Who Would Be A Teacher?

After forty years of teaching, I must confess that it was never my intention to be an educator of any sort. The truth is, I had to take up that profession full-time to shut my forever complaining wife up.

Between 1984 and 1990, I had a very satisfying and richly rewarding career as a freelance copywriter. Then it all came crashing down as a result of a very devastating economic recession. I tried really hard to find another job, but it was nigh on impossible due to there being too many graduates like me chasing too few jobs.

The one area of work I had never considered, as a full-time occupation, was teaching. Yet I was quite happy to have a series of part-time teaching jobs, running parallel to my work as a writer, as and when I could fit it in around that flourishing scribe career.

However, once the writing career bit the dust, and was showing not the slightest sign of recovery, my wife at that time started to carp on at me to take up teaching full-time. Ever eager to please her, I did as she suggested and took a second degree, this time in Education (1992-1994).

My very first job in teaching was an unmitigated disaster. It was a class held in a cardboard manufacturing factory for a group of recalcitrant YTS trainees, (YTS is a government-sponsored Youth Training Scheme). To make matters worse, it was very close to Christmas, so a lunchtime visit to the pub across the road was mandatory. And the consumption of too much alcohol was obligatory. After lunch, back in the factory, the consequences of that liquid lunch piss-up were off the scale.

One young female vomited all over the top of my desk. Another female sat next to her and urinated all over the floor underneath that lovely mahogany piece of furniture. Then an aggressive male started to throw hardboiled caramels at me, and despite his drunkenness, his aim was true. Talk about a baptism of fire. That group of people was unteachable. I have absolutely no doubt that they all spent the rest of their misspent lives making cardboard boxes, earning just enough money to get pissed out of their tiny little minds again, again, and again.

As I stormed out of the factory classroom, the baying mob was hurling a barrage of one highly obscene insult after another. I just thanked the lord I had no obligation to my employer to ever go back. In fairness, my boss, Bob, did try to forewarn me about what to expect. On the way to the job in Bob's car, he told me...

"You must realize Ralph, you can't teach these types of people anything. The best you can hope for is to impart a little wisdom, and that is if you get lucky."

At the time, I thought Bob was being somewhat cynical. Afterward, I changed my mind and decided he was over-optimistic. And I made a mental note to get right out of the teaching profession as soon as it was humanly possible. I had absolutely no intention of spending the rest of my life having to deal with unruly mobs of the dregs of what passed for humanity on a daily basis.

In 1978, I spent three years attending after-work evening classes just to gain enough qualifications to go to university. In 1981, I achieved a life dream of going to uni, where I spent the following three years studying English Literature. Then, in 1992, I went back to University to do a two-year degree in Education. In all, I spent eight years studying, just so that I could deal with the human zoo.

Over the next forty years, despite my promise to myself to get out of teaching as soon as I could, I continued to teach on an off-on basis. It was very much a case of needs must. At one point I even owned my own language academy in the south of Spain for five years. And here in Japan, I have done quite a few online teaching jobs.

In the main, it has been a mixed experience, with a great deal of dross interspersed with the odd moments of sparkle. I have had the joyful privilege of teaching some wonderful students, some of whom went on to stellar careers, and I am to this day still in touch with them.

On the other hand, I have been physically assaulted by a child for no reason at all, and I have been lied about by a student who did not like being told to be quiet in class. This young girl told her mother appalling lies about me in an act of revenge. The mother was a close friend of the head, and she transmitted her daughter's lies to the head, who saw fit to fire me. Later the girl retracted her false accusation, but it was too late, the damage was done and I was out of work. I have to confess that it filled my heart with joy when a few years later I saw the same girl on her knees in a supermarket stacking shelves.

Do I regret not completely leaving the teaching profession? Not really. It helped to pay the bills and put food on the table at times when no other jobs were available. Also, I did learn a great deal about the learning experience from the other side of the desk. Would I repeat the experience? Probably not.