Rewind back 12 odd years to summer 2003. Before the iphone or indeed any smartphone. People were still addicted to staring at their phone screens - but they were more likely to be texting 'how r u? wots up m8' or perhaps playing snake, which was an incredibly simple but still deeply addictive game for dot matrix phone screens of the time.
I had a Nokia 3330 which was pretty cool because it could send rudimentary picture messages. However they were expensive to send and I had little money because I was unemployed with little experience or qualifications. I couldn't speak any foreign languages. I didn't have a degree - in fact, I had never been to school. (I was home schooled along with my 5 other brothers and sisters). Then my cleverer younger brother (cleverer because he was at Oxford studying modern languages and could speak fluent French and German) made me a job offer.
'How would you like to teach next week,' he asked.
My brother worked at a local language school, teaching French teenagers English during his summer holidays. However, I was nonplussed.
'How? I don't speak French.'
'Exactly. You're gonna teach them English - not French. All you need to do is get them to talk in English and teach them 5 new words everyday. You only have to teach four of them and the money's good - you get paid £42 a day.'
£42 per day! It was nearly as much as I got for a whole week on income support! £42 per day was over £200 a week! Enough to buy a spanking new Nokia 3330i....
'Ok, I'll do it,' I said.
In the end, it was exactly as my brother had said. I taught four teenage French girls in their host family's house on a local council estate. I taught them five new words a day, got them to write daily diaries and to speak in English. They all came from middle class families near Paris and wondered why all English houses looked exactly the same. Looking back on it, it was amazing that a totally unqualified teacher with no teaching certificates, experience, CRB or DBS checks should be allowed to 'teach' four girls who were under 18 years old in a unsupervised environment.
I 'taught' my four young charges in the morning for three hours, ate our packed lunches which were provided by their host family, then took them off to some 'cultural excursion' in the afternoon where we met up with the other students and teachers from their group including my brother who was teaching another class. The 'cultural excursions' were mostly a joke. One of the places we visited every week was the local dump where students were supposed to learn about recycling. A favourite was the cinema on Thursdays because the tickets were cheap on that day for under 16s. The big film that everyone was eagerly anticipating was Return of the King from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, that wouldn't be on until December. I had to content myself with looking forward to payday so that I could buy that Nokia 3330i with the interchangeable covers... And anyway, I was enjoying myself 'teaching' young French kids. I enjoyed talking about music, books and films with them. When one day I brought my acoustic guitar to class they were delighted and wanted me to teach them how to play their favourite Nirvana and Greenday songs. I couldn't believe my luck. I was being paid to play the guitar to an appreciative audience. My journey to become an English teacher had begun. A seed had been sown.
