The Worst Decision I've Ever Made

Let me tell you about my TESOL course – otherwise known as the worst decision I've ever made.

About five months ago, in July '11, I took a course in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. It was the first major decision I'd made by myself – I spent my own money (okay, maybe I borrowed a bit) and happily lay down ten grand to go through this one-month intensive course.

I thought it was going to give my life direction and purpose, set the tone for the next five to ten years of exploring the world and blessing everyone around me with the gift of English.

Yeah, that didn’t exactly work out.

When I interviewed for the course, I was told I was the perfect candidate. On paper, I was. I had a university degree and a year of tutoring experience. I wanted to go to Asia to teach tiny well-behaved Asian children and eat noodles. I love English – I say 'whom' and know what a semi-colon is for.

Ha. Guys, I'm also a very very VERY bad teacher.

Not bad in a good way.

First of all, it was an intensive course. One month, full-time, with homework and practicals. Shit, I'm getting stressed just thinking about it. I thought I worked well under pressure, but I was deeply, horribly mistaken. We had a pre-course assignment to hand in on the first day, and obviously I'd left it to the last minute and stayed up all night finishing the damn thing. I was all pressured out before I even showed up to class.

At first I thought I was doing alright – we learned fun stuff like what a Concept Check Question was. Apparently, saying 'Do you understand?' is some sort of blasphemy, because nobody's going to cut into your lesson and admit they don't know what's going on. A CCQ asks for content in response to your question, so instead of saying “You have five minutes. Do you understand?” You say, “How much time do you have?” and the bright sparks are all “FIVE MINUTES TEACHER!” In theory, anyway.

Next was the practicals. Keep in mind I was not only teaching arbitrary language rules for the first time in a real classroom, but my fellow trainer-teachers and a MODERATOR were at the back of the class FUCKING STARING AT ME AND TAKING NOTES.

It was a nightmare. I can only look back and laugh now because I was SO bad, the only reason they passed me was because technically I was doing some stuff right. I wrote up my lesson plans and printed out my flashcards, but as soon I stood up in front of the class, I was awful. My voice shook, I went too fast and then backtracked, I taught to the floor because I was terrified of my students, whose names I'd either forget or mess up.

They were an adult class of refugees from different parts of Africa, and our class had the least English of anyone in the program. They were a very intimidating bunch and the fact that my voice went up a few octaves every time I talked to them didn't exactly command respect.

Pro tip: when you're in charge of a room of people who mistrust you as an agent of oppression in their lives already so scarred with political and economic crises that they had to flee their homes, making them eternally bitter, DO NOT try to make them play broken telephone.

It will not cheer them up.

I used to think I could teach. I was a tutor in university and enjoyed it. I like saying clever things and hardly ever tire of my own voice. I had a particularly bright class as my very first tutoring experience, and I think they inflated this delusion that teaching was a skill of mine. I thought I did okay – their work improved over the course, and I even made them laugh a few times.

So when I applied for the TESOL course, I thought I was just going to nail it like Jesus to the cross. Oh, how very wrong I was. Every practical was like walking the plank and jumping into burning oil.  Two weeks in I actually broke down and wept in the middle of the after-class assessment. Yup, I was that girl, and it was not cute.

I learned that tutoring isn't teaching, really. A tutor's job is to build and expand on whatever's taught in lectures and maybe incorporate some general knowledge or useful anecdotes or theories. Teaching is a thousand times harder:

• Imagine explaining the past perfect tense to someone who has  no concept of it in their first language.
• Explain it using simple terms because they're hardly going to know what “x is relative to z” means.
• Imagine them giving you the stinkeye while you're trying to explain it.
• Don't forget to stress about sticking to the eighteen minute lesson plan - you just spent sixteen minutes on the bit you allocated three minutes to.
• What's that sound in the deafening silence after you ask a question?
• It's the moderator's pencil scribbling “YOU SUCK” across your little assessment paper.

Some of my good friends are studying to become teachers, and mad props to them. I just can't do it. I don't have the mojo.

It didn't help that I caught the 'flu halfway through the course, and you couldn't miss more than two days because the fascist pigs international moderators wouldn't stand for it. I powered through and by the end of the month, the 'flu had turned into bronchitis. The coughing fits from the bronchitis turned into a sprained chest wall muscle that made it painful to breath, laugh and sleep (my three favourite things) for two months after the infection cleared up.

Yeah, fuck TESOL.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the course I did was pretty high-quality and I learned a lot. The teachers were great and the moderators weren't even as evil as I make them sound. It's more their very presence that terrified me. Other people actually enjoyed the course. For me though, it was a perfect storm of totally-not-worth-it.

But you know what the best part about this whole shitty situation is? That it's over, and I'm alive. Yup. I spent all my money, killed a little bit of my soul, humiliated myself several times over, and got a qualification I'll probably never use.

And everything's fine now. I took my antibiotics, watched a lot of TV, and got over it.

I made a big decision and it turned out to be the wrong one, but that's okay. I didn't die of embarrassment and nobody arrested me for being broke as a joke. It's actually made me a little less afraid of taking risks, you know? And that's a good thing.

To more bad decisions!

On money and the lack of it.

