A quick and not remotely exhaustive guide.

Business English classes

New teachers are sometimes alarmed by Business English. They fear it will be high-powered stuff about balance sheets and P/E ratios, which impoverished teachers know nothing about. In fact, it is the same old twaddle at every level: introducing yourself, using the telephone, showing visitors around, presentations, negotiations, etc.

There is very little grammar, but set phrases like “What if we bought 100 units? What discount would you give us?” The coursebook has photos of ghastly yuppies video-conferencing or flying Club Class to New York.

Children’s classes

Most English teachers hate children. The odd teacher who does not will never be out of work, as the others desperately beg the DOS for TOEFL classes, EAP, anything that will not have children in them.

English teachers’ inability to hold down a relationship or a steady job or generally be a responsible grown-up means they have so far failed to reproduce. Their experience of and rapport with children (or indeed anybody that they cannot get drunk with or shag) is nil.

The best way to keep children quiet is to give them something they like doing, then think of a pedagogically convincing reason for doing it. Colouring-in, for example, is perfect: it takes ages. However, parents have been known to complain. The wise teacher writes “Colouring-in Dictation” at the bottom of the picture. He then reads out in a bored voice, “The clown’s trousers are green, his nose is red,” and so on.

Children are actually not that hard to please. Their favourite teacher is the one who gives them the most sweets.

Company classes

See here.

Conversation classes

A misnomer, as the only conversations that take place are in the students’ mother tongues. Naive teachers who walk into class and ask brightly, “Well, what shall we talk about today?” quickly learn that “Don’t know” is the favourite topic.

Traditionally the teacher thinks of a controversial subject for discussion, like, “Would you marry someone of a different religion from yourself?” 100% of the class immediately answer NO and the lesson develops along predictable lines: teacher vs. students.

Topic	Teacher’s opinion	Students’ opinion
Capital punishment	Against	“Is good idea”
Homosexuality	Cool	“This peoples need psychiatrist”
Feminism	For	“Zzzz…”
Racism	Terrible	“Black skin tee hee hee”
Meaning of life	Hippyish stuff	“I want rich with Mercedes”

Alternatively, the teacher tries to think of a topic that students might actually be interested in: the latest mobile phones, Britney Spears’ clothes, Derek Beckham’s hairstyle. Unfortunately, the teacher is so old and out of touch, he has only a sketchy idea of what young people like nowadays. He realizes that they will not share his passion for The Fall, but may not have noticed that the Michael Jackson/Madonna lesson he has been teaching for the last ten years is looking a little dog-eared.

Sometimes the teacher gets round this by asking the students about their favourite bands, TV programmes, etc, while he furtively takes notes. However, this does not always produce the anticipated results.

• Favourite book? The Bible/The Qur’an
• Favourite person? God
• Favourite person other than God? Jesus/The Prophet Muhammad
• Favourite person other than God, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad? My mother

Teachers sometimes think conversation classes are an easy ride. In practice they can require a lot of prep.

Exam preparation classes

There are numerous international exams, but only two worth remembering.

TOEFL is a strange American test of a language deceptively similar to English. It combines archaic, formal grammar with folksy idioms. In the listening test unemployable actors read unnatural sentences in plodding monotones or with inflections in the wrong places.

IELTS is the snooty Australian-British alternative to TOEFL and generally believed by students to be even more difficult.

Both are mind-bogglingly boring to study or teach. Play the odd game in a TOEFL or IELTS class and the students will love you for ever.

General English classes

Yer standard class. Grammar-based on the whole, with a book like Headway.

Private classes

The two of you sit in an oversized classroom, which feels extremely empty.

If you have a student ready and eager to chat, there is no problem. Usually you are given a psychopathically shy teenager, whose ambitious parents want them to learn English before they go overseas. The student looks at the floor for the entire lesson and answers questions in monosyllables. If you play a game, they look thoroughly dejected. They seem to have no interests, apart from “play computer”. You discover all this in the first lesson. There are only 99 to go.

Teenage classes

Teenagers are the worst possible students. They have hours of boring school with horrible teachers every day, then in the evenings, when they could be hanging out in shopping malls snogging, they get you.

If you are young and cool and good-looking, you should be OK. Otherwise teenagers detest all teachers, except perhaps the really crazy old ones, who they can laugh at.

You could try teaching them dirty words and relating some of your more grotesque sexual experiences. But often there will be a shy, innocent, pious young girl in the class and you will feel constrained.

There is nothing for it but to endure—and suck up to the DOS, so the class gets handed on to another unfortunate.

Website building classes

The students are shepherded into the computer room and the teacher asks them to brainstorm ideas for a class site. After an hour they come up with “Don’t know”. The teacher then makes 20 suggestions, all of which the students reject. In the end the teacher forces them to choose and they settle on “Most favourite places to hang out”.

The students then sit at the computers entering things like “I hate this lesson and the teacher”, while the teacher keeps phoning the technician about why the computers do not work.

When the site is finished, the teacher has to go through it page by page, correcting the English, so that the world will not realize how crap the school is. The site is then uploaded to the Internet, where nobody reads it, but it looks good on the teacher’s CV.