TEFLees in Spain

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.