The Ecuador letters, part 11

A year and a half in Guayaquil and I still hardly know the place.



Here, I'm supposed to say "because I've been working hard": well, there is that, as long as you classify worrying about work as a form of working (I always do). Apart from working hard, I've also been doing things like getting married (to a wife and two kids), buying a house and a car, putting up with painters redoing the house (this is current), etc. All of which puts my sense of self under some strain, since a year and a half ago I was still wont to define myself as the only unmarried, childless, houseless, carless 44-year old in the Northern Hemisphere. Which just goes to show that, as the neurobiologists are quick to point out, when you switch hemispheres, you switch everything. I hardly recognise myself any more. But I just about still do: after all, I'm still as secretly weird as I ever was (my vices follow me everywhere: they're loyaller than dogs). Perhaps weirder, even: Ecuador encourages it. Also, there's the fact that "having" a wife, house and car is primarily a legal question: what does it really mean to "have" these things if you can't drive the car and you have no time to enjoy the wife or the house (because you're working hard)? As usual, E_ (wife) has an original solution: "drive me and enjoy the car" (drive, of course, is manejar, literally "manage": in South America they manage cars, driving is for suckers). Well, there is that. Anyway, this "car" (in case anyone is curious) is a big shiny thing, apparently made of metal and plastic, that graces the garage: it has no other use or function as yet, though I suppose it is theoretically possible to "enjoy", at odd moments, its laconic, vaguely benign presence outside the kitchen/garage interface window. I hope one day to learn to drive it, as does E_. But at present that's what it is, an immovable fixture. It was, of course, her idea, as was the current redecoration. In fact, everything at present seems to be her idea. I have no time to have ideas: I am working too hard.


And they went up to him and tugged at the hem of his garment and said, Master, What is work?


And the Master said: work is a state of mind. He who truly Works, is not he who planteth, nor he who soweth, nor yet he who reapeth; he who truly Works is he who hath an idea that he should be doing something, but knoweth not exactly what, and is therefore in a constant state of sick fear, lest his lack of knowledge and skills be found out, along with the fact that whatever he decideth to do, it always turns into a disastrous mess, whereas everyone else on the planet seemeth to have no problem at all.


And they questioned him again, saying, Master, What is "a disastrous mess"?


And the Master stroked his beard and replied: go ye unto Room 16 after the last class, and tell me what you see on the floor.


And they said, Master, we see a little puddle of Coca-Cola under one chair, and a scattering of sunflower seed husks under another. We see a wilderness of screwed-up bits of paper. We see sweet wrappers, used and discarded pens, bits of chewing gum stuck to the underside of chairs. In short, Master, we see a disastrous mess.


And the Master said unto them: this is the result of someone who knoweth not how to teach being allowed into a classroom. It's not just that he cannot maintain discipline: most of the time he has very little notion of what he should be teaching, or if he does then he hath no idea how to teach it. So instead he relieth on a remarkable gift he hath developed for droning on about nothing in particular and scribbling things on the board almost at random, and generally making it look as if he knoweth what he is doing. Which would probably be good enough for a lot of schools in Ecuador, but unfortunately not for this one, this one being the one that pays teachers enough to run or at least own a car. Hence, the constant feeling of foreboding, guilt and sick anxiety which, in his case, goeth by the name of "Work".


The ironic part is, I thought I had at least got past this. I thought I would never, at least, have to "teach" again.


I used to "teach", back in Spain, but that was different. There, you had a Coursebook, and you just had to follow it .- something a trained orangutan could easily do (there are, in fact, many trained orangutans working in EFL). Even there, though, in spite of having started off my career as a teacher reasonably well, over the years I drifted into a state of mind not unlike the current one: I could see that my teaching was getting worse, in the sense of being less and less dynamic and entertaining and "competitive", but I didn't know how to fix it, and so the anxiety gauge started creeping up and up. I kept telling myself that what was lacking was motivation: I wanted to be a better teacher, but I didn't seem to want it enough to put any serious effort into it. I sensed that as the years went by, I was becoming more and more boring, and supposed that this was simply a reflection of the fact that my personality was becoming more and more boring, but after careful thought I decided that making my personality more interesting was something else that, while a desirable goal, probably involved more work than I was really willing to invest. After all, who needs an interesting personality?


So in the end, I quit teaching.


I never regretted this. The new job, programming in VB and SQL Server, while it involved less pay and double the number of hours, was such a welcome change, I was still inwardly chortling at my good fortune five years later. When you're a programmer, you don't have to dress decently or shave, you don't have to talk to anyone, you don't have to pretend to have a personality, you don't have to take any work home with you and then spend hours fretting at your apparent inability to summon the willpower to actually do it, you don't have to go to meetings and have "ideas"... above all, you don't have to wonder what it is exactly you're supposed to be doing, or to make random and invariably wrong guesses about the best or easiest way to do it.


And yet now I'm back in "teaching" again.