Teaching English Overseas With Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry

This is a true story. My day job is teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) at universities and corporations overseas, on a worldwide basis. I’ve been doing it since 1986, living in 10 countries from West Africa to Japan. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it, and other assorted clichés. But it really is a tough job.

Although we teach mainly at universities, we’re not professors; neither are we certified school teachers. We belong to some purgatory of nonentities where we can be exploited, dumped on and then spat out at will. (Overseas, we can be fired peremptorily at any time with no recourse.) Our managers are EFL people who wouldn’t know how to manage their luggage, let alone a group of professional people.

Both the ranks and the managerial levels area are dominated by petty-minded schoolmarms who own exclusive rights to the Correct Way to Teach and who are curriculum-obsessed. That is, we peons must create lesson plans for their own sake and they must fit the Master Plan of Schoolmarms.

In Equatorial Guinea, where I worked for a US oil company, teaching English to locals in the oil and gas industry, the supervisor of my rotation shift stepped off the airport shuttle bus and the first thing out of her mouth in that grating, gravelly voice was “Okay—WHERE’S THE CURRICULUM?”

I said, “Curriculum? We don’t need no stinking curriculum.”

“What?” she said.

“I teach via the Movie Lines Method. I believe every lesson and every word from my enlightened yap can come from famous movie lines to the exclusion of everything else.”

The Curriculum Queen looked like she’d been hit by one of those battered Land Rovers that chase rhinos in the bush, which is apropos considering she damn well looked like a rhinoceros. She went red and sputtered a bit and huffed and puffed and finally collected herself enough to say something. Then she snorted and I thought she was going to charge me and I jumped back an inch or two before collecting my wits.

Here, I’ll take a moment to describe CQ’s character. She was one of those eminent personages who steal your work and take credit for it, along with everything else that is positive that has ever contributed to the program. If something useful had been done, she did it. No matter who did it. She was an ogre who scolded you if you taught a lesson that wasn’t in the CURRICULUM that she had ordained (without authorization, I might add). CQ basically invented everything. When she took valuable time to be away from her critical and internationally recognized duties of creating the NEW CURRICULUM, it was only because she was busy attending the United Nations Conference on Cold Fusion in Geneva. She invented cold fusion.

Back to huffing and puffing and gravelly, grating voice, she said, “Movie lines? Oh, brother. All right, then, let me see your LESSON PLANS on my desk tomorrow!”

Revolutionary though I am, I actually like to pick up a paycheck now and then, so I submitted my LESSON PLANS. They went something like this:

Lesson One:

“Now ah can be a nice guy, and ah can be one reeeaal meeeaan sumbitch.”

Lesson Two:

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Lesson Three:

“Ya got ta git yer MIND right!”

Lesson Four:

“I know what you’re thinking, punk–did I teach six classes, or was it only five? Well in the excitement and all, I sorta lost track myself. But seeing as how the Schoolmarm Curriculum is the most powerful curriculum in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

You get the drift.

Very rarely, justice prevails. The Curriculum Queen eventually got herself fired due to sheer arrogance and wound up teaching in Afghanistan. Let that be a lesson to you. If you teach for a living, don’t be arrogant, and don’t moan and cry about being transferred to Dearborn, Michigan. How’d you like to find yourself in a classroom in Taliban land?

“God is great!” Mullah Omar remarked when learning of this development, “for Queen of Curriculum will scare away the infidel American dogs in uniform! Praised be to Allah, for she shall bring peace to our lands because no girls will want to educate themselves when they know she has invented the Afghan National Curriculum!”