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

- Spike Milligan

When I was about eight, my sister and I opened up a bunch of cool, shiny batman figurines in the toy aisle of the Shoprite. With our boundless stealth and cunning minds, we assumed that Batman, Robin and Catwoman could have a quick adventure, and nobody would be the wiser. An assistant found us, obviously. My mom had to pay for the toys, obviously. And they were what, R50, maybe R60 each? Big money. She took our pocket money away, and a measly R10 a week would go towards the toys until they were paid off.

In the long run, my mom made a profit out of that embarrassing day, because she never restored our pocket money. It's been fifteen years, and I'm still paying off that bloody Robin.

Here's the thing about money.

People who have it don't think it's a big deal.

I kinda hate those people. And I kinda am one of those people.

My formative years (do people still say that?) I didn't have a lot of money. My dad loved casinos more than he loved our house, and he ended up trading the latter for the former. My mom worked at a deli and then as a taxi driver to keep the family afloat. I can't remember a time when she wasn't exhausted from work. We moved a few times before landlords could kick us out for not paying rent. My clothes were faded, exuberant numbers from family friends who'd clean out their wardrobes and think of poor Janet's girls.

While I saw myself as poor, I didn't have much angst about it. It wasn't a reflection on me that the adults in my life were selfish or mathematically challenged or whatever, right? And why would I want to go on school trips to Warmbaths anyway? I had my carefully curated collection of Pokemon tazos, and while I wasn't happy, I didn't let myself get miserable by entertaining the hope that I'd ever have anything more.

But things started to take a turn when I was about sixteen and my mom took a risk and opened up her own business: selling replica oil paintings at a stall at the local market. I helped out every weekend and things were painfully slow at first. We didn't have a single sale for almost four months. We'd be on our feet, showing people paintings, hope lifting the corners of our mouths while defeat dragged our shoulders down.

But one day, a nice blonde woman bought a Mediterranean scene and paid with a cheque that, to my astonishment, cleared. Money started trickling in, so slowly that I didn't realise we had any until we moved to a bigger flat in a nicer area two years later.

My sister, through sheer irrational willpower, had gotten herself through a year of university before it was time for me to apply. I told people I wanted to study publishing, because being a writer was far too foolish an ambition. Anyone can write, what made me think anyone would want to pay me to do it?

University changed my life because it changed my perceptions. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who didn't worry about money – they didn't even think about it. They had new cars and shopped in Sandton and didn't even know how much their course fees were. They had cards to pay for a R50 salad from the cafe every day. One of my first weeks there, I had a conversation with a guy who said he liked to travel, so I asked where he'd been. “Brazil, England, Greece, New York,” he began - I specifically remember my eyes widening at this point, so much so that I daren't remind him that New York wasn't a country. He was surprised at my surprise and even more surprised when I asked him how he managed it. “Well, just family holidays and stuff, you know...” he said edgily, as if I'd take all his travel away from him if he didn't justify it.

I had plenty of moments like that – accidentally making rich people feel uncomfortable by making them feel rich. Of course, making people feel uncomfortable is one of my undeniable talents, but I think I've gotten better at this particular strain of awkwardness. For instance, I no longer respond to people moaning about Paris being so crowded in the spring by sunnily saying, “I wish I had your problems.”

Though my mother's business was paying rent, I was reliant mostly upon my dad's sporadic support when it came to paying fees. For three years my stomach twisted every month's end, knowing that this will be the month that the money doesn't come together, this will be the month that they'll kick me out because I'm a fraud and these clothes belong to my mother's best friend who brought them over to our house in a big plastic bag.

But I made it through – call it luck or the law of attraction or a small financial miracle, but I got my degree. And after that, I got a year's Merit Award to carry on and do Honours, which I did simply because you don't turn down free stuff. Education doesn't grow on trees.

But the problem is that once I'd gotten out of university and out of the cast-iron socially acceptable excuse of having no money because I'm living 'the student life' (although I never abused alcohol on a regular enough basis to be worthy of that title) I've finally come to a conclusion.

I want to be rich, damn it.

There, I said it. The depressing thing is that I don't just want to be rich now, I want to be rich five years ago. I've seen life on the other side. I want to be rich five years ago, so that I didn't have to spend my weekends at the bloody market holding up paintings and grinning like a maniac, so I could drive to house parties on the other side of the world in my own car, so I could go to fests where everyone walks around in flip flops and sleeps in tents and pretend to be poor for a long-weekend. And most importantly, I want to be rich five years ago so I could take all that stuff for granted.

The truth is, I'm sorta rich now – well, the teenage me would've thought that I'm loaded. I have a whole R500 in my bank account – do you have any idea how many chip packets with the tazo-strip that'd buy? I 'work' one or two days a week (still at that selfsame hell market) and don't have income the rest of the time, and yet a roof magically stays over my head and the good pickles are still stocked high in the cupboards. I spend my days writing, pushing, straining to get something of decent quality out of the hormone-soaked creative cesspool of my mind. I've written over twenty-thousand words this month, and all but eight of them are ugly.

I'm living a borderline-moneyless existence, while almost everyone I spent four years studying with are driving their lovely cars to work in posh buildings, or overseas traveling or studying or suffering the crowds of Paris.

And while I know it's only temporary, that maybe one day my words will be pretty enough to sell, I can't help but feel like I'm still paying off that bloody Robin.