A while back I gave high praise to the late Ian Dury for discarding that glib phrase in favour of "If you can, teach; if you can't, FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Quite right, too.
But now I've been doing a CELTA course in teaching English to foreigners. It's a damn good thing to do; there are lots of TEFL courses, but not all of them are recognised anywhere. CELTA is a seriously good one, and will get you a job more or less anywhere. You can do it part-time over several months, if you've got that long; alternatively you can do it intensively, in a month. It costs about a thousand quid.
It's bloody hard work though. Especially if you're doing it in Britain in the summer when none of the transport works; it's taking me 5 hours a day to do the commute, on top of the very intensive 8 hours' coursework. The trainers are real slave-drivers, in the best sense; switch off for five minutes, and you'll find yourself utterly clueless half an hour later. Now we've started teaching practice, anyone who asks a question is told "Well, we did that last Thursday - weren't you listening?"
Still, it has a real flavour of being worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone; what you need is not a job or a career - those just convey you into the hands of some management arsehole - but a skillset, and this is a good part of one.
Saturday 2 August 2008
Crete
Spent a week in a part of the world where a bit of sun could be relied on.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.
In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.
On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.
Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.
But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.
In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.
On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.
Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.
But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.
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