Hi Shawn,
Ok. I've re-read this thread a little more rigorously. :'( Sorry! I started off on the wrong foot. I apologize if I'm sounding off a bit aggressively, or at least it sounded that way even to me upon re-reading my own post. I understand that you started this thread some time ago during difficult times personally speaking and things have changed drastically for the better for you.
What I meant to say, take a deep breath, is that English teaching's not so bad given the right conditions, and I DO understand, believe me, that those conditions are hard to find and maintain for any worthwhile length of time. These difficulties definitely make the job a lot less attractive, to say the least, but not totally unattractive altogether.
One typical problem is that it's easy to burn out, I do so every year. Because of the seasonal nature of the work, you work much harder some of the time and not at all at other times. The problem I have personally is that I sometimes burn out and have to cut back on classes for a while.
It's usually the wishy-washy sh@theads that push me over the edge. There is a high frequency of lazy, wishy-washy, uncooperative students who will just drive you (and the good students in the groups) up the wall with poor motivation, horrendous attendance and awful punctuality. You'll often have different students wanting completely different approaches (eg. conversation, grammar, business, games or songs, etc. - in companies) On top of it, after months of this, some will be falling further and further behind (eg. missing the presentation phase of ppp lessons one time after another) and they might just finally give the HR people a call and complain. It really is quite difficult to always keep everyone happy despite what other teachers here have said about simply keeping them entertained with photocopies of articles and whatnot. Nothing works perfectly for everyone forever. You'll always get one or two "deviants" who actually want to learn.
Another writer here said something about the teachers being lazy (the chicken or the egg). There's no doubt about it for me: student's get exactly what they deserve. I've seen it time after time. In general, they pay us good money to teach them and then they don't let us. Nowadays, they don't actually even need us except for the writing and speaking, so why aren't they learning any faster?
Another problem is that we all have to make a living and low-end jobs for starters usually don't pay well enough for us to make ends meet. I do want to be perfectly clear. I believe anything under 25 euros an hour to be peanuts." Actually, I think that I am personally making peanuts at 35-38 euros an hour. Though most people in Madrid seem to make even less than I do, the fact is that I have had plenty of students who make real money so I can't take myself or my teaching profession too seriously at this point salary-wise-speaking. I'd just love to be able to afford some of the luxuries they regularly enjoy like month-long vacations in both Ibiza (motorboating) and Disneyworld. I might choose to do something different myself, but having that kind of money would sure come in handy.
So, given all of the sort of thing that I've outlined above, I do burn out with "playing the game" from time-to-time but I always just pick myself up and get on with it. I know that your job must seem awfully different to you, but it sounds awfully like more of the same to me. I was born into this. My father was a high school teacher and I grew up with it, bullsh@t and all. I had seen lots of stuff before I even became an English teacher, such as seeing a j@ckass, alcoholic principal fire 7 or 8 honest, decent, hard-working high-school teachers for no good reason except that he was a b@stard with a serious personality problem (he had done this before at other schools previously it turned out). There were other situations, my own high-school English teacher (for native speakers) commited suicide some ten years ago. Every student I ever knew in high school would give him a hard time like you wouldn't believe and I guess it just eventually got to him. So, I guess that because of these types of experiences I just have never taken to the idea that working for a "serious institution" would rescue me from my otherwise difficult "freelance" circumstances. Unfortunately, I have seen too many serious institutions seriously f@cked up.
By the way, somebody's likely to take a dive out the 8th floor window after the load of cr@p that I just let loose with. My apologies to you all and your families. Anyway, speaking of families, I have one to take care of, which is why I put up with the dark side of this business. There's definitely a before and after to having kids for those of you who don't have them yet, at least for me.
Oh, and also by the way, I do have a second job besides teaching. I've been working on my website 20 or 30 hours a week for years. I started it because of the seasonal nature of English teaching. The idea was that I would work on it more in the off season, which is what I currently still do. Little-by-little I have had to cut back on my teaching to keep pace with the requirements of the site. I would recommend that everyone who's in teaching do something similar and moonlight. There are writers, webmasters, artists, photographers, musicians and god-knows-what-else working in this business because it gives you lots of flexibility to make up your own schedule.
I'll cut this post off before I get too far into all the positive points of this job, and there are a bunch, believe me.
Cheers,
MadridTeacher
http://www.madridteacher.com
