TEFLees in Spain

Teaching English in Madrid is perfect for very social people.  The demand here is mostly for business English, and a majority of the companies who can afford to pay for English classes choose to do so for their higher level employees.  Because classes so often happen early in the morning or during lunch, many students would rather sleep or eat than slave away at phrasal verbs. 

However, this phenomenon means that teachers in Madrid often end up with one-to-one classes.  This private environment with a high level executive with a good grasp of English who wants to improve conversational skills for business trips often leads to what feels like Spanglish counseling.  And those writing English teaching material seem to know this.

Shannon, a beautiful TEFLite who did our course last summer, recently used a handout from the internet that contained the following exercise in order to demonstrate “how to give advice”:

Dear Aunt Jennifer,
I’ve recently started taking lessons with a
beautiful English teacher. She’s 28,
single and has a wonderful smile. I’m in
love with her, but I’m only 18, and I have
really bad spots. I also have no
confidence. Should I tell her how I feel?
From Shy in Seoul

Dear Shy in Seoul,
No - you shouldn’t date your teacher,
even if she is beautiful. It’s an awful
idea. English teachers are poor and
they drink too much. They also go back
home after 18 months. Why not wait for
your spots to go? You might meet
someone much better.

For Shannon, who is in fact a beautiful single English teacher in her twenties with a wonderful smile, I can see this being an opportune moment to receive a declaration of love from a student. 

But the fact is, our students do tell us incredibly inappropriate things that they shouldn’t.  They tell us they are planning to fire their personal assistants, that they think their husbands care too much about their jobs, that they hate their co-worker who will be in your following class, that their company doesn’t pay taxes on their internationally exported contacts because they package them as letters, that they are planning to call in sick to get a long weekend, that they stay in the office pretending to work in order to avoid riding with their spouses who are horrendous drivers,  that they have not yet come out as gay to their conservative families, that they hate certain racial/ethnic/religious groups, that they think women are useless in the workplace, and that they had a fabulous blind date at the weekend.  (Just examples of course :))

Maybe it’s because we are some of the very few people they know who are disconnected from everyone else in their lives.  Maybe it’s because it doesn’t seem to count in a foreign language.  Or who knows – maybe it’s because they just share inappropriate overly personal information with everyone in their lives and we are just a little drop in the big bucket.  Introspectively, I know that I over-inform my Spanish teacher as well… for a little bit of all three of the reasons listed above. 

As much as you learn on a TEFL course, nothing can really prepare you for very important strangers telling you very random information.  But with the relationships we build and the contacts we make, we benefit:  we get employee passes to Hugo Boss sales, we get job offers from HR managers of international corporations, we find out which bus is the fastest way to get to the park and how to swear in Spanish and where to go for the perfect mojito in Lavapies. 

The give and take of teaching English is a unique balance… it is strange and fabulous and quirky.  Just like English teachers.

I came to Spain to take the TEFL course at TtMadrid.

“But why did you choose Spain?”

For some inexplicable reason, this is one of the most common introductory questions between expatriates of Madrid.  And no one seems to have a real answer.

Why do we come? 

Maybe some of us had a burning passion to cross the ocean and take a TEFL course to spread our beloved language to those in foreign lands.

But more than likely, we were bored.  We were exquisitely, impenetrably bored.  The common themes among English teachers appear to be their inability to explain how and why they ended up in Madrid and their insatiable desire for change and challenge. 

This makes for very interesting company.  In general, English teachers are wandering, maybe even a bit lost sometimes.  We are searching for something that will contrast against everything else we have ever known, and google.com told us that the answer was teaching English in Madrid. 

The beautiful thing about TEFL – the reason I feel confident selling TEFL – is that it’s like a gateway drug.  Initially, native English speakers who have no knowledge of the Spanish language and culture teach English because there are no other jobs available to them. 

Some of the teachers fall in love with teaching and continue for years, making it their career – like Eileen, who came to Madrid seven years ago to be with her boyfriend and is now a very professional and respected teacher. 

Others give Madrid a go, get it out of their system, and go back home to their “real” lives – like my friend Kether, who did our course, stayed a year, and now teaches TEFL in her home of Santa Barbara, California. 

And then others find opportunities through teaching English to make a living in Madrid doing something that we were unable to do upon their original arrival in Spain – like Craig, who used his TEFL to support himself while getting started as an online business consultant here in Madrid.

So, maybe this question of why we are here, why we were TEFLees, and why we are now TEFLites (named thus by my pregnant boss Natasha, who is not to be questioned) is so difficult not because we are here beyond reason, but because we are here for so many reasons. 

We are here to challenge ourselves with a foreign language, foreign customs, and foreign mindsets.  We are here to give ourselves a fresh start and new location for our prior interests.  We are here to stretch in the sun with copas and canas and laugh with people from lots of random countries at each other and at ourselves.

And some of us are here to blog about the lives of the English teachers who come in and out of our lives every month.