Reading. 55 The teaching profession is as rewarding as any other occupation if you enjoy doing it, you learn and grow55 The teaching profession is as rewarding as any other occupation if you enjoy doing it, you learn and grow, are ambitious, believe in yourself and identify your purpose and objectives. Read the text below. Find contradictions to what I have just said and explain the discrepancy.
And if you do find your heart is in teaching English, is it ever possible to make a go of it, settle down and earn decent money, or will you be condemned to living the life of the eternal rootless student? "If you're prepared to go from Sri Lanka to Spain, you can make a go of it. If you come back and go to Brighton and teach for £8.50 per hour, you'd be better off making cappuccinos," says Melanie Butler, managing editor of the trade paper EL Gazette. "It's an industry which 70% of people should leave after a year: they've got what they can out of it." "There's no obvious career ladder," says the director of a recruitment agency. "The drop-out rate is pretty high because the money's not good. People usually come back to get a 'proper' job, and by that I mean proper money.You can expect to earn between £500-£600 a month in a language school in Poland. In Italy, the salary would be similar, but the cost of living far higher. People who have taught English abroad are often bad at selling their skills on their return to the UK." The Press & PR Officer Marcella McEvoy found that her experience teaching English in Prague helps her in all areas of her work. "It taught me tenacity," she explains. "As a Tefl teacher, there are many moments of humiliation. You learn to develop a very thick skin. " Ms McEvoy believes that determination to make the lessons a success meant that she developed creative skills, which she now exercises when devising campaigns for Scope such as Mother, Bump and Baby Month. Having to constantly dream up entertaining lessons is something that any ex-Tefl teacher will remember with either affection or horror. With most English language teaching done in private language schools, if your classrooms start to empty, you can only take it personally. The ability to wing it helps, and many people have the knack of being able to turn up to a lesson with nothing but a handful of Cuisenaire rods - variously coloured wooden sticks used as a teaching aid - in their pocket and a few jokes, games or songs up their sleeves as preparation. Stoical, inventive and daring, they can pull off a performance, which would make the likes of Eddie Izzard or Marcel Marceau green with envy. But some people have less than pleasant memories: "It was the constant stress; standing up in front of the class and worrying about it all falling apart. " Ms Valentine is now development manager at the University for Industry in Sheffield, where she is nevertheless still involved in education: she's responsible for national learning centres. At International House in London, Roger Hunt is director of teacher training and has been drawing on white boards and chopping up bits of paper for quite a while. Proving that you can make a career out of ELT, and a successful one at that, Mr Hunt originally went to an affiliated International House school in Alexandria for three months in 1980 and ended up staying for four years. He's worked in Madrid and Budapest, has written books and travels widely. "I think some people think it's a young person's job," Mr Hunt says. "But now we get a lot of people applying for our courses who are middle-aged and successful and decided they want to see the world and teach English." And it's something you can always go back to. And if you do get the bug, you can get ahead in ELT and not just keep the wolf from the door.
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Teaching English as a Foreign Language, or Tefl (also known as English language teaching, or ELT), has always been a good bet for graduates who happen to have English as their mother tongue and want to travel, learn another language and put off doing a "proper" job for a couple of years. Yet, on their return to Blighty, is the line about "two years' teaching in Malaga" on their CV actually interpreted by potential employers as: "dossing on a beach while drinking San Miguel and taking it easy"?
