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[dreadnought]

Now, I know all posters to this forum are sane, well-balanced individuals who take their responsibilities as an EFL professional very seriously. Yet, we all have to admit that this job can attract certain - let's call them 'unusual' - characters.

So, to business: who is the craziest, oddest, most dubious, dodgy teacher you've ever worked with? Names can be changed to protect the innocent.

I'll start us off: when working on a summer school in Cambridge there was a teacher there called 'Chris' (actually his real name WAS Chris, just without the inverted commas). He must have been in his mid-thirties, and we got the feeling there was going to be trouble when on the first night, even before any of the students had arrived, he got into a standing argument with a female teacher who he felt had insinuated he was gay (she hadn't).

In the first week, he started off gently, putting the moves on an 18-year old Russian students and then snogging her in front of all the other students at the weekly disco.

In the second week, he hit his stride: first, there were complaints that he was looking up female students' skirts; then, later in the week, he got drunk at an outdoor film showing in a park and decided to relieve himself in front of a group of terrified Taiwanese students (not even bothering to turn his back - classy).

In week three, he went for the big finish: while at a school outing to a disco in London, he got drunk again and punched a seventeen-year old German student he thought was moving in on his Russian Lolita. I was the other teacher on duty there, and I had to physically separate them on the dancefloor. I packed him off to sit on the coach that would take us back to Cambridge. But he wasn't quite finished...as the students were filing onto the coach, he leapt up and again tried to punch the German guy he'd attacked in the disco. Even when we'd calmed him down and got him back to the school, he was still threatening to go this poor student's room and punch his lights out.

Sadly, he never made it past week three as he was fired the next morning, so we never got to see how he could have improved on what he'd done already (my feeling was that he was just warming up). His parting shot though was when the Director of Studies fired him. In all seriousness, he asked 'Is this going to affect my chances of coming back to work here next year?' Admittedly in some EFL schools that would be a perfectly legitimate question.

So, can anyone beat that?

[EnglishBrian]

Don't think I can beat it but you brought to mind a teacher I had to work with when I was a new DoS. She'd been recruited over the summer by the Director, supposedly as a kids expert, which we badly needed.

Quickly became apparant she hadn't a clue about teaching any kind of age group and when I tried to investigate her background it changed each time I asked her a question. She had taught art (she was an 'alleged' artist) but the final version of her background as far as I understood it was that her TEFL weekend+ course in the US had only involved 'peer teaching' and this was her first TEFL job.

Anyway, she'd come to us from America to 'find her roots' (yes, one of those!), she was Jewish and hadn't grasped that while Friday wasn't a 'teaching day' it was still a 'working day' - we did do the odd one to one then, and had development sessions and everyone had to do office type stuff. We also had English Club in the evening and occasional school parties. She refused to do any of this and told us she hadn't realised we were 'religiously intolerant' in not giving her Friday off. Someone suggested she could do some work on Saturday or Sunday instead, but she said she'd been promised them as the weekend!

She had a class of upper-int teenagers who were really playing up with her. when I went to observe I found they were in the middle of a '3 lesson series' where all they were doing was going through English magazines with scissors, cutting out every word beginning with W or C and pasting them to the toilet door in the corridor.

The final straw was when attendance at one of her classes dwindled to zero and it was only by chance that I spotted this - she hadn't told anyone and was just locking up the classroom and going home early.

Oh yes, she'd dragged an evidently agrophobic husband along with her who seemingly refused to set foot outside their flat.

To cap it all, when she was asked to leave after one term, she complained that the extremely kind and positive reference I wrote for her wasn't glowing enough. Nightmare.


I won't mention a different teacher we had who was caught in the office by our middle aged Australian feminist, relieving his sexual tension over the keyboard. Left a particularly dodgy stain on the chair too, that we kept swapping with the secretary's chair. She used to get quite angry when she arrived each day, pulled the chair from under her desk and saw that it was that chair.

[struelle]

I worked with a new teacher 2 months before the term was finished in Shanghai, he was eccentric but very interesting. At first I was a little hard on the guy and his behavior, then I eased up and decided h wasn't worth getting all upset over. We ended up geting along.

