A standard activity of the middle class students that I have the joy to teach back in the UK is the taking of a “gap year”, between school and university. This might involve travelling round the world working and partying, combined with doing some of charity work in a poor country. Ostensibly this is to give them a chance to mature by seeing more of the world, in particular to gain a sense of perspective from spending time with less privileged people. However, judging by the comments that some of them put into their essays, it seems to generally have the opposite effect. This is perhaps because they apparently spend most of the time hanging around and drinking with the sort of person that they hung around with at school, and will hang around and drink with at university, except in a sunnier climate.

Now, doing the sort of work that I do gives me the right, perhaps even the obligation, to be cynical about the whole development arena, and projects like gap year students in particular. Along with membership of professional bodies, subscription to relevant journals comes a free invitation to join the “Make Geldof History” campaign. Of course, you could be cynical about my work, but that would be pointless as I am already far more cynical about it than you could ever possibly be. Despite this general rancour, there is something particular about people who go to teach English to school children as volunteers that really makes me angry at the futility and self-righteousness of it all.

In the first class with my first year students, I always ask them about their educational background, so I can adjust my teaching accordingly. Every time I hear the phrase “I spent a gap year teaching English to orphaned orang-utans” (or similar) I make a mental note to take 10% of all the marks of that student, just for being so irritating. What makes it so particularly annoying is not the will to help, which should be applauded and encouraged, but the self-righteousness that accompanies it. The whole industry that entices students into paying thousands of pounds to undertake this trip maintains the lie that the recipients of these classes receive more from this than the volunteers themselves. Their brochures are full of phrases such as “when I taught them a few phrases, their little faces lit up, and I could see how much they gained from the experience”. One could make the point that the students might be better off receiving free health care and half decent job prospects than a few phrases of a language they will never speak again, but this would expose the economic dynamic that underlies this phenomenon. Put simply, the students, mainly because of their age and experience, have nothing more to offer than language teaching, and so this multi-million pound industry of sending the young British middle class abroad is driven not by need in the recipient countries, but by demand for a character building experience in the UK. In times past, the young British middle class were sent abroad to get another type of character building experience, as military officers they would shoot natives to maintain the great British Empire, but the current system isn’t that much of an improvement. It is not just us who do it, last time I was on research in the mountains of the DR I met a middle aged woman from Atlanta who had decided to take a month of work to come and teach English at a rural Dominican school. Of course, she spoke almost no Spanish, had no teaching experience, and had made no contact with the school that she intended to teach in. She just thought it was sufficient to turn up and get going, and this would alleviate her conscience for a while. She was “giving something back” – what, and to whom, was not up for discussion.

What gives me the right to take such a position is that for the last few months I have been working as a volunteer one morning per week, giving English classes. This is because many of the parents have been asking me to do this, and it is one particular thing that I can do to directly do something for the community, without compromising my research. Mainly however, it gives me a legitimate excuse to do something other than my own work. The Dominican government, as usual demonstrating its infinite wisdom, has decided that all students should study English, but haven’t bothered to provide the qualified teachers or resources. The job in the school down the road was left to the maths teacher, who tries his best but himself only speaks a few phrases, and the books are old, tattered, and few and far between. I have been thrust into this void of knowledge, and have been trying to fill it with usefulness and enthusiasm. Mainly I have been failing.

Now, as some of you might know, and the rest would have guessed, I was not a good child at school. In fact, I recall being threatened with expulsion on more than one occasion. I feel that Karma has come to teach me a lesson in behaviour they could never teach me whilst I was at school. Rather than “their little faces lighting up”, when I attempt to teach a few phrases to the students, they ignore this as the boys are too busy throwing objects at other boys, or trying to flirt with the girls, whilst the girls are busy dodging thrown objects and flirtatious comments whilst engaging in gossip. It is not the rewarding (and easy) task that people may lead to you believe. In the long run it should provide me with some benefits, as I will get ever closer to understanding, and perhaps even empathising, with my students.

In one of today’s classes, I was teaching how to describe someone, so that next week we could play a game of Guess Who? I got the students, who were about age 16 in this class, to give me the name of a body part that we could learn to describe.

Of course, the first thing that was shouted out was “ass”, as boys will be boys. I thought about correcting him, to tell him the proper pronunciation of the posterior is “arse”, but remembered I am supposed to be teaching ‘Mercan English, so I let the ‘error’ stand.