Although being an ESL teacher is highly rewarding, it can also be very challenging. Even well into my second decade of ESL/TEFL teaching there are still tough days where it seems hard.
ESL teaching can be a hard job. At times, parts of the job can seem to conspire against you. Behavioral issues, a full teaching load, absent colleagues, large group sizes, students fossilized errors, management issues, extreme mixed ability groups, and SEN are a few of the issues faced.
I am going to unpack each of these issues and a few more besides, in order to give you a flavour of why I believe that ESL/TEFL teaching can be a hard job at times. I would not want anyone going into the ESL/TEFL industry without knowing the negatives they may encounter.
So, here we go. I’ll do this in a list fashion starting with the more trivial and finishing with the worst aspects of the job.
#1 – The cover lessons
In my early days as a TEFLer in a shopping mall language school, half the staff were basically backpackers who had decided to stay on a bit, whereas the other half were more long term expats looking to pass time during their retirement.
Essentially, I was in the former group, although I always took the job pretty seriously many of my colleagues did not. ‘Sick days’ were taken all too frequently and I knew full well that the absent colleagues were just too hungover to make it in as I had often started the drinking session with them but just had the foresight to leave that bit earlier.
Anyway, being forced to give up one of your free periods to teach a group of teenagers conversational English on a Saturday morning with no prep was not a barrel of laughs. I would often rely on those free periods to get my planning done for the next lessons as and so losing that free time had a big impact on the rest of my day.
#2 – One to one classes
True story, a businessman got really enthusiastic about studying English one day and our sales staff sold him a great package whereby he got a great price for 40 hours worth of lessons and he had two months to use those lessons.
However, the gentleman’s initial enthusiasm ran out pretty quickly and after the first week he did not show up again, until, the eighth week. He realised he was about to waste the money he had spent. So, lucky me, got the pleasure of having to teach him nearly 40 hours of conversational English back to back for an entire week.
Now, this would not have been so bad if he had not been a complete beginner and if I had been teaching for more than a few weeks. Nowadays, I would figure out a way to handle that course pretty quickly.
Chop it up into hour long blocks focusing on different skills, rotate through a few topics interspersed with a few short tests to keep him on his toes, job done, no problem, but back then, boy oh boy did I struggle with that one.
The hours went by so slowly and we didn’t seem to make any progress, it was painful on both sides. Still, I think we both learned a few valuable lesson from that experience.
At this point you might also like to read my guide to what TEFL teaching is really like based on my years in the trade.
#3 – Annoying students
Occasionally, you’ll get a student that just takes a dislike to you, for whatever reason that is, they just decide that they are not going to fully cooperate in your classes.
This can be anything from trivial things such as them just being unenthusiastic during the planned activities, through to deliberately disrupting lessons by shouting out silly answers and disrupting the flow of the class. In a UK government school, I had chairs thrown at me and it was well known that some students carried knives. This was one of the reasons that corridors were patrolled by policeman, and I still didn’t feel safe!
Thankfully, the vast majority of my TEFL/ESL teaching time the students I have taught, mainly from Asia, have been fantastically well behaved.
#4 – Admin
Keeping on top of the paperwork can be a full time job in itself if your boss actually enforces the policies that are written down. For example, some schools require you to sign a contract that says you will produce lesson plans for every lesson you will teach.
When you have 4-6, hour long lessons per day, department meetings, duties, extra-curricular clubs, and CPD courses to attend then it can be hard to find time to write those lesson plans. It then becomes a very pointless task when no-one ever looks at them! Least of all you whilst you were teaching.
And god help you if you are ever inspected by any accreditation team. We were recently inspected by EDT and the amount of paperwork/google docs we were required to produce was ridiculous.
The head teacher stressing about everything and creating more and more folders required to be filled with more and more nonsense documents that have zero impact on how well you teach the students. These things can at times add to the stress of the job.
#5 – Flatliners
Some people pick up English more easily than others and it is completely natural for students to progress at different rates. It is even normal for students to completely plateau for a while before making progress again, but occasionally you will get a flatliner.
