Tales from the Chalkface

When I think of my worst first day of teaching at a new school my only consolation is that it is unlikely that I’ll have a worse experience in the same situation.  A cohort of native English-speaking language teachers and myself had just arrived in a Gulf state at the beginning of the second semester to enhance the English teaching at high schools for boys throughout the country.  On the plane over I’d opened my Lonely Planet guide for the first time and read that my destination city was described as the most boring place on Earth – not a good start.  Then, on the inset day before the students returned, my British colleague had an anaphylactic shock after eating something we’d been promised didn’t contain nuts – he almost died. 

I think most of us will have been attracted to one of our colleagues in the staff room at one time or another.  At a school in Hong Kong I once became smitten by one of my co-workers; was it her looks, her charm, or her knowledge of English verb tenses? I don’t know, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind – it would wander to visions of us staring at each other adoringly over a copy of Cutting Edge’s Teachers’ book (Pre-Int edition), or imagining us skipping hand-in-hand to a lecture on the latest innovations in English language teaching by Scott Thornbury.