Job Discussion Forums

[31]

Comments?

[Golightly]

One of my students once asked me,'Teacher, why do English drink so much?'
I replied, 'If you lived on a cold, wet, muddy, overcrowded, foggy, expensive brown and green island in the middle of the Atlantic, you'd want a drink too.'
He got it after I'd explained the second conditional....and the vocabulary.
Part of the reason is simply because we can. It's the ex-pat syndrome thing - we feel that we are not bound to the usual social rules that pertain when we are in our home countries and cultures. I've seem ex-pat Turks here in the U.K. do the equivalent - eating bacon sandwiches!

[dmb]

If you spoke to a doctor I'm sure they would say I drank too much(Don't doctors have the highest rate of alcoholism amongst any profession?) I like to come home, crash out on the sofa, read, watch tv and have a couple of beers. It has nothing to do with my job. It is just me or is it a cultural thing?Ok the weekends are different.
EFL is quite often a young persons thing. finish uni, decide to travel, do aTEFL and go abroad for a couple of years and have fun- which involves going out alot. When I was in my early 20s I was out almost every night in seedy bars in Taksim. Nowadays, step forward middle aged dmb, I probably go out once a week. I prefer to have friends round or go to nice restaurants- and have a couple of beers.
Of course if you go to the Gulf you meet the serious EFL alcoholics.
Anyway I'd say it was more of an age thing or a cultural thing and not job related

[31]

True dmb but I still think that the following are true from my experiences anyway:

TEFL attracts misfits. Misfits amongst other things sometimes have an alcohol problem or develop one.

Hard core drinkers like the Gulf ones you mentioned stay in the job partly because they either live to drink or drink to live and because they cannot get work elsewhere. Who is going to employ them and if they could get employed their sloppy work, smelling of drink, absenteeism, lateness, always chewing olips etc. would be noticed.

Some people like you adapt well to living and working long term in another country, others don`t. (If that sounds patronising I didn`t mean it to)

TEFL can grind you down. The daily grind and in my opinion doing TEFL for too long makes you an exile. Some people are happy that way, others aren`t.

Some teflers lose touch with family and friends, others don`t. I think this contributes to it.

Lastly EFL is one of the few jobs where you can mess up and walk round the corner and get a new job. No doubt you met/heard stories in Qatar of the types who do 3 months here, three months there. Leaving before their lack of qualifications and drinking becomes too apparent. What other job can you do that in.

[dmb]

[31]

Of course I have met more ''normal'' people but I meant that TEFL attracts more misfits than other jobs that (should) require degree level qualifications.

You seem to be implying that there are more misfits in Gulf EFL than EFL elsewhere. I disagree with you. I think your experience in the Gulf wasn`t typical of Gulf EFL employers. QAC has a high turnover and untypically employs people well over 55. It doesn`t check qualifications thoroughly whereas many Gulf employers do. A lot of Gulf teflers are in their 40s and 50s and are married with kids. Few QAC employees have wives and kids with them.

[dmb]

Oh 31 we were doing so well we've been in agreement in our last few exchanges. but I now have to disagree. I think there are more EFl misfits in the Gulf, that's my experience and I may be wrong
Correct QAC does a have a high turnover. That is because they offer short term contracts. Some of my friends there had been working there for years for 6 months of the year over the winter, when the weather is nice. Most were married but their kids were not there because they had grown up and had their own lives. I was one of the youngest teachers there.
Anyway, fancy meeting for a beer and we can discuss this more. not that I drink too much or anything.

[31]

[dmb]

I'm not a man for violence. Except boxing and rugby.But thats controlled... usually

[31]

[dmb]

Go on mention them. But I stand by what I say. violence isn't an answer. first sight of violence or a fight..... I leg it.

[molly farquharson]

oh you didn't see me on balo sok the other night then. my friend's ex-husband was trying to attack me when i told him to go away and leave us alone. i couldn't believe the words that came out of my mouth. animal. that was the second time in my life i have ever been physically under attack and i would say that i am more man than he was. maybe it's the menopause... the interesting thing is that people on the street could see there was trouble brewing but no one offered to help, though some would have jumped in. i think the moon is getting full...

[corall]

definitely boredom.

during the week, if i drink i can't deal with the next day. usually i don't drink from sunday to thursday, which means i go a little wacko on the weekends to make up for my week of sobriety. i do find we drink a lot. it's all my friends and i do. we meet at the local and stay there most of the weekend, sometimes we vary location but the activity is still the same. the reason? i don't think we can think of anything else to do

i have other friends who go on weekend trips or day trips. but now that i think about it, they are not really hard core teflers, they are just here as it is easy to get to the other places they want to go. they are more travellers i guess...

ps. i agree, violence sucks!

[yaramaz]

When I lived in that place in Anatolia that started with K (I know y'all are sick of hearing that word) I went away most weekends simply because there wasn't much to do there. You certainly couldn't drink there. That's what cappadocia was for. Hooray for cave wine! (I miss caves. I think ı was a troglodyte in a past life)

[dmb]