The hazards and misfortunes of being a language trainer

There are few things I find more frustrating, upsetting, enervating and infuriating than the English language training sector and the people involved. I shall elaborate, but this is really just a small part of the overall picture:

There is an awful paradox at the heart of it all that needs somehow to be killed off. If you look at people of other professions coming into contact with large groups of customers on a daily basis, like accountants, doctors, lawyers and the like, they keep themselves to themselves and don't reveal their secrets to the world so readily. They also provide a "need-to-have" service, rather than a  "nice-to-have" service, such as artists, restaurateurs and gardeners. For that reason they can charge a lot of money for their services. Artists, restaurateurs and gardeners too, but there are very few of the latter who actually can afford the kind of gated properties of the former. In fact, they are liable to be the clients of the latter. And far fewer in number, which is why most artists don't make a huge amount of sales.

Language training falls in a middle category. For some it is a "nice-to-have", for others a "need-to-have", where half are learning languages to better carry out their job, and the other half so they can hold conversations with strangers on hotel terraces; and herein lies the problem. The managers and owners of language schools are able to get the best of both worlds by charging clients in the "need-to-have" category a lot of money for the services of their trainers/teachers, yet pay their personnel the same kind of fees from the "nice-to-have" category. It is a trick of the trade, and a very prevalent one. Furthermore, a sizeable minority of the teachers are gap-year students, or freshly diploma'd twenty-somethings who can barely recognise the difference between a preposition and their elbow. The rest, who are trying to make a career out of it are terrorised by their employer by making competitors out of your colleagues (ever wondered why many are reluctant to share?) and making every day in the school seem like it's your last one. But the most despicable part of their little ruse is how many hoops they make you jump through for such a paltry salary. Take a look at some of the jobs on offer on the TEFL websites. Here's one I found today:

[Name removed] is a leader in the provision of educational travel programmes. Accredited by the British Council, we've been teaching English to international students for 20 years. Our aim is to provide students with a fun, friendly and safe environment in which to develop their communication skills in English.

We are looking for talented and committed EFL teachers to work on a non-residential basis at our centre based at [name removed].

This is a 1 week post, teaching up to 20 hours.


So far, so good.

Then:

Essential:
- CELTA, Trinity TESOL, PGCE in English or an MFL, or equivalent
-Bachelor Degree

Desirable:
- Experience of teaching students of university age
-An undergraduate degree

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A NON RESIDENTIAL POSITION AND WE ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE ACCOMMODATION.

So, you're thinking it's going to reward you for the fact you have a degree and you need to pay for your own accommodation? Wait for it...

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I say, what?

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I did read that right?

Yep, you definitely did.

That's virtually nothing. I got more per hour for mowing lawns, and that was back in the mid-nineties.

So, let's say you're doing the maximum 20 hours for the week. That works out at £250 for the week. Then let's add in your accommodation. You're in a well-to-do provincial city in the late summer. Kids are back at school but it's still warm. You're looking at £25-£40 per night, for a youth hostel or a cheap hotel. So that's between £170 and £280 for the week. In the youth hostel category, you come out with £80 profit, leaving you with just over £10 per day for food. In the cheap hotel category, you're £30 out of pocket even before you've bought a muesli bar for your evening meal. And you still have to factor in that you need to travel there. Oh yes, and UK tax. And that's not for preparing lessons, correcting and marking work and doing the admin. It says "From £12.50 per teaching hour".

This repeats itself over and over again in varying forms of ruthless cheapskatery and devious mind-trickery as to leave most people with the idea that you should be grateful for actually having something to bloody well do, and you're actually such an ungrateful little weasel for demanding a higher salary. You are supposed to understand that you are doing a humanitarian act, and asking for more money will lead to demands from the others, which in the end if all the teachers did it would lead the school to bankruptcy.

Utter rubbish.

Imagine you've got a class of 8 students. Their parents have paid a package of £500 to £900 for the week, including all meals and basic accommodation in the residence halls of the campus. That's about £4000 to £7200 per class. That means the people on the course are from families that are not poor. Indeed, they're likely to be the lawyers and doctors of the future. The school has overheads, so let's take away 60%. That still leaves £1600 to £2880 per group. And they can't pay proper salaries to their teachers?

There are many standard replies to that question, including the old cliché about profit margins and the like. But what I find most baffling is that these schools really do find the personnel for their courses. There really are people who wish to fill the gaps. And these are the pedagogical versions of interns, that new breed of modern crypto-slave that will do anything for the promise of a job in the future. Except in this business, there is no guarantee of success or riches beyond the current hourly rate afforded by language schools across the world.

I think it is really high time serious language trainers got together and separated themselves from the amateurish schools willing to employ bookish recent graduates looking for a jobby (job + hobby) from the more serious ones who look after their staff and treat them more like the career-minded human beings they are trying to become.

Career-wise, I live in a bubble of contentedness, and I am thankfully not in this predicament that the vast majority of my fellow language trainers find themselves in. But when I look through the job ads just to see what else I could be doing, I despair for the predicament of those wanting to join me in this noble yet poorly-rewarded of professions. It is a very well-oiled ladder, and that's how the schools like it.