A student for whom no matter what strategies you try, no matter how much you correct them, drill their pronunciation, explain a grammar point, illustrate a concept, they simply won’t budge from their incorrect ways of using English. This is known as fossilisation.
The reason I don’t like this is that it is a poor reflection on my teaching if I cannot find a way to get through to this type of student, but it does still happen from time to time.
Granted, sometimes age is a factor, sometimes the mistakes are due to the heavy influence of their first language or that quite simply they were taught incorrectly in the first place. These students are hard to teach due to the frustration that is experienced on both sides.
Our popular article how to support and ESL student in the classroom fits in nicely here.
#6 – Head spinning
One minute you might be teaching a group of near complete beginners, the next minute you have to transition to teaching an Academic IELTS class at a near native level. Whilst some people might see this as part of the attraction it has the potential to throw you off your game somewhat.
#7 – Parent power
If you do something that the parents do not like then it won’t be long before you know about it. This can be anything from the fact that you were seen out in the wrong part of town, your wardrobe isn’t quite up to standard or that your accent is not clear enough. If you upset the wrong parents then you can expect management to be on your back pretty quickly.
You can guarantee that management will side with the parent. They are so scared of losing their custom they will bend over backwards and do anything to appease them. Very rarely have I seen a manager/member of SLT stand up to the parents and challenge them. The best thing to do is to be extra mindful of parents, know which ones the moaners are and don’t give them any opportunity to complain.
#8 – Lack of preparation time
With sufficient preparation time, pretty much all the needs of a class can be addressed and suitable strategies for a lesson thought through and implemented. However, when time is at a premium then there may not be time to prepare properly.
This has certainly made me feel uneasy going into the classroom when I am uncertain as to which way the lesson will go and I feel I am under resourced.
This is when I find teaching ESL hard. Time can go slowly when you don’t have a well structured lesson with activities that flow nicely and build into the next one.
If you have not had time to think through your differentiation properly before the class, leaving you with some groups of students sat there twiddling their thumbs because they have finished early, and others barely half way through the work. This can quite easily lead to behavioural problems and yet another headache to deal with.
#9 – SEN issues
This is a thorny issue indeed. How do you know if a new student has got weak English skills because of the lack of exposure to English and because they are just struggling to pick up the language, or because they have a genuine learning difficulty?
It can be very difficult to identify an ESL student as having a specific special educational need because most of the tests for conditions, such as, dyslexia, are tests that are done in the English language, and guess what, they don’t have very good English and so the results are of little use.
Furthermore, diagnosing an SEN issue can first require the permission of a student’s parents for them to go through the process. This can be an issue as in certain cultures parents do not want to accept that their child is in some way ‘different’ or not up to par in their eyes. They hope that by sweeping the issue under that carpet that it will somehow go away, they would rather not face the awkward truth.
#10 – Poor management
A major problem with teaching in general and ESL being no exception is that often the management, or senior leadership team may well have had no previous experience of being a manager and probably have no related qualifications either.
Too often they have graduated to those positions because they have either just been there so long that it was only a matter of time before they were promoted, or they were once a really popular teacher and so were given a shot at management, and it turned out they were not suited to the role at all.
What this actually means is that you end up with incompetent people in charge, who do not know how to manage, inspire, or lead a group of teachers, yet, you are expected to dance to their tune as though they know everything about teaching. If you don’t, say goodbye to your next contract offer!
I have worked in so many places where the above has been true. And what were once nice work colleagues, change completely when they sniff a little bit of power. It can quite literally tear a place apart when incompetent managers are given free reign to do anything they want.
There we have it then, a fistful of reasons why ESL teaching is a hard job and really I have only just scratched the surface with those pointers.
That said though, with the right training, working in a supportive environment and through experience, all of those above problems can be solved, it might just take a little time or forethought but they can all be overcome.
Overall then, the positives of the job vastly outweigh the negatives. You have only got to read through my post about the benefits of being an ESL teacher to get a feel for the massive upside to the job too.
