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Showing posts from October, 2025

Interview with a Teacher

I recently asked a colleague, Dominic, if he would kindly answer some questions about his experiences of teaching English as a foreign language. “It's for my blog,” I told him. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment, but then said he would cooperate on the condition that I don't use his real name. So, Dominic, when did you start teaching? I answered a job advert on Dave's ESL Cafe in 2015. It was for a teaching position in a town in Poland. I'd just completed a CELTA course and I thought that teaching abroad would give me an opportunity to see more of the world. That's what I thought, anyway. Something tells me that it wasn't what you expected? The owner of the school in Poland was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a weirdo. The walls of his office were covered with photographs of various people he'd met on his travels -- hundreds of them -- and there were cameras installed in the classrooms. He routinely spied on my lessons. He didn't always pay me on ti...