Finally, a short note about the people who do my job. They are extraordinarily proud people, preferring to let someone else organise the lessons, set up the course locations, find the clients, level-test them, propose times and hours for their course, and ask them for post-course feedback. The teacher is only willing to involve him/herself in the bare minimum of extra activity, and you have to ask why. That is because it is not their job. They are paid to teach and give advice, mark work and guide students to their target. Correcting tests, preparing lessons and writing course records go largely unpaid. Many would say that out of every hour spent in the classroom, about 25 to 40 minutes is spent doing the accompanying admin. And in the class, the energy spent giving the lesson in comparison to the monetary rewards has a real effect on morale, psyche and sense of self-worth.

So next time you question the commitment and satisfaction of language teachers, remember there may be a hundred reasons behind it. Either the language schools need to stop their ludicrous race to the bottom with their course fees (a recent article in Swedish on public procurement of language services, this time translation and interpretation, found that low pricing had an adverse effect on overall quality and client satisfaction) or trainers need to refuse jobs that don't properly reward them for their efforts. I know already what is going to happen: all the time there are people willing to work simply for the work experience, who were legally minors less than 5 years before they do their dodgy TEFL qualifications, the rest will be exploited. And this particular formula is repeating itself in many other professional sectors.

Keeping occupied

So, this time last year, Lady Kirsten and I decided to go house-hunting. We wanted to stay in the area but I wanted an easier ride to work in the morning. In Wiltingen, it took me 90 minutes to get to work and 2 hours to come home, which i didn't mind, considering I don't go every day and we lived in a water mill in the middle of some stunning countryside. Moving was always going to be hard, considering the nature of the place we lived in, so wherever we went would really have to be tip-top.
We didn't have long to wait. I ran a search on the main property website for the area, and found an absolute beauty in Saarburg. It was the very first place we viewed in the late autumn and we would compare it against any other property we looked at thereafter.

It was on a fairly steep incline, but the views over the valley and surrounding hills was memorable, and the roofed terrace (seen above on the right of the house) was perfect to survey the natural landscape all around.

The downside was that even though it bordered on the forest, there were some busy roads nearby, including a spaghetti-style slip-road system that is soon to be adapted, and the planned building of a supermarket only a minute away, with all the palaver of construction and destruction. However, the bus to Luxembourg leaves from only 200 metres from the front door.

The most poignant thing about the house was that it had a certain dignified air, as if to say "like me or loathe me, this is what you get". And considering its most advantageous selling price, there were no major renovation issues, which baffled me and still leaves me wondering why, come the following spring, it was still on the market. Looking at other houses of various shapes and sizes in the meantime, nothing compared to that one, and so we put in a bid for it. It was the best decision we made.

On the top floor are four light and spacious bedrooms, a bathroom and a hallway, on the upper ground floor is a huge kitchen, a large dining room, a living room and a smaller room doing nothing, so we converted it into a library. The ground floor is a second residence, which helps to pay a large chunk of our mortgage, and behind that, built into the land, is a cellar large enough to use it for washing clothes, storing a huge amount of boxes and housing the gardening equipment until I built a garden shed.

The roofed terrace is a delightful place to sit and we decked it out with hanging baskets filled with long-lasting plants. We added some further plants and even tomatoes and peppers, which produced a small but rewarding yield in September. The main work was in the garden and upper meadow, where there is a huge empty space, just waiting to be landscaped. This will not happen overnight, but I wanted to get things going this summer and I built a shed (as I mentioned), although not one of those you hammer the panels together, like there is already in the garden (see photo below), but rather a cabin-style shed where you bang in the planks so they overlap. It may take longer, but it is a satisfactory feeling to know you built it yourself. I had to shift a lot of earth, as the incline of the hill would have not been a wise place to build foundations. With that soil, I made a heather rockery and kitchen garden.

We hope to stay here for many years.

Uphill:

A balloon passes overhead. Our nut trees (right of photo) provided the local deer with a huge Sunday breakfast one morning in October.

Building a garden shed:
Lady Kirsten deciphering the instructions for putting on the roof. The hardest part about building the shed was shifting the soil beneath to level off the ground. I filled the hole with fine gravel to keep it dry.

Taking a short break:

Me, discussing a shisha break with Iman, our renter. As an Iranian descendent, he has access to some of the finest flavoured shisha tobaccoes in Germany.

The completed shed:

Roof on, wood stained and heather rockery planted, I built a bird house with the remaining pieces of plank. It has become a focal point of our cats' entertainment. I still need to affix the guttering to the shed and place the blue barrels below to provide water for the plants come the spring.

Old and new:

The old shed will be sawn up and used to heat us up in midwinter. In its place will come a pergola and seating area for us to relax with a good book, some cheese, wine and bread. The grass area between the heather rockery and the wheel barrow will become a terrace next year.

Deer in the garden:
We are frequently visited by all sorts of wild animals, including a trio of deer one Sunday morning. I spent about 45 minutes admiring them in our and next door's gardens, munching on the grass. My admiration turned a little sour when I went outside later on in the day and found they had eaten literally every living and growing thing in the garden. They were great substitutes for my hedge trimmers but they could have stopped when they got to the worcesterberry, raspberry and blackberry plants...
Still, it has solved one problem for me: I know what I'll be cooking for dinner on 25th December now.