Anyways for at least 3 months from February - April / 04 at a boarding school in Shanghai I was working alone, and couldn't stand it. I kept pestering the admin to find another foreign teacher, and pronto, as I couldn't stand shouldering the entire responsbility. And my contract said I was entitled to working with colleagues, which is a clause I put in myself.

So after all that pestering, they finally bring somebody else in. Turns out he was smoking during the interview with the FAO, and I thought, oh no, careful what you wish for. He later drank in the office, and sometimes I'd show up and find piles of beer cans over the desk. This got me riled up and I told him to stop, as there is a ban on drinking on campus.

But aside from that he'd do really interesting things like walk for 3km down a road in no particular direction, as well as jump over fences to get out of the school and to the local pubs - recall the drinking ban on campus, which I admonished him over. I later joined him on those 'excursions' to the pub, though. At one time we came back at 3am and hopped over the gate where the guard was fast asleep. A Chinese senior high student went with us, which wasn't really bright, and I hoped that he wouldn't get caught - for his sake.

Well this FT made life interesting, that's for sure, and his teaching was quite good. He kept borrowing my lesson plans, but he did have a good classroom presence.

Steve

[VanIslander]

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

When I taught in Japan,

we had a teacher come in one Saturday morning

with ... um, er ... vomit on his shirt and tie.

After a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to wash it off,

he went into the classroom with his photocopies and a cup of coffee.

Roughly 30 minutes later, a young Japanese woman came out of the classroom

with a red face, and sheepishly explained to our manager that the teacher

(we'll call him "John" 'cuz that was his real name)

had ... um, er ... fallen asleep in class.

[dmb]

In Qatar there was a guy who had decided he had had enough. So he packed his suitcase and walked off into the desert in the general direction of Saudi. He returned a few hours later having decided it wasn't one of his better ideas.

Or how about a teacher i never met. She arrived in Istanbul at midnight. She was met at the airport by one of the office staff and taken to her flat.
I went round the next morning at 9am to welcome her and bring her into school. She wasn't there. She had decided she didnt like Istanbul and had gone back to England.

oh just remembered another. At a party one night, a teacher who had had enough was out on the balcony threatening to commit suicide unless the school paid for a flight back to England. i had to talk her in then phone the boss and explain what had happened. He was only too happy to pay for the flight.

or one night i was in my local and the owner came up to me asking if i had recruited a new teacher and motioned over to one corner. I said yes and she told me 'can you please tell him to put his d*** away.' he was next to the girls' toilets and flashing at the women!! He never turned up at work the next morning so he got the sack.

[Hector_Lector]

Many moons back, the Brutish Council in Qatar emplyed a teacher called T*ny. He resembled Catweazle - straggling hair, wispy beard. He must have been in his late fifties, and claimed to have been beaten nearly to death in Thailand.

The students loved him. His classes almost all returned for new courses, demanding the same teacher. He had a fear of technology, and rather than use cassette players, he would read out tapescripts, acting out all the parts with appropriate voices.

After a few drinks (ie a bottle of whisky), he would turn completely mental, once abseiling down from the roof of his six-storey building to his flat, having lost his keys.

At a party shortly before he left (that in itself a dramatic event, involving him driving at top speed away from the Council, flinging the photocopies he had made and hoarded over three years out of the car window), he tried to pick a fight with the four-year-old son of the DOS.

[Will.]

One teacher I knew actually planned their lessons...All of them...In advance...In detail. I don't know what the lessons were like.

[dreadnought]

[moonraven]

I haven't actually worked with that many crackpots--some folks that were rabidly agressive and tedious and/or stratosperically egocentric, yes--but I only remember one who was really nuts.

This guy was more or less 50, and he showed up in a small town on the Pacific coast of Mexico from someplace in Europe where he had been for maybe 10 years complaining that his several TONS of teaching materials were hung up in a customs warehouse at the Mexico City airport. (Disclaimer: I was not the culprit who hired this fruitcake.) For me, that was the first clue that he wasn't hitting on all cyclinders.

I noticed that he seemed unusually nervous, and that he was a very poor listener--as he was even very distracted when I gave him the explanation of why he was going to function as coordinator at another campus of the university where there were no other EFL teachers. Making eye contact was difficult for him.

Before sending him on his way, I made some suggestions about what he could do to evaluate and place students in groups and gave him copies of some of the books and tapes and CD Roms that we were using.

