What's your favourite fruit?

[lolwhites]

You can afford a mortgage working for an academia?
You're overpaid!

Seriously, though, I worked in academias before moving back to the UK in 1996. Working conditions in private language schools coupled with the near impossibility of a foreigner, even from another EU country, getting a job in the state system were two of the reasons I didn't stay. I take my hat off to you, Revel, for sticking to your guns.

I returned to Spain in 2002 for a 2 week training/updating course for Spanish teachers, and got to see English classes in the state schools for myself. What I saw confirmed my worst fears. What made it worse was that I got the distinct impression that the state teachers felt they had "made it" and had no need to update their skills or take advice from anyone else, just sit back, cash the pay cheque every month, wait for the pension to roll in and never mind whether the students learned anything or not.

[LarryLatham]

Perhaps it's one of the reasons we bother to get on the internet here, and dial up Dave's to commiserate with each other and lament about how 'lousy' the standard teachers are, even when they're being paid so well, while we, superior teachers though we may be, are 'mistreated and maligned'.

I feel pretty much the same way as the rest of you. I became, like you, a teacher who gives a damn about his students and the language by working hard, reading and thinking a lot about it, and trying to be the best I could be. People like us are to be found everywhere, in every endeavor. We are simply built that way, and we'd be the same whether they respected us or not, whether they paid us well or not...because we don't know how to do it any other way.

But most of the time our students treat us well, and the others just p*ss us off , so we come here to complain about it.

Larry Latham