I have taught English at an institute, a bilingual high school (where I was also a social studies teacher), and a university in Bogota. Teaching English is the easiest way for a foreigner to obtain a visa and live for extended period of time in Colombia, provided that you need a steady income and don’t possess the fortune necessary for a business or investor visa. This post is not intended to completely denigrate the option of teaching English in Colombia; because that possibility existed, I could stay in the country, remain solvent, learn Spanish, and lay the groundwork to enjoy the Colombian lifestyle I have today, all with a thousand-dollar TEFL certificate that it took me only a month to earn. Through English teaching I have met a variety of interesting fellow professors, gotten free housing for a year and a half, learned what makes Colombia tick, and even felt the occasional satisfaction that comes from teaching a good lesson.
However, the majority of teaching gigs in Colombian are young person’s work; in order to deal with the unpredictability and Catch-22 logic common in all too many educational institutions here, you need a steady stream of high energy and fresh Colombian experiences like trying ajiaco for the first time to keep you motivated. Teaching English is much more difficult than it has to be due to cultural differences and peculiarities it took me a long time get used to. Some of the lessons I’ve learned:
1. Educational institutions are rigidly hierarchical.
In each teaching gig I’ve had, there was always a founder and his or her family in charge, who spent most of their time either being the public face of the institution, thinking up new marketing schemes, or simply enjoying all the money that the school earned for them. The founders rarely did anything related to day-to-day operations, but if they came up with a new idea, the entire teaching staff was expected to drop everything and accomodate it, even if it meant completely rewriting the curriculum in a week’s time or changing basic level English to a lesson plan based entirely on singing pop songs (this actually happened – at the university!)
This also meant that if the founders got angry (and being wealthy entitled Colombians, they’re always getting angry) employees simply had to absorb the temper tantrums, insults, and cruelty that resulted, no matter how unjustified and ridiculous. As a foreigner who gives the school gringo cred, you won’t bear the brunt of this, but you will be in an environment where your Colombian co-workers leave meetings in tears, quit in bursts of anger, and get hired and fired constantly, while everyone else gossips about it all. It gets heavy, and just a little bit of compassion from the administrators could go a long way to making the workplace environment of a typical Colombian educational institution much more pleasant. But since the common philosophical outlook of an educational administrator here is “Treat people like dirt and you’ll get flowers” at best and “Teachers are infinitely replaceable and desperate for work and honestly who cares about them” at worst, this won’t change anytime soon.
2. Competition is fierce and getting fiercer.
There were already a fair amount of gringos attempting to teach English when I arrived here in 2008, but now we are a veritable colony within the country. This has driven salaries down and made us more expendable, a situation that’s even more precarious for the Colombian-born teachers who normally get paid even less than we do. Wages are still generally enough to pay the rent, but not much more; you aren’t paying off your college loans on this kind of salary. If you have no experience, you will be making very little a majority of the time, especially if you get paid hourly. Learn to love cheap beer.
3. There is too much paperwork.
The lion’s share of any teaching position should consist of lesson planning and teaching, grading, and offering students extra help. But in Colombia, teaching is mostly filling out endless amounts of paperwork only tangentially related to education: long-winded student psychological evaluations for discipline hearings, feedback reports, fake lessons planned in groups at training sessions that take time away from planning your actual lessons, and plenty of other documents full of legalese that are too boring to even recall. The demand for all these useless sheets of paper forces teachers to cram the work that is actually necessary for class into less time, and the lessons suffer for it. This leads to two possibilities: you can either take lots of work home with you, or your mañoso Colombian co-workers will show you how to plan lessons more efficiently; for example, assigning more oral presentations as opposed to written projects. As an earnest do-gooder gringo, you will start out grading essays on Sundays until you get cynical about it all and cut corners like all the other teachers.
4. Your schedule will suck.
Bilingual high schools usually give you weekends off and a decent amount of vacation, but at the institute and the university I had to work on Saturdays. Arriving home on a Friday night that feels like one more weeknight sucks, and having only Sunday off is not enough time to recover from 30-50 weekly hours of teaching and preparation, especially since the job is so social and draining. You are constantly talking and interacting with students, fellow teachers, and administrators, and sufficient time off is necessary to recharge your energy level to give lessons the zesty presentation they deserve. And if you spend that precious Sunday nursing the nasty hangover you got from that urgent Saturday night bender you needed to blow off some steam, it will only make your schedule seem that much more cramped and stressful.