As the weeks passed and the e-mails I received from him made less and less sense, I thought that maybe being the only EFL teacher was getting to him, so I invited him to spend an afternoon with us and give us a presentation. He said that he was going to talk about the "Lexical" approach, and asked for an overhead projector. I told him I hated OPs because I didn't like to read extended texts that were always out of focus on a screen or wall. He did not take the hint, and repeated his request.

When he came he did use the OP, and it WAS, of course, out of focus. After about 45 minutes of his more or less randomly placing acetates on the screen and talking in circles, one of the profs asked him to define the Lexical Approach. That question threw him for a loop.

I felt sorry for the guy, so I changed the topic and asked him what he was doing in his classes at the other campus. He stammered a few times and indicated that he was going to the classroom and speaking to the students in English and hoping that they would absorb something of the language.

That ripped it for me. I maneuvered him out of the workshop room and walked him to the front gate. He was muttering something about not having given a very effective presentation when I stuffed him into a taxi....

When the university vice-president suggested to me that I kick him into shape I pointed out that I had not hired the guy, that he did not work for me, and that I didn't care to have anything more to do with him.

I changed jobs, and was on another continent when I received the news that the guy had finally just disappeared....

[dreadnought]

When I was working as a DoS in Morocco, a British guy came to the school looking for a job. He'd been fired from another school in the city, but that wasn't a big problem as the boss there was notoriously trigger happy and would sack teachers for all kinds of bizarre reasons. In the interview the guy really didn't impress and almost seemed hellbent on outlining all his failings as a teacher. I quite liked him, and felt a bit sorry for him, so I called him back for another interview and he seemed a bit more on the ball. I wanted to hire him, but the local Director of the school said it would be bad for the school's reputation if we took on teachers who had been fired by our rivals. So, I phoned him and told him we couldn't give him a job.

A few days later I got a letter through the post, and when I opened the envelope a picture of a naked Moroccan woman fell out. On closer inspection it was a picture of a naked Moroccan woman with a baby suckling at her breast. The lengthy ten-page letter accompanying it was from this teacher begging me to give him work. Apparently he'd got his illiterate Moroccan maid pregnant and they'd had a child. But, without a job he couldn't support them and he couldn't get a residence permit and he would have to leave. He was actually living with his whole maid's family in a shack on the edge of Casablanca. The letter was bizarre, full of weird metaphors and odd stick drawings (one of him begging to me on his knees). It was clear this guy was not the full shilling.

I was certainly glad that I didn't hire him when I learnt from one of his colleagues that a few weeks later he'd gone absolutely psycho at a party, started swearing at everyone, ran down the street shouting at the locals and then disappeared from the country leaving his wife and child behind.

About a year and a half later, I was working in Poland and I was in one of the local bars in the city when I spotted him there with some teachers from another school. At least I thought it was him. I asked a friend of mine who was sitting close to ask him where he'd worked and he said Morocco and his name was the same so it definitely was the guy. He'd just got a job there working for a school. A few weeks later I left Poland for another job, but one of best friends stayed there. I learnt from him a few months later that this guy was a grade A fruitcake. He used to sit in bars talking to himself and to imaginary characters and he wanted people to refer to him as King James. I gather he got fired pretty damn quickly.

God knows where this guy is now, but I hope he's not following me.

[dreadnought]

[31]

Yeah but TEFL is a profession.

[Gregor]

