MORE THAN teaching

Dear reader,

It seems I have mis­led you and that I was wrong about some­thing I sug­gested in this col­umn last year. In an ar­ti­cle ti­tled “House closed”, which was pub­lished in No­vem­ber, I wrote about how the In­ter­na­tional House chain of lan­guage schools folded across Cat­alo­nia and this meant that the own­ers made a de­ci­sion to sack all 300 em­ploy­ees. That left them still only tech­ni­cally em­ployed, be­cause they were all being un­paid but also un­able to claim un­em­ploy­ment ben­e­fits.

This was in ad­di­tion to the shut­ting of Merit School in Barcelona and sev­eral oth­ers I used to work for (I won’t name them here.) With these sep­a­rate clo­sures cre­at­ing what I saw as a col­lec­tive tragedy, I in­ferred – with­out ac­tu­ally say­ing it – that from the Covid pan­demic, the en­tire Eng­lish-as-a-For­eign-Lan­guage (EFL) in­dus­try was highly likely to get flushed down cap­i­tal­ism’s stink­ing toi­let. Not quite.

What is the case though is that teach­ers who still have jobs are being forced to do more for less.

Most peo­ple’s idea of a teacher is some­one who stands in front of a black­board or white­board and talks at a class. That’s what they see; just as what I see of a nurse is some­one who walks into a hos­pi­tal room and checks on me when I’m a pa­tient. Of course, there’s a great deal more to it for any­one doing ei­ther of those jobs.

“When­ever two or more are gath­ered in ed­u­ca­tion’s name,” EFL teach­ers will usu­ally talk about how we are prac­ti­cally so­cial work­ers/coun­selors or even a kind of friend to our stu­dents. This is one as­pect of my work that I re­ally enjoy and it’s es­pe­cially pop­u­lar in 1-to-1 classes, where some stu­dents di­vulge the most per­sonal things with­out any col­leagues around. Last week, I faced a stu­dent in an on­line class in tears about her re­cent di­vorce. I’d known her for two weeks.

In the re­cent past, I’ve also lis­tened to male stu­dents con­fess their in­fi­deli­ties and tell me how they’re hid­ing on­go­ing af­fairs. I’ve had a fe­male stu­dent come to class and spend re­peated hours fill­ing me in on how her hus­band ma­nip­u­lates her and tracks her move­ments. These are a few of the more dra­matic ex­am­ples, but a nor­mal part of the job is hear­ing and ab­sorb­ing com­plaints about cowork­ers, bosses or the gov­ern­ment. We are seen by plenty of stu­dents as ed­u­ca­tors, but also as peo­ple who can be trusted be­cause we’re not a fixed part of their work­place. At other times, it seems we’re like trav­el­ling sales­peo­ple who visit your of­fice to spruik the health-giv­ing prop­er­ties of the Eng­lish lan­guage. All this and much more.

But we are doing more, for less, as I said be­fore. Pay rates have been pushed down even fur­ther by ‘client’ com­pa­nies who dic­tate to smaller ‘acad­emy’ lan­guage schools from what their bud­gets sup­pos­edly allow them to af­ford in these hard times. This fi­nan­cial bur­den has often been passed on to teach­ers who, al­ready trapped in a low-paid in­dus­try, are being paid an in­dus­try stan­dard con­tract rate of around 15 euros an hour. Be­fore taxes. When my fam­ily and I moved here in 2006, I was being paid 21 euros an hour at an in­ter­na­tional sec­ondary school. (A house cleaner in Cat­alo­nia is gen­er­ally paid around 10 euros an hour this year. In cash. No taxes but also no so­cial se­cu­rity.)

Pre­cious few EFL acad­e­mies pay higher than the norm and plenty of em­ploy­ers pay even lower, now in­cor­rectly claim­ing it’s cheaper for teach­ers to work at home via on­line class­rooms. And travel costs for petrol, trains, metro and buses going from the inner city out to Sant Just or Mar­torell or Ter­rassa? That’s been qui­etly for­got­ten about or scoffed at when re­quested.

I’m also doing more admin for the five dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies I cur­rently work for. I have a cou­ple of bet­ter paid pri­vate classes and I’m happy to have work again after a bar­ren sum­mer. But I’m not happy to do at least an hour every day of putting class data into each acad­emy’s sep­a­rate sys­tem. That’s on top of plan­ning teach­ing ses­sions or writ­ing stu­dent re­ports: all un­paid tasks to­tal­ing up to an­other hour every day.

And here’s a cost com­par­i­son for his­tor­i­cal con­text. The price of petrol has gone up by 50% since we moved here in 2006. I don’t think I need to tell you about the jump in costs of rents in Barcelona or the price of elec­tric­ity going up by 36% in the pre­vi­ous 12 months.

More work for less? Oh, yes.