Why Work When You Can Teach English? by Ian Lees

Author:Ian Lees [Ian Lees]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Ian Lees
Published: 2015-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

11

WHY US?

Outside the classroom, life was still great. Perhaps a little too great. I felt settled, and at home. Over a year gone, I no longer felt I was finding my feet. I had a steadier girlfriend and steady friends, and passing relationships with friends of friends and neighbours near and far. I had commitments and routines. I was living.

It also made me realize quite how much I was missing out on. Weekends excepted, I was the one who couldn’t make dinner, or football, or pop over to someone’s house. I had always been working the opposite timetable to the rest of the world, going to work before them and leaving work after them, but now the rest of the world was trying to invite me in. I was living, but I didn’t have time for it.

Instead, I created time, and gradually stretched the after-work beers further and further into the early hours, until I began to wonder if any of my morning classes could remember what I looked like without a hangover. They probably thought I just had that rare eye malady that seemed to afflict only male English teachers. As it became more of a struggle to face each day, it became more of a struggle to put an end to the night. Each class felt like an eternity, and I went through the door unable to imagine it could end, let alone envisage the end of the whole day. I would come out of each class, spark up a cigarette, take a couple of puffs as I exchanged my books, stub it out in the corridor ashtray without breaking stride, and slump into the chair of the next class. ‘Flumluh’, the teenagers would say, in a language I now understood perfectly. ‘I know… Mhluf… I know…’ I would reply.

Weekends, when I drank as if trying to catch up on all the nectar of life I’d missed during the week, was the only time I felt human. But I wasn’t human, I was superhuman, a turbo-charged version of myself in which all my good and bad was concentrated in levels too intense for the people closest to me. Each Sunday evening, when darkness descended, it felt like the start of an interminable funeral procession, quite possibly my own.

The boss called me to the office one day and commented on my weary demeanour, the secretary nodding dutifully. After a little thought-pause and thought-pose he suggested I swap my daily morning class at the factory with another teacher who only had three mornings a week, starting half an hour later to boot, at another company. But there was no fooling me. Oh no. I had heard from the very teacher herself not long before that she hated the class and was going to ask to have it changed. They were all big boss sorts, and she felt intimidated. So when they offered me the class to give me ‘a bit of a rest’, I called their bluff and said that

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