Teaching English in Budapest

I’m about to teach English for the first time in my life. The stage is set. I’ve checked my pens are working and I wore a collared shirt for the occasion. The blue long sleeve shirt I bought from Next for that online interview. I have my shambles of a plan written in my notebook. I was supposed to have it written out in an official style on headed paper and I was supposed to give Esther a copy. In the struggle to take in all the information being thrown my way I’m making big errors. Really big basic errors. My peers are at the back of the audience ready to make notes on my performance. There are some concerned expressions, some confused. Esther is wondering where her fucking plan is. The students start coming in. I think of anxious board meetings. Jerry Smith’s, ‘Hungry for Apples?’ fiasco. Some of the more humiliating job interviews. In all the anxiety the scene starts to look to me like a comedy club. Paying customers down the front, some might be drunk already, others trouble makers. The newspapers are at the back ready to write reviews. I’m the arsehole on the stage who will either make an entertaining show or crash and burn. Either way it’s entertaining for someone. It’s refreshing freedom to have my success or failure in the next 45 minutes all on me. Without so much as a forklift driver hindering me in making a shambles of this first attempt at being a teacher.

The clock strikes nine and there’s silence. All eyes on me. The students want to learn something and the press stare at me like statues from the back of the classroom, pens in hands, poised to write their opinions. Esther tries to forcefully push me into making a start from across the room by swinging her arms about like a coach pushing a boxer into the ring. I should really say something. It’s nearly five past so I introduce myself. Where I’m from in County Durham we talk fast. I have to keep repeating myself. Esther whispers loudly, ‘slow down, slow down’, whenever I open my mouth. She’s a coach trying to guide a rookie through the game. I had some handouts I was clinging to with white knuckles. Seems the thing to do for a teacher is to print stuff and pass them around.

These CELTA lessons are only 45 minutes and the clock slowly ticks down. The students take the initiative and start to read the handouts. They must be well drilled because they aren’t getting any direction from me. They’re trying to help me out. I often see enemies everywhere but here I see allies. They busy themselves reading for a while and talk to each other, giving me time to think of what to do. Seeing them do something was better than that opening five minutes of nothing. The talking is getting louder and not much of it is in English. Esther looks at me like she wants to move on. Her hands do some sort of frantic macarena to give me the hint. Then I remember I didn’t pre-teach! Fuck, there were five words I needed to explain before the students spent the past ten minutes reading. CCQs or something. So I backtrack and write the first word on the board. ‘receive’. ‘Does anyone know what this means?’ Silence. So I just tell them, ‘It’s like when. Like when you get something’. Hopefully that's done it. I continue to attempt to pre-teach new words after they’ve already read them in the text, pronouncing the vowels all ‘rang’ rather than wrong. My harsh native Durham accent rather than the received pronunciation Harry Potter style the students might be used to increases the sense of bemusement.

There isn’t much of the lesson left by the time I’ve pre taught new words after the part where I was meant to set them a task followed by goofing about cluelessly. Ten minutes left and we haven’t gotten to the grammar yet in what’s supposed to be a grammar lesson. The exercise is on the handouts I gave them. A page out of a textbook with the reading they’ve already spent 35 minutes on and the gap fill grammar exercise. The present continuous tense is the subject matter. I think this tense is about something starting now and going into the future, or is it something happening now which started in the past? Luckily for me most of the students have already started the grammar task. Good old initiative, great to see. But some have finished it. ‘OK, you all have five minutes to complete the exercise.’ This leaves me five minutes before I can get off the stage. At this point I’m just hiding behind the clock wishing for the full time whistle. I write the present continuous on the board from my scrappy notes. I assume it’s right, it’s the same as in the textbook but it might as well be ancient Egyptian to me right now. Good thing I wrote down the answers in my notes. Checking answers should be enough to get the clock to zero. Forget the fact I’ve missed out half the material I was meant to use. Might be a smart time to ask a question. ‘Yuki’, do you have the answer to question A?’ ‘Yes, Abdul was going to the shops.’ My reply was ‘vat’s right’, self conscious that my ‘TH’ still sounds more like a ‘V’ from a childhood speech problem. The confused expressions were because the answer I gave was wrong. The students were too polite to shout, ‘No teacher!’, when I’m clearly struggling to fight the flames of this train wreck. We get through answers A to G and and it’s finally 1015. Esther signals me to leave the stage and I’m relieved it’s over. I clear up the board quicker than a windscreen cleaner at the traffic lights and gather my notes with a burst of pace making way for the next teacher. To be honest, she’s the first teacher off the morning after that shit show.

After that fiasco I was expecting a good pasting. I remember when I worked at the Nissan factory, way back when. Our crew would get feedback on our previous shifts' failed attempts to ship out quality paint repairs before the start of the current shift. Steven would often leave his jam jar glasses at home, reducing his ability to see lumps of welding flash in a Qashqai’s fresh paint more of a hopeful dream than a workable talent. Mike was trying his hand at middle management and gave his feedback to us in the style of those who went before him and trained him up. ‘Alreet, listen up lads’. Incidentally, the only female in paint shop check and repair was on maternity leave. ‘Canny shift last neet. It waz leek the fooking Alamo doone there’. The other manager always referenced the Alamo when the workload of shit we got from down the line was high. He needs his own catchphrase. The up and down in his Mackem accent is akin to the tones of Cantonese. ‘Aye, alreet shift. Apart from yee Steven. Ya fooking let wa doone again lad’. This is the sort of feedback I’m used to from five years of factory work. Unnecessarily brutal, demotivational, threatening and often humiliating. Often all four. Poor Steven didn’t help himself though. Sometimes when the manager noticed he had forgotten his glasses he’d put him on tailgate inspection. Steven’s a very tall man, a former military guy. He lifts up the tailgates on the endless line of Qashqai shells as far as they can bend on their hinges for a good neb inside to see if there’s enough paint and the right number of defects. The handles are clipped onto the tailgates at this point in the line and are steel hoops covered in fifty coats of paint. The car is just a steel body on a train track at this stage in assembly. No plastic parts yet. Just bodyshells trundling along freshly painted. On the low ceiling of this silver aluminum booth in which we worked, emblazoned with fluorescent lights, there is a steel pole running the length of the booth. An obsolete remnant of a tool used to make a long gone model a decade earlier and the end of the steel pole starts right above tailgate inspection. We must’ve made two million of these Qashqai’s to this point and were near the end of the facelifted mark one’s production run when he managed to attach a longer and taller Qashqai seven seater to this pole. I was putting black stickers on doors next to him when I heard through my earplugs steel stretching under tensile pressure and the scream of a man who can’t quite find the right words to scream so ends up just sounding severely autistic. The steel bar was stronger than the Qashqai which is being stretched out like it’s on a medieval rack, the trolley it was on is still moving at full pace pulling the car’s front. The roof of the booth is starting to bend and fall in under pressure, then a tailgate hinge shears off releasing some of the tension. Part of me still regrets pushing the emergency stop. It would’ve been interesting to see how much destruction was about to happen to North Eastern industry if I didn’t do the kind thing and stop the line. Steven got worse feedback for the minor fuckups. People tend to express concern in their feedback rather than be overly critical when we go the extra mile in fucking up, as I just did.