No thank you.

I got up this morning and put on outfit number 2 - black trousers and purple shirt. I ate breakfast whilst watching the BBC breakfast news programme. I left the flat/appartment at 8h15. When I arrived at work I went to the staffroom. I hung my jacket and bag up and put my lunch in the fridge. The crowds round the notice board had moved to the whiteboard where notices are written - room changes, cover lessons, notes to tell us they're testing the fire alarm (which, due to bad handwriting looked like 'don't worry the fire alarm is being fished this morning') etc etc. There was nothing relevant to me so I did the last of my photocopying and began looking for my textbooks and class register that were supposed to have appeared overnight. No surprised that at 8h45, with 30 minutes until teaching begins, there was no sign of either.

The text books appeared along with the class register at about 9h05. I was a text book short. I went down to reception and was given another one. I was also told the teacher's book would be ordered for me and oh, by the way - you have 5 students, not 4. It was now 9h10 - 5 minutes before lessons begin and I had to photocopy one extra of every sheet for the student I had only just been told would be in my class and for who I had no register sheet. As you can tell, the day was getting off to a fantastically organised start! When the bell sounded I went to meet my class - there were 5 of them, students that is, - 2 French speakers, a Hungarian, a Polish IT student and a Spanish PE teacher. They were supposed to be pre intermediate. They never were. They were more intermediate than anything. That meant the course text book, which I have to use, was too easy for them. That and it being one of the worst course text books I've ever encountered. Note to self: avoid Clockwise EFL textbooks. Anyway, the morning went very very slowly with the students looking about as bored as me. At the end of the lesson one of the students asked me whether she could move up a level as she'd found it all too easy this morning. You and the rest of the class my dear I felt like saying but instead I told her I'd see what I could do. When lunch finally rolled around (again it had been a case of, at several points in the morning, me being convinced time had stopped but no, on closer inspection of my watch the seconds were turning to minutes just significantly more slowly than they do when you're rushing to catch a train) I popped into reception to pick up my contract. I was told the Principal hadn't signed it, I said I didn't mind, there was just something I wanted to look at. I then went to the staffroom and had to find the morning teacher of my afternoon class to see what he had taught which enabled me to plan for my afternoon class. After eating lunch and liaising with the teacher it didn't leave much time to plan and ended in me pulling a book of the shelf and deciding that that'll do. Trouble was I then needed a cassette player and a cassette and I needed to get my cassette in the right place. I don't know if it's just me but I presumed, maybe quite stupidly, that the >> on a cassette player would mean fast forward and the <<>> is rewind and the << is fast forward! I don't know if you remember but I had no room allocated for this class, I also didn't know how many students there were going to be and I didn't have a register either. Well, I was told there were 6 students and we came to the conclusion I'd be in room 6. So at 14h off I went down to room 6 which is at the back of the cafeteria. I arrived and realised I needed a code to open the door. Off I went to reception for the code. When I went back to room 6 another teacher was there. She was teaching L4.2 in room 6. Hmm, ok, so where was I and where was my class - L5.2? Off I went back to reception. They sent me to room 15 where I found a group, a rather large group may I add, of students all standing up talking about where they should be. By this time it was 14h15. I asked them what level they were. Some were L5.2 - which I kept. The others were L4.2 which I sent to room 6 where I'd just come from. I now had 4 students. We did some vocab activities and didn't even get onto the listening which I'd just spent goodness only knows how long finding with the, what was in my opinion, backwards cassette player!

After this lesson I went back up to the staffroom. I sat for a while watching everyone flapping around. One of the teacher was getting angry and having a paddy as someone had stolen a cassette from his desk and it was the only copy of that cassette and now he couldn't do the lesson he'd planned and and and it all resulted in his writing a message on the white board saying 'do no steal cassettes from other teachers' desks'. Someone then annotated that note with 'hear hear'. As if that wasn't enough to make you think you were in a school playground, another teacher couldn't find the cassette player designated to the classroom where he would be teaching next lesson. Each cassette player has a number on it and the idea is that you take the cassette player which has the same number on as the room you're teaching in. So if you're in room 16 you need to look through about 30 identical cassette players until you find the cassette player with room 16 written on it. Why can't you just take another cassette player if you can't find the one with your room number on it?! Apparently that would lead to another teacher frantically looking round for their cassette player which you would have because somebody had yours... anyway, this trivial thing led to another childlike note being written on the white board - take the cassette player for your room not somebody else's'. I really couldn't take anymore. Not only did I have to somehow plan 3 hours of lessons for the next day using a course text book that was the wrong level for the class, I also had to work alongside this group of, well, immature, couldn't-care-less-unless-it-was-about-cassettes-and-tape-players, so called teachers. No thank you. I went back to the flat/appartment feeling properly depressed. I had an evening of lesson planning ahead. I had days of teaching with inappropriate resources ahead. I had weeks stretching out ahead of me of reruns of today. No thank you. I went back to the college. I went into reception. I was holding my contract and I asked whether, as the Principal hadn't yet signed it it wasn't yet a proper binding contract. When I was told it wasn't yet concrete and was assured that the Principal would sign it (as if I'd been asking out of fear that I was working without a proper contract!) I said I didn't want them to sign it and I'd rather we ripped it up. She looked at me gone out as if I'd just grown a second head or something. The Principal, having over heard the whole thing, asked me whether I could wait '2 ticks'. I was taken to the exact same room I'd been in last Monday when I'd come from Brighton to pick the contract up. He came to ask me why I wanted to leave. Was it the classes, the staff, something someone had said or done? I refrained from telling him that I had never seen such unorganised chaos anywhere ever before (even my Lycée in France was better organised than this and that's saying something!). I just said I wanted to go home and I was allowed to leave. I walked back to the flat/appartment feeling freer and happier that I'd done for a while - I only arrived on Saturday but it seems like an eternity ago. But now I could go home. I am going to home tomorrow. I do not regret my decision to leave after only two days. I do not feel like I have failed in any way. Infact I think it would have been easier to stay. It is the first time I have ever walked away from anything. I even stuck out an A Level in Chemistry rather than giving it up at As! But I wasn't about to sacrafice 8 weeks of my summer living on my own in a city where I don't know anyone doing a job that theoretically I love, just not at that language school, for any amount of money. I still enjoy EFL teaching and will definitely do it again, but I wasn't about to let my passion for the English Language be wiped out of me in a playground of unprofessional childish so called teachers all battling for survival in an unorganised, resouce-lacking college.

Like I said yesterday: if that's the world of work, you can keep it.