Turning a nightmare into a dream

 "Dreams are the touchstones of our character."  (Henry David Thoreau)

When I was growing up, I dreamt of several contrasting careers: air stewardess, vet, a lawyer on Law & Order, however never the owner of a language school.

It was only in my early twenties that I came across the wonders of teaching English abroad: At first, I only did the TESOL as a way to support my frugal attempts of saving the world through doing a social project in Italy. I was unsuccessful in saving the world but instead found that I enjoyed explaining to Italian students,in particular Italian Soldiers (!) the simplicity of English Grammar. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to stay on a year in Italy and work in a school belonging to a chain. (Hence this school will as of now, be known as simply the “chain school”). This is where the nightmare began: 

1) A note to all inexperienced teachers, if a school’s library consists of a wide collection of books with photos of people in flares, take the first plane, train, car or bicycle back to England! Yes, being the inexperienced teacher that I was, I ignored the fact that the range of books were limited and skipped off to the piazza for a gelato. 

2) Another note to all inexperienced teachers, teacher training is important! Unfortunately at the chain school, our teacher training amounted to being shown where the scrabble set was and how the photocopier worked. 

3) Alarm bells should definitely start to ring, when the school owner is involved not only in the language business but a breeding business for dogs and women. I will let your imagination run wild as to what his breeding business for women entailed. Unfortunately, the Italian knack of turning a blind eye rubbed off on me and I happily skipped off yet again to the piazza for a gelato. Thankfully my ignorance was temporary and due to my outrage towards the lack of resources, training, support, awful accommodation, the list does go on for a while and well of course the breeding of women, I was blacklisted from the chain schools in Italy. A final note to all inexperienced teachers, you cannot be blacklisted, as I was to find out!

Throughout however all of this, I had the opportunity to develop as a teacher and go through the initial phases of photocopying a rainforest and going to sleep with the Murphy book on English Grammar. Furthermore I had the opportunity of meeting and teaching a wide range of people from an extremely ambitious Chemist aiming to do the Cambridge Proficiency Exam to an eccentric primary school English teacher from Napoli aiming to learn the English Alphabet – Remember, the Italians have a knack of turning a blind eye.

This experience awakened in me the belief that a language school should be offering more than scrabble and a handful of books to its teachers and clients and the fact that I could run a better language school and would like to run a language school – somehow the breeding business just did not appeal to me.




Lesson 2:  Learn from others, before teaching others.