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[sliim]

Would anyone like to share their worst experience teaching abroad? There is a great one that begins with a British woman and a teddy bear in Sudan. Can anyone beat that?

[coffeedrinker]

It wasn't exactly teaching, but I did once have a terrible accommodation situation. Ironically, I had found it myself.

I rented a room from a woman who turned out to have some serious psychological issues. Her brother also lived there (did not know this before I moved in) - he was 40 or so and had a habit of shrieking while playing video games. The major drama though was with her issues.

I made up a story to explain my moving out, as if they couldn't guess why otherwise(!) and a few nights before I left, the woman brought into my room a student who was supposedly thinking of renting the room. They sat down and wouldn't leave til the shrieking brother came over and made them. (So in the end, he wasn't that bad! He was not shrieking at that point)

I'm kind of rolling my eyes as I write this, but at the time it felt pretty awful to feel not safe in the place I was living. I guess I came away from it realizing I do not have the ability to read people as well as I think I do!

(it's not better than the bear, but can anyone really beat that? Share anyway...)

[eslstudies]

this is the now legendary "Laoshi meiyou kuzi" episode in Guilin, China, mid 1997.
Pretty low key, but mid morning, the power went off. A few times before when this happened, I'd checked the fuse box, thrown a switch, and hey presto.
This time the door blew shut as I was outside, so I'm in the stairwell on the 6th floor, no hidden key, dressed in T shirt and jocks [standard indoor gear for Chinese summer], no shoes or even slippers. No other FT's in the building to borrow from, other than a 5 foot nothing Japanese girl who would have had conniptions with a large semi-naked man at the door.

So no option but to stroll around 400 metres to the Foreign Affairs office, skirting the classrooms and dorms as much as possible, hoping the FA officer was in his den, otherwise, I was screwed! He was, he laughed, but didn't make a big deal of it, I got home and worked out a spare key option. But hell I had sore feet.

It's a bit like an old nightmare this one. As a kid I used to dream of going to school in my PJs.
.

[jestert79]

Well, this isn't incredibly funny or nightmarish, but my lack of experience at the time amplified the stress this caused.

On my second day of teaching EVER, I had to go teach some lessons at a "satellite school," where the school rented out rooms in a public school an hour away to have lessons. According to the roster, my first class was teens, 10 or 11 of them.

What ended up happening is 18 or 19 kids showed up, with parents constantly knocking on the door and saying this was their kids' class too. As I was trying to start my lesson, one of the parents called the DoS on their mobile. I was trying to talk to him with the kids going crazy in the background, and he said "Get control of your class."

Anyway, it turned out some of the parents just had the wrong time slot, and the school was opening up a new class, so a week or two later they brought in another teacher and I had a nice little class of 10 or so.

Yeah, I know, *yawn*, I could swear I have a better one but I can't think of it at the moment.

[Shan-Shan]

Early this century, my second day in Seoul teaching a kindergarten class (something my TESL training did nothing to prepare me for).


The students' previous FT often held "alphabet competitions" where members from two teams raced up to the white board to write whatever letter the teacher called out. The faster, and more accurate, the better.

About two minutes into this activity, one little girl up at the white board suddenly dropped her marker and quite literally turned white. Seconds later she collapsed onto the floor in a flurry of spasms and convulsions. Her eyes remained wide open throughout with a look of distant, horrible pain.

I picked her up and went downstairs to the main office where I told the receptionist to call an ambulance immediately. The staff, however, barely reacted, saying that this student often fainted and had other odd episodes in class in class "because her mother wants her to be thin (i.e. doesn't feed her much)".

The poor little creature ended up taking a two month sabbatical.

[soapdodger]

Unfortunately I could write a book on this subject. Here's one worth sharing.

Many moons ago I was doing my second year with a large summer school company in the UK on the campus of a provincial uni. The previous year had been great, good team, good students, good everything...in fact the best summer school I have ever worked at. And then this.....

The first problem was a spot of thievery amongst the students. Not such a big thing, inevitable when you get alot of people living together. We knew more or less who it was but couldn't pin anything on them. Then there was a fire in an accommodation block toilet, fire brigade, the whole thing. Caused by someone having rammed a stolen camera into a tampon incinerator, which jammed in the "on" position. Alot of bother with the Bursar's office at the uni.

A couple of days later, I was on office duty and I thought I saw a whisp of smoke going past the window. Then another one. I went outside to find the field behind the building up in flames. "Oh, well, stubble burning that's got out of hand, not our prob." I thought. Ten minutes later there was a call from campus security that local residents had seen 2 youths running away from where the fire had started in the direction of our building. Well, that was never fully established, but we had a pretty good idea who it was, same ones with the thieving and the tampon incinerator.

A few days later there was a trip to London, early morning kick-off. The teachers all set off down to where the buses were parked and stood around smoking and chatting. One of the drivers, for no reason at all, started hurling abuse at the teachers which was tactfully ignored. He continued all the way to London, on the coach with the Centre manager aboard. The plan for return was that everyone was to meet at 4.30 in Parliament Square and departure was at 5.00. At ten to five two students were still missing, but the abusive coach driver said he was going anyway, and started to pull off with a female teacher half on and half off the steps of the bus. Another teacher, male, shouted for him to stop, which he did, clambered out and made to hit the male teacher. At this point the Centre Director, a great guy and a Scouser, stepped in. In seconds a serious punchup started, which luckily due to its proximity to the side of the coach and the height of the windows the students didn't see. Once things had calmed down a bit, we set off back, only to be greeted on arrival by three squad cars full of the local Constabulary. The abusive driver had phoned them at the motorway stop to say he was in fear of his life. Thankfully his colleagues didn't support him at all, and the police left, probably disheartened that the riot they had been looking forward to never materialised.

Couldn't get worse? A few days after London, doing his late evening rounds the Social Director found 2 drunk guys in their twenties wandering around the third floor of the students accom. He got them into the office where he and the Centre Manager got some details from them. One was a student of that university who lived nearby and the other was a mate up from Oxford. They left, hurling insults. About five minutes after they'd gone, a student came rushing in to report water coming through the third floor ceiling. It was quickly discovered that these louts had ripped the water pipes out of the wall in the fourth floor toilets and water was pouring through all floors below. A lovely mess to clean up last thing at night. Apparently the student from that uni went to the Bursar with his parents the next day to claim youthful exuberance and offer 300 quid compensation, which was refused. I believe prosecution ensued and presumable the piece of excrement in question didn't get a degree either.

To cap it all, on a personal level, my paycheque was stolen from the secretary's drawer where I'd left it for safekeeping while off doing sports. Probably a teacher, and I'm pretty sure which one. No big shakes but it meant a ten-day delay getting another one from head office. Thanks for that if you're reading this.

Needless to say I didn't really feel like going back for a third year!!!

[soapdodger]

Oh, and is a nighmare almost a horse?