Parodies, mostly.

ELT Fever
I must go down to the school again, to the life that’s raw and rough,
And all I ask is a classroom and a desk to store my stuff,
And the OHP’s hum and the tape’s whine and the boardmarker’s squeaking,
And the blank looks on the faces and the rickety chairs creaking.

I must go down to the school again, for the call of my old boss
Is a wild call and a clear call from a truly frantic DOS.
And all I ask is a tidy room with the whiteboard shining,
And a Headway and a filler, and the students whining.

I must go down to the school again, to the vagrant teaching trade,
To the grammar and the vocab, to the work that’s underpaid,
And all I ask is a beer or two with an easygoing workmate,
And a quick shag and a deep sleep when I finally get home late.

If—
If you can prep your class while fellow workers
Are panicking and hunting for a game,
If you can show you’re not one of the shirkers,
But tolerate their grouching all the same,
If teaching TOEFL without hesitation,
Or GMAT, FCE and IELTS too,
Or business, teenagers, or conversation,
Or children, these are all the same to you,

If you can chat to parents without groaning,
Or meet the owners without licking arse,
If teachers can’t depress you with their moaning,
If meetings which you chair don’t seem a farce,
If you can keep the sluggish students busy
For ninety minutes right until the end,
Within the school you’ll reach a height that’s dizzy,
Which is to say: you’ll be a DOS, my friend!

The Teacher
When I retire, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a language school
That has forgotten England. The OHP
Conceals the dry dust of an outcast fool,
A dust whom England once bored stiff, when forced
To face her flyovers, Millennium Dome,
And traffic jams, to breathe in their exhaust,
Drown in the litter, freeze in frosts of home.

But think, this brain, at peace in warmer climes,
A pulse in the terrestrial soup, no less,
Gives somewhere back the language England speaks:
Her words and sounds, her aspects and her times,
And grammar, learnt at school, and sentence stress,
To foreign learners, under alien peaks.

The Observed Lesson
Nobody heard him, the crap teacher,
But still he sat insisting:
I was much better than you thought
And not explaining but eliciting.

Poor chap, he did too much talking
And now he’s dismissed
It must have been too hard for him his nerve gave way,
They hissed.

Oh, no no no, the lesson was fine
(Still the crap teacher sat insisting)
I’ve been a brilliant teacher all my life
And not explaining but eliciting.

Clerihews
Liz and John Soars
Were once a pair of penniless bores,
But now they’ve ascended to the landed gentry
Thanks to the royalties from New Headway
Elementary.

Michael Swan
Drones on and on.
Seldom mute, he mostly likes to yammer
About grammar.

Mario Rinvolucri
Is to language teaching what Delia Smith is to cookery.
Which is to say he has written dozens of books
At which nobody looks.

Limerick
The questions in IELTS are so full
Of tricky conundrums, the woeful
Student who’s stuck
Cries: Oh, what the fuck—
I’ll chuck all this in and do TOEFL.

See also the poems by Michael Swan.