Teaching EFL - ESL in Greece

Tested to death, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

Lately,I have been receiving emails from people who would like advice on getting work as an EFL - ESL teacher in Greece. I suppose that they have looked in Google and come across my blog. In the beginning I was careful not be appear too negative and so just said that they should check out the ministry of education's website for the requirements and be sure that they know their work rights before signing any contracts with schools here. .

However, I have come to the conclusion that somebody who is serious about teaching would be best off going to another country and that the conditions in which teachers, both foreign and Greek are currently working are going from bad to worse.

It is not just the low pay (try living on 700-900 Euros in today's Greece) or that you're only fired every summer holiday, it's also the fact that the treatment of educators in the private sectors has fallen to an all-time low. High graduate unemployment and a struggling economy means that there is a seemingly endless stream of people willing to work in foreign language schools. As a result the value put on educators is minimal and this is reflected in the rapidly deteriorating working conditions. Summary dismissal, abusive behaviour and irrational demands are now par for the course in many schools.

Thankfully,I have manged to avoid most of this, however, many of my colleagues have not been so lucky. A case in point is Lambrini, a hard working teacher wth many years experience and mother - of - two. Like many others, she too was looking for a new position in a language school this September. During her search for work she came into contact with a possible employer via Hyphen, "an ambitious company dedicated to inspiring realism, quality standards and viable practices to educational businesses throughout Europe ".

After phoning the school and talking about working there part - time Lambrini, mentioned the fact that there might be a possible timetable clash with her other job and asked to postpone her decision for a day or two so as to re-arrange her programme in order to accommodate the school.

Apparently, this so outraged the school owner that she immediately contacted Hyphen to complain. In turn Hyphen then sent the following email saying that Lambrini had been "blacklisted".

"Dear Mrs. M#######,

We had received your Curriculum Vitae for a potential Teaching position September 5th, 2008.

During that time, we were pleased to hear you had accepted a teaching position at Mrs. K##### Foreign Language School at Evosmos,

however, much to our disappointment, we were informed that after you had agreed to a cooperation with Mrs. K######, you decided to terminate that cooperation in a rather sudden manner.

Please note that we only accept professional behaviour, be that of potential teacher applicants, or school owners.

We consider your behaviour was not of the standard we require and for that reason, you have been blacklisted.

In addition, we have also informed Foreign Language School owners of the above.


Sincerely,

Tina #####

Academic Project Manager

hyphen (engineering education)

As you can see the situation is truly dire when simply asking for more time to make a decision is grounds enough to get you blacklisted. Nor are such extreme reactions isolated incidents. In Athens, Thanasis Papadopoulos, a teacher of German working for the Europaiki Poreia language school was fired and then sued for "abusing the honour and esteem" of a student when he dared take his case to the local teacher's union. Not content with this the school owner also took union representative, Dimitris Papadopoulos to court for "slandering" the school's "good name".

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In many language schools poor wages, chronic job insecurity and abusive employers are now par for the course. Bugged classrooms, teacher reduced to tears by screaming bosses, non-payment of bonuses and insurance contributions no longer raise eyebrows.

So, if you are considering teaching EFL/ESL in Greece, you seriously need to think about what you are letting yourself in for.

Changing

I was in school today when I bumped into one of my old students. He told me that he'd set up his own blog and then went on to show me a whole bunch of interesting sites. How times have changed. Only a couple of years ago it was an uphill struggle to get my students interested in using the internet. Either they didn't have access or they considered it the sole preserves of computer geeks. In vain I tried to show them all the real cool things they could do.

Now, within a matter of months most of the students I tutor have acquired fast internet and are dying to find out how to use this wonderful tool. They ask about sites and applications, and are discovering a whole new world.

Back in the day

I think it is indicative of the way EFL/ESL seems to lag behind the rest of the educational world the fact that we still have to use audio and video cassettes instead of CDs (mp3 anyone?) and DVDs when teaching English. Just like the books they accompany the cassettes are stuck in the 80's desperately hoping to ignore the changes that have happened over the last 25 years.

However, I see a ray of hope as more and more of my students are complaining that they can't use the cassettes as they don't have a cassette recorder at home. Maybe, just maybe the publishing companies might cotton on to the fact and start releasing their stuff on CD. Radical thought, huh?

Teaching

Soon I'll be starting back and so I have to get back into teaching mode. One of the things I've decided to do at the beginning of the new school year with my new classes is do a lesson on how to use mobile phones in the classroom. Over the last few years I have been doing something similar with the uses of technology in order to learn English outside the classroom (see here) with DVDs, Wikis, blogs, podcasts etc.

However, this has had mixed results in the classroom as we don't have PCs and often students don't have internet at home. As a result they see such activities as an optional extra which can easily be discarded. I can't say I blame as the ideas are new, often difficult to understand, at least in the beginning and add to their already overloaded timetable.

Ideally, I would be able to teach and supervise such learning in lesson time, but that is not possible. The educational system I work in seems to loathe and reject any form of technology or innovation. Instead of new approaches we simply introduce yet more exam practice materials. i.e. yet more books filled with mock tests thinly disguised as course books.

I think a good analogy would be that of a runner preparing for say, 100m sprint. The person does nothing other than sprint 100m for a year. There is no stamina training, no weights, no special diet.In fact their only training is running the same distance over and over again.

Many parents teachers and students are convinced that unless you do activities which are in the final exams then you're wasting your time. So, for example, the only way to prepare for a cloze test is to do hundreds of other cloze test. It doesn't matter that the test is different each time or that you're ignoring the underlying skills and knowledge required to do the exercise succesfully.No, if the test has this form what you have to do is blindly repeat it endlessly.

May Day in Thessaloniki

How low can you fall and still look yourself in the mirror?

I was just talking to friend here in Thessaloniki who is also a language teacher. Unfortunately, she has recently lost her father to cancer. As you can imagine this has come as a devastating blow to her and her family. To add to her distress, not to mention anxiety she has been told that she ill have to make up the lessons she has missed organising and attending her father's funeral over the coming Easter holidays, otherwise she will not be paid. As she is married and has a family this is money she can ill afford to miss, especially considering the expenses she has incurred.

Words can not describe the anger I feel over this. Yet this kind of incident is not isolated, but rather indicative of the attitude of many, if not most school owners here in Greece. They feel that their staff are utterly disposable and hardly worth the effort of addressing civilly, let alone treating with respect. High unemployment combined with an endless stream of possible replacements means that language teachers have as much job security as your average fast food employee.

One can't help but wonder if one of the reasons why Greece does so badly in international EFL?ESL exams (click here to see the statistics) is because of such attitudes.