and set off.

Most of you are going to be thinking "where?" "where does an eleven year old boy run away from home to?". Don't get me wrong, there are enough sad and tragic cases of kids who have no love in their lives. Whose childhoods are blighted by illness or disability or an uncaring society. But I wasn't one of those. I was a slightly spoiled eleven year old whose brother knew more ways to wind him up than was good for an eight year old. I told myself, it was either running away or fratricide. It had come to that.

So for the past week I'd been concocting a plan. I'd leave home as normal, head for the school bus, wait long enough for my parents to go to work before enacting my scheme. I made it all the way, by mixture of hitching and bus, to my Nan and Pop's house in Durham. And, it was a good 5 or 6 hours before my dad came to pick me up. That was a pretty grim drive back, I can tell you. Maybe I'll write more about this another time.

The second break for freedom came when I was 16. A particularly adolescent-sided argument with my mother ended with the words "that's it, I'm leaving". To which my mother replied that I shouldn't let the closing door hit me too hard on the way out. With no other way to save face, I stormed upstairs, packed a bag and booked myself into a B&B on the very same Bishopthorpe Road. Why? Well, I had my freedom, didn't I. I was on my own, out to make my way in the big, wide world. And where better to start than two miles from home in a bed and breakfast.

We had no internet in those days. We did have phones, but it didn't cross my mind to call a few places and find out how much B&B's cost. I just picked the nicest looking one and checked in. These days you have to show ID and sign registers. Back then, I handed over some cash to a small, grandmotherly type and in return I got a key. When I looked at the remnants of my wallet, I realised I'd probably got a maximum of 4 or 5 days living in this sort of luxury. The world turned and I returned to the family home. The pretext was that I'd forgotten underwear, but I think we all knew that that was as close as anyone was going to get to an I'm sorry. That came later.

So, 1986 and here I am. With my dad's help, I'm moved into a box room just outside York's Roman wall. I have a job, trainee manager in a bingo hall, and I have a place all of my own. What I don't have is any experience. I've always been adaptable and am pretty resourceful when push comes to shove, but that morning, when the electricity ran out and I didn't have 50p for the electricity meter and the small room heater that it powered, I understood one version of this blog's title.

Why mention all of this now? well, here I am nearly thirty years later and it's 5 am on a Thursday. I'm living in Indonesia, my wife is lying next to me and I'm sweating like a pig on a spit. Yep, the electricity has gone off and the meter needs feeding. Where's my wallet and torch.....

You want to work in Paradise too?

There is a steady stream of people who decide, for one reason or another, to up-sticks and head for Jakarta. Some people do as I did and head for Asia and then consequently find themselves in Jakarta. Other people head for Jakarta or other parts of Indonesia specifically.

The reasons for coming vary enormously too. It could be to work for a company, such as in the oil industry. It could be a gap year, or it could be as simple as needing a change. Whatever that reason, if you want to work your way around a new country, then teaching is a great choice for many reasons.

If you choose teaching, and teaching English, it usually means learning a new skill (more about that later). It allows you to then take that skill and potentially apply it anywhere that needs an English teacher. Depending on how the experience progresses, you may find yourself diversifying into other jobs. One thing I can pretty safely guarantee though is that the experience will change your life.

So, how to begin........
Well, assuming you aren't currently a teacher then you need to get some experience to become one. Most institutions are looking for some qualification that proves you understand what is involved in teaching either EFL (English as a Foreign Language) or ESL (English as a Second Language). If they're not interested in you having any teaching qualification, worry.

Many teachers take a TEFL course, the 't' stands for teaching. This is often through a company such as  i-2-i (http://www.i-to-i.com/about-i2i/careers-with-i2i/) who offer both online and classroom based opportunities. I'm not familiar with this as it's not the route that I took somy advice is that you really do need to check what your future employer is looking for. So don't skimp on the research. Put another way, it may seem relatively easy to do an online course, but will the qualification get you a job? Or just onto an extended course for further qualifications?

