Part One

It was 1988, maybe '89, when I finally said goodbye to the post of chairman at the Buddhist Centre in West London that I had held for almost a decade. This was all very well, but it came with its own issues. Primarily, there was the question of personal finance. Where was I to get money to live on? For years my life had been shaped, and largely supported, by life and work as a Buddhist for Buddhism. All of a sudden, that was at an end. I needed to fend for myself, a task that I was disastrously equipped for.

One of the Buddhists I used to live with had a former girlfriend who was director, principal, or something, of a business school. They were looking for someone to teach some English. They were clearly keen to help me out, and an interview was arranged.

The school boss was friendly, energetic, and enthusiastic. "I'm offering you the job." "But I don't know how to teach English." "You can always learn."

I had two weeks in which to learn how to teach English. I was well-versed in imparting Buddhist ideas, and teaching people how to meditate, but I had the feeling that English might need a bit of a different approach.

What I did in those two weeks, I have no idea. But I learnt very little about how to teach English. I turned up at the business school without a clue as to what I was going to do. Maybe once I was in the classroom, what is needed would become clear.

Vauxhall School of Business Studies; I think that's what it was called. The vast majority of the students were young adults, nearly all of Afro-Caribbean descent. My job entailed providing 'language support'. It's all very well studying to be a secretary or something, but it doesn't help your work prospects if you can't string a sentence together, or tell a full stop from an exclamation mark.

I rolled up for my first day. I had a pair of slightly formal, creased trousers for the occasion. 

The afternoon class took to me reasonably well. The morning session was a different story. Lots of young mums, holding down part-time jobs as well as doing the business course. The last thing they wanted was another class imposed upon their already precious time.

"This is the language support class" I announced. "More like an ethnic minorities class" one of the nice young ladies retorted. Oops. You could cut the air with a knife. "You're not really suited to be a teacher" another one volunteered a bit later on, as I did my pathetic best to demonstrate that I knew what we were all doing.

Part Two

What I did in those early classes I cannot remember. It's called trauma-based memory wipe. I had my own little room where I could prepare lessons, and an enormous file full of teaching resources left by a previous incumbent. Which is great, if you know how to use them....

Word got back to head admin that there was unrest among the students. The underlying resentment at being forced to attend this discriminatory class that singled out ethnic minorities was palpable every time I walked through the door. "Maybe you should give them a test, so only those who most need it attend the lessons" the chirpy principal proposed. Sounded like a good idea. But it wasn't.

Following the test, there were the borderline cases. These including two members of that endangered species, young white students. The girls requested that they be exempt from coming to the classes. Yes, I said. Big mistake. Big big mistake. Any doubts that this was in  fact a race discrimination class disappeared. The biggest riots since Martin Luther King could be felt brewing.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes, anyway. In my state of despair, I finally came up with a brilliant idea. "You can get on with your assignments in class today." For fifteen minutes, they almost liked me. 

The courses, from what I could tell, were based on assignments, which needed to be handed in by a strict deadline. The main effect of these glorious assignments seemed to be to induce panic and anxiety in the students, and to scramble their brains even more fully than they were beforehand. Some of the students had jobs and little kids to deal with as well as this college work, and these silly bloody assignments sent them into complete mental meltdown.

"Yes, get on with your assignments, and I can come around and check your English as you go." A good deal of this checking involved my sitting at my desk watching the clock anxiously, while they sat there frying their nerves. Sometimes I would go around trying to help, but most of them took exception to having me look over their shoulder, and preferred to get on by themselves, making spelling mistakes every other word, and forming yet more sentences that weren't sentences.

Occasionally, another member of staff would poke their nose into the classroom, with some message or other to deliver. They would be quite surprised at what they encountered. "Just getting on with assignments today." "Oh....."

Still, you can't just leave them to do assignments every lesson. I was thoroughly miserable. I would sit for long periods in my little class-preparation room, poring over the materials, wondering if any of them were at all useful with the students in my classes. And, even if they were, how on earth to use these resources.

From a cursory study of the language, I began to make up my own rules about the English language, and produced my own teaching materials. I showed one of them, on the different ways you could speak about the past in English, to one of the other teachers. "I didn't know that" she volunteered helpfully.

Part Three

Despond bordering on despair was the prevailing mood. My life was saved by Arabella. Arabella was eighteen years old, and occupied an impressive spread somewhere in the middle  of Penthouse magazine. I knew this, because I had a copy of Penthouse tucked away among the language materials in the top drawer of the large filing cabinet in my little office. 

I would often take a long and longing look at Arabella before heading off into the lion's den, the torture chamber, that was the language support classroom. Arabella saved me. She was beautiful and sexy, gazing out naked and nubile from those glossy pages in that drab drab room. She affirmed that yes, beyond the desolation, beyond the barely-concealed despair that was life at the Vauxhall School of Business Studies, there was colour, there was joy; love, life, passion were still there for the taking. Lovely Arabella, a pinpoint of light shining in a world of mediocrity and endless grey.

I have a sense of gratitude towards those who have helped me at some juncture or other on the way. I wish to thank them, and I occasionally search out such folk, even decades after our most recent encounter. I sometimes wonder what Arabella is doing. Two teenage children and a brickie as boyfriend in Chelmsford, most likely. I would like to send her a box of chocolates at the least.

There was something about that place. As if it wasn't primarily about education at all, but something else.....

I was occasionally invited to staff meetings, to report on progress in the language classes. "Yes, everything's fine." "OK. Next." But what struck me was how little of the agenda was really about the students. As if they didn't really matter very much. Instead, there was always a political, ideological, flavour to the goings-on. It seemed to curiously resonate with all the posters on the notice board about the dangers of sex with men, and how it can bring with it all sort of diseases, cervical cancer not the least. I could never figure what this had to do with educating the underprivileged and getting them a job as a secretary....

Part Four

The teaching work lasted about six months. I henceforth left everything behind on a three-month Buddhist retreat in Spain. It was still 'support': instead of language support, I was part of the support team organising food and suchlike. I understood that better than the previous support job.

A few months later I enrolled on a course, and learnt the rudiments of language teaching. I went on to spend over a decade teaching - or at least trying to teach - English to students from all over the world. I actually enjoyed some of it, and seem to have been fairly good at the job. It was work that also gave me the opportunity to meet predominantly young people from an array of countries and cultures, something that I consider to have been a privilege.

It was a funny thing, though. During those months of torment and turmoil in Vauxhall, I didn't speak to a soul about my painful position. Maybe I did, but I don't recall doing so. You would think it would be the obvious course of action - seek out someone who'd lend an ear to my woes over a coffee. But it appears not.

This is doubly ironic, coming as I did from a Buddhist organisation that stressed to an unusual degree the importance of friendship and communication. Maybe the rules didn't apply to me any more. If I were still living and working within the orbit of the Buddhist world, I might have had more attention than I wanted. As it transpired, I had voluntarily ejected myself out of all that. I cast myself out onto the street, or into the gutter, of my own accord. I was on my own from now on.....           

I had spent months in a job about which I hadn't a clue. And I survived. It occurred to me that there are probably millions of people out there who spend a lifetime doing a job without a clue. For sure, I had met some myself. Bureaucrats, administrators, functionaries. I thought back to my childhood years at school. Some of the teachers knew what they were doing. But others?

And, as the years passed by, I met people in various levels of management who were the same. Banking a monthly salary but without a clue. Hanging in there for years, partly because nobody mustered the energy to do anything about them. The main effect of their incompetence is untold misery for those working beneath them. And this,by the by, is exactly how the real managers of the world want it.....