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Amok Mama: One of the advantages of being a TEFL teacher

Teaching English as a Foreign Language is a nice way of making enough money to pay your rent and buy a bit of food and beer too. But there are other Vorteile associated with the job, says Jacinta Nandi.

You never know what you might need it for. Photo: seetefl (cc)
You never know when it will come in handy. Photo: seetefl (cc)

“So, I had a one night stand the other night,” says my friend Hayley.

“Oh,” I say. “Was it good?”

“It was okay. Actually, it was a bit embarrassing, really.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Well, in the morning, I woke up before him yeah? And I lay there, next to him, waiting for him to wake up. Only I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what his name was.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“So I was lying there, trying to figure out what to do. Like, I couldn’t ask him, could I? I couldn’t just come straight out and ask him. ‘Hi, that was great last night, what’s your name again?’ So I thought what I should do was, like, get up and go through his jacket and find his Personalausweis. But what if he woke up and saw me rifling through his pockets like a junkie whore type person? I didn’t want that to happen.”

“It would be slightly humiliating, I’ll give you that.”

“So then I thought to myself: Hayley – you’re an English teacher! You can just elicit his name! I mean, it’s one of the advantages of being a TEFL teacher, right – being so good at eliciting stuff. So I lay there, while he slept, and I made a plan. Like a mini lesson plan, in my head. And when he woke up, I said to him: ‘My name is Hayley – and my dad calls me Hales. It’s like a nickname. Do you have a nickname?'”

“Sneaky. And kind of genius. What did he say?”

“He said: ‘Well, not really. You can’t really make a nickname out of Jörg.”

“Bingo!”

“I mean, thank God I’m a TEFL teacher. It could’ve been a really unbearably embarrassing situation, otherwise.”