I went down a slightly different road and took a CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) with a company called International House based in Bangkok (http://www.ihbangkok.com/index.php). I really can't rate this highly enough. It was the toughest month of my life in some ways. It was also the most satisfying ( I should apologise to my ex-wife for that last sentence). What I have found since is that the Tefl courses seem fine but the CELTA is just so much more developed. I can only tell you how I felt at the time coming off the course. It was so in-depth and extremely focussed on lesson planning and delivery that I still adhere to it's formats over two years later.

So why Thailand? Well, Thailand has it's knockers (no pun intended) but International House are a reputable company and the CELTA is directly affiliated with Cambridge University so carries a prestige too. The second reason was that they offered a residential course in Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand which appealed enormously to me. I had absolutely no intention of staying and travelling in the sweatbox that is Bangkok, but Chiang Mai offered a different perspective.(The picture below is not the accommodation, rather it's the view across a serene, tranquil catfish lake, perfect for reflecting on your teaching practice or essay writing.)

This is the website for the residential course location http://www.nugentwaterside.com/ you don't book your accommodation, it comes as a package but this site shows better angles than my photos!

There is a maximum of twelve teaching students on the CELTA course and ages and experience vary enormously. below are some of my friends from the course.

The added benefit of taking the CELTA in Thailand was that with the classroom teaching practice, I taught non English speakers and in hindsight this was immense value when starting my first job.
The students are locals from Chiang Mai and are offered a structured English course for free, as long as they don't mind being guinnea pigs for the teaching students!
(above is the computer and research room and below is one of our training classrooms at Nugent Waterside)



"I've passed my TEFL/CELTA, what's next......"

Well next up is to apply for a job but who to apply to?
For me I'd settled on China or Indonsia in the first instance. China because I'm fascinated with the culture and Indonesia because I knew next to nothing about it. Why not Thailand? Well, the CELTA course had finished in February and the fact is that the State schools don't really recruit until May/June and financially I needed to be working.
My Uncle, who has a great deal of academic experience of China was at pains to suggest I didn't go there. Before anyone hyper-ventilates, this is my blog, with my experiences. I hear many good stories of experiences teaching in China. I have never worked there so really can't comment other than to point out that my Uncle didn't consider it to be the best move I could make. So it came to pass that I took up an offer with EF English First in Jakarta.

I reccommended earlier that people should do their research carefully. I did not. I was partly so happy to get the job I'd applied for (I had also been offered a job in China) that I just kept anticipating putting the hard work into practice.
Not researching carefully enough usually, after having started the job, leads to cries of "what?" or "You want me to do what?" or "I'll be sharing a room with two goats and Grandma Probolingo?". I have been lucky. This comes from being placed in a great school with an academically excellent Director of Studies. But my advice to everyone is DO YOUR HOMEWORK!

Have a list of what you want to know:-
location
salary
what ages will I be teaching
expectations of ability to follow your own interests outside work
accommodation
etc etc

This way in any interview, you will be prepared as much to ask questions, as to answer them.
If you're offered the job and time allows, I'd expect the Director of Sudies who you'll be working with to contact you and offer the opportunity to speak to or email current teachers. Another chance to ask pertinent questions. This along with the research you did earlier will ensure you don't arrive and immediately think "what the ......?"
In all likelihood you'll be taking on a one year contract. That may or may not be extended depending on your performance as much as your intention and any extension depends on what you want to do next. I know teachers and DoS's who have continued into their fourth years and beyond.

Finally. This is a job of work you are taking on. If your goal, as in the words of the immortal Artist Formerly Known as Prince, is to party like it's 1999, then don't do it. Do something else. Get into party planning or wedding organising. You're going to be responsible for impressionable minds. Of course you'll have plenty of chance to let your hair down but you're not on some kind of extended holiday. Better to hear this now than when you're struggling to get a reference for your third job in three months!

Life as a teacher is hard work but there's also fun too. My school is often organising day trips or overnights to different places. Going off on your own is also fun and there's always plenty of help and support to do this.

Good luck and feel free to comment here or ask for further help. I'm happy to oblige.