Another annoying aspect of working at an institute is that classes are usually given at the crack of dawn or after dark because most people study either before or after they work. I found it impossible to relax during the 6-8 hour midday hole between classes because I couldn’t get that night’s lessons off my mind, and as soon as my night shift was finished I had to rush home and get to bed to make sure I was refreshed enough to wake up before the sun rose the next day. But with a drawn-out schedule like that taking over the whole day, coupled with my truncated weekends, I ended up feeling exhausted all the time anyway.
5. Students rarely seem to fail, even if you fail them.
A failing grade that you give a student is merely provisional. Failing grades can be changed when:
a. The student’s parents or a school official politely ask or advise you to give the student an extra invented project to magically raise the student’s grade before report cards are handed out. This means that a student’s laziness throughout the semester, which had already frustrated you for months, also creates more tasks for you to during the time of year when your workload is at its heaviest.
b. The school you work for passes students regardless of whether they really deserved to or not, which happened repeatedly at the institute and university. The administrators at these schools thought more like entrepreneurs than educators, meaning they would rather pass a failing student than lose a paying customer that might be discouraged by a bad grade. To me, this calls the whole credential that the educational institution is offering into question, since you can graduate without actually mastering the material being taught, but maybe I just think like that because I’m not enough of a hard-nosed businessman.
The lack of consequences for being a jackass all semester and not doing any work was immediately picked up on by all the laziest and surliest students, who could see right through the system and drifted along expecting free passing grades. They did their part to make teaching the rest of the class much more difficult with their idiotic comments and lack of discipline, and with the threat of repeating the class eliminated there was little I could to do keep them from acting out.
6. Your plans mean nothing and will be changed on a whim.
Remember that detailed syllabus you made at the beginning of the semester? It’s a suggestion and not what will actually take place when you’re teaching. There’s always unplanned interruptions, usually on the day that you were planning to give a quiz or when an important assignment is due. There will never be any advance notice, but suddenly you will discover that the school is celebrating its anniversary with an impromptu reggaeton dance party, or having an assembly about binge drinking with compulsory attendance, or creating an athletic competition that gives kids an excuse to run around instead of doing any work. All of which is fine, I liked skipping class as much as the students did, but the lack of advance notice in planning these kinds of activities made everything more disorganized. Flexibility and resignation are essential qualities for coping.
7. You are often on your own when it comes to materials and lesson plans.
Colombian educational institutions force you to invent everything, sometimes even the whole teaching plan for the semester, from scratch. There is almost never a compendium of lesson plans and activities to refer to, and you will be scurrying around the internet trying to find something to do at the last minute because the plan in the syllabus was too vague or because the book the institution uses is so terrible. While most schools will give you markers if you need them, every single place I taught was stingy with photocopies. The bilingual school only permitted each teacher ten photocopies a day, not even enough to cover one class, let alone the 4 or 5 I taught in a typical day. The institute and university simply expected professors to pay for photocopies out of their own pockets, unless the secretary let you sneak in a few freebies on the boss’ photocopier when he wasn’t around.
Even if your institution uses some kind of book, it will often be useless, and contain activities that will put your class to sleep or be too complex for their skill level. The world history textbook that students bought at the bilingual school for my social studies class was meant for native English-speaking university students, and was full of complicated vocabulary words and frankly unnecessary information that sailed right over middle schoolers’ heads. In practice, this translated into inventing an entire social studies curriculum by the seat of my pants, and assigning a lot of research projects and library time since I didn’t have photocopies to work with. At the university, students began complaining when teachers asked them to buy the textbook, which apparently college students in Colombia have the right not to do if they’ve already paid tuition. This horrified the administration, who didn’t want to lose any paying customers over such a controversial issue, so teachers were told to stop using the book. What were we supposed to use instead? Our gift for improvisation. Without a solid backbone to base your teaching on, classes become a marathon of cobbled-together activities and exercises with no benchmarks to measure student progress. Oddly, this seemed to suit everyone just fine.
On the plus side, dealing with employers like these gives you the necessary backbone you need to develop for successfully navigating daily life in Colombia. One time I had to defend myself against the English institute when they wanted to send me to an oil rig deep in FARC territory to teach the engineers there for two weeks each month, at the same low salary I was making. When I said no, they threatened to cancel my visa and tell DAS that I was undocumented, and that I would be deported. I had only been in Colombia about a year or so at that point, but even then I knew they were bluffing and I called them on it. Imagine DAS agents knocking on a gringo’s door, asking to see their papers! It was the dumbest lie they could think of, and they expected it to work because they were used to getting what they wanted out of their employees through intimidation. Colombian educational institutions are still learning to outgrow the country’s feudalist past, and seeing the remnants of it as an English teacher can be a frustrating learning experience. While I appreciate the opportunity these schools gave me to legally live and work in Colombia, I doubt I’ll ever teach in that kind of environment again. You have been warned.
