Another Crap Lesson - Tim Flowers

Tim Flowers is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher based in the capital city of one of the baltic states. He is 42 years old. His previous job was working for the Post Office (main sorting office - as a superintendent) and this excellent and relevant background has given him a good grasp of the fundamentals of the English language, and the art of teaching it to others. He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamorous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the glitterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night. He likes beer.

..well that was a wasted lesson I have to say. Amongst the top 10 (or so) wasted lessons I've ever taught. They just simply weren't getting it. I hardly got a chance to get any reading in, only about 25 pages of the Social Contract by Rousseau which I've been holding up in the trolleybus so people can see the cover these past days, and the thickos already started having problems with dependent prepoisitions. You'd have thought that by elementary level that would have sunk in by now, particularly as I gave a 25 minute explanation on the topic, and was even good enough to intersperse this with my views on the US political landscape, all for nothing.

Since the previous lesson, when I just decided to rest my eyes for a couple of minutes whilst said group were working through a badly photocopied set of exercises I'd taken from a book I randomly grabbed 5 minutes before the class, I'm sure they have all decided to be dead set against me. It's because they're evil capitalists, I can see it now. One of them, some 20 something blonde whose daddy works in a bank or something unforgiveable like that, had the gall to suggest I was anything other than a resounding success for renting at an overpriced rate off of an old lady in Kopli. What does she know? I remember watching the Tiananmen square massacre (on a black and white TV in a bedsit in Lewisham) probably a bit before some of these people were born.

Then when we went into my special quick fire period of asking questions, somebody didn't laugh at my witticism about Stalin sounding a bit like 'starling'. And to cap it off, somebody's mobile went off despite the fact that I vaguely gestured towards the 'switch mobiles off' sign, three months ago at the beginning of the course.

Now I hear one of them is off to Thailand. I'm sure they won't give it the respect it's due, merely coming back with talk of temples and lady boys instead of the real Thailand, that I saw, on the inside of a police cell having had the strength of character to have got drunk on Guiness.

Oh well, it's nearly the Christmas break soon, when I won't have to interrupt my day of sitting on wikipedia and facebook and cutting out bits of paper to attend to these sheep. Happy days are coming.