Wow.
Awesome stories. When I took the DOS job, I was determined to avoid hiring the kind of nutters I'd seen over the years as a teacher. I also wanted to avoid being the kind of guy you find on englishdroid.com, or the kind of guys I have worked for.
There was this one guy - the DOS when I was hired at a school in Jakarta - who was clearly completely paranoid. First of all, he wasn't a teacher and never HAD been. He was this back-slapping guy with a marketing background. I have no idea how or why he wound up in Jakarta, OR as a DOS of a school But there you are.
He had a really good group of teachers, and HE deserved credit for putting them together. There were LOADS of us there, and the atmosphere in the teachers' room was amazingly positive and professional, compared to a lot of other places I had worked before. I was working with about twelve other teachers, most of them foreign but a couple locals (and that figures into the story).
One day he called me into his office to discuss a "conspiracy" to have him fired and thrown out of Indonesia. The ringleader of this conspiracy was supposedly a really good teacher there. He was a bit of a trouble-maker in the office, I'll admit that, but his classes were great, he was always professional, and he basically just talked a lot. Just a lot of hot wind, but nothing serious.
Anyway, he was the ringleader, and as I was known to attend parties in his home occasionally (he was quite the entertainer), this DOS character was convinced that I, as a clearly mature and honest man, would be willing to level with him and reveal what I knew of this plot.
He was competely convinced of it. But as we talked (for more than an hour, all the while I tried to "talk him off the ledge," as it were), I got a stronger and stronger feeling that he was missing a few cards.
Finally, he implicated one of the local teachers in this scheme, and I stood up at that point. I told him that he was out of his mind for even suggesting that, and even if he was right, he'd be even MORE out of his mind to try doing anything about it - this sweet, young (about 19) and QUITE GOOD teacher, devout Muslim who would never harm anyone or anything in any way, was also the daughter of the Secretary to the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Indonesia.
Just, if you're a foreigner in Indonesia and you decide to take on that kind of fight, you are batting WAY out of your league. I mean, really, at THAT point, it hardly mattered. If she was really out to get him, the ONLY POSSIBLE avenue is to get on her good side. You do NOT fight her. That's INSANE.
I hoped that I had managed to talk some sense into him, but he was clearly no longer in control of his facilities. The next day, he called the sweet young (powerfully connected) girl into his office, and I can only imagine what he might have said to her. She exited his office not fifteen minutes later (it was during office hours, so we ALL saw her get called down and later run back up), in tears, almost hysterical.
The rest of us teachers didn't know what to do, but we tried to comfort her and calm her down.
I really wish I could have been there to see what happened later, between the owner and the crazy DOS guy. Because the next day, after classes were finished, the boss brought in pizza for everyone, asking us to please stay late, as the management had an announcement. We nervously agreed, because this owner was a sweet man who didn't usually impose on our time, other than to plan the odd excursion for the students and teachers to the Thousand Islands or some such, but right THEN, he did not come across as someone to mess about with.
We took some pizza and listened as Crazy DoS Man announced his resignation, effective immediately. That was it. The owners (man and wife) stood behind him, listening carefully, arms crossed, looking uncharacteristically stern. When he finished, he was dismissed, and we were, too. We had had time to take exactly two bites of pizza.
We never saw Psycho Ian...SORRY! I mean, "Crazy DOS Guy"...again.

This same school was where I learned how NOT to be a DOS. That same guy, before he lost it completely, hired a woman who...well, you've read a similar story already. She came to twon around six or seven, showed up at the school, and a collegue and I were asked to show her to her house.
We didn't have a lot of time. It was illegal, but we had a gig that night - I'm a drummer and he was a guitarist, and we were booked to play a BIG gig and we didn't want to muck about.
But no wories. We both lived close to her new house, so we took her. On the way, she revealed that she had just completed her TFL and this was her first teaching gig. Fair enough; that was normal for our school. She'd worked in the prison system in CANADA (I didn't previously know they HAD a prison system), and we reckoned she'd be pretty tough.
Nope. On the way to the house, we were giving her pointers, about things like avoiding the huge, flying cockroaches and how to discourage rats from getting into your house.
Mind you, these were serious and daily issues, so we just assumed that she had been informed.
She had not been. The idea of the roaches and rats alarmed her, to say the least. We had JUST got her calmed down when we got her to her home, turned on the lights, and she immediatly spotted a GEKO on the wall.
Now, her reaction to this was still completely unexpected. She freaked out. We tried to tell her, "NO NO NO! The gekos are your FRIENDS! They EAT THE BUGS! Don't hate THEM!!"
She was having none of it. But we had a previous engagement and had to leave.
The next morning, we learned that she had freaked out SO BADLY that she had called the DOS at two in the morning to have her taken back to the airport to wait for the next plane back to Canada.

[guest of Japan]

I don't have any stories to compare with the above. Every foreign EFL teacher I have worked with has been completely stable.

I did once work with teacher in the US who was missing a few marbles. He was the nicest guy in the world. He had dreams of being an actor and actaully had a soap opera part once. However, when it came to giving a lesson or even just holding a coherent conversation, he just couldn't do it. The principal at the school loved him, but I think it was mostly his entertainment value.