Two Stories About Being An EFL Peddler

 

Miyakonojo, Japan. 2009? 

 

I was back home in Canada in the early Aughts because, once again, I got screwed by a sleazy South Korean employer. It was the wild west days before the Korean government put their foot down on everyone in 2008 and mine was just one of a thousand similar hard luck stories. 

Not wanting to throw in the towel on living in a place that was actually paying me a living wage... 

Sorry Nova Scotia. You have always massively sucked in this regard. 

...I spent a lot of that down time looking for ways to get to Japan instead. I found out that shitbag lying criminal EFL chain NOVA was running a job fair in my hometown. I dusted off my suit and went in to enjoy a long lecture about how awesome the company was to work for.

If you follow the link above you'll know that this was all a lie. No one but their teachers knew at the time.

I already had some experience running a class at the time so I wasn't some fresh-faced kid whos balls only recently dropped. I didn't have enough experience to know that this was exactly who they wanted to hire. That wasn't me. So they pulled what I later found out was a very old trick;

The interviewer, pretending to be a student, asked me a question about something that no kid would ask and any adult would just open their Japanese-English dictionary to find out. It was meant to trip me up and leave me sputtering, and it worked.

Confession: You can easily trip me up. All you got to do is come in from an angle that has little to do with the reality of a situation. Then I'll be stuck in a loop of trying to figure out what the fuck sort of game you're playing. 

Basically I'm too busy determining the size and shape of your bullshit to call you on it. I'm really glad the block button exists.

I was rejected, of course. Dodged a bullet. But it left me sour. I found out when I finally was working in Japan that Nova were always like that. Poor guy I knew, handsome, fluent, got caught up in Nova's well-earned collapse. He was a polyglot so he went to China the following month, already speaking the language.

Some people just got it. 

Gunsan, South Korea. 2016?

 

OVER A DECADE LATER... 

I was standing in a science lab in a small elementary school in South Korea. Before me were three of the school's teachers who were confident enough in their English to judge our demo lessons and pretend to be the students. Next to them was the principal and... I can't help myself sorry... Super Nintendo Chalmers. (sorry!)

 To my right was my boss and my partner teacher who despised me and I despised her right back. A story for later. To the left were the business owner and teacher of the EFL chain we were competing with for the contract to teach English in Gunsan elementary schools. 

They had just finished their demo lesson. It was a real quality presentation too. Power point, toys, flashcards, wowzers! It was real TV, man! How was I gonna compete with that? I barely prepared anything. I had a whiteboard and three coloured markers. 

I did wear a nice cardigan over a button shirt. I just hoped they didn't notice that my black trousers were actually jeans.

Sounds like I was doomed? Nah. We won the contract and I got all the teachers of the school saying good things about me. Now how did I pull that off?

I used my five minutes to teach them how to say who they were and where they came from using easy to remember drawings and memetic hand gestures.  I engaged with them directly. As if they were kids fresh in the class who only knew English via early morning TV. I talked to them. The competition talked at them. That shit works in university, not with kids.

Most importantly: The Korean teachers took acting like like a legit student seriously. Asking questions a kid would ask. Not the questions a shitbag lying criminal EFL corpo would because they wanted to hire some pretty young thing instead of someone who knew their shit.

Some people just got it.