TMA!!!

OMG!  WTF?  There are just TMA nowadays.  What am I on about?  Too many acronyms, that’s what: and there are more of them all the time.  Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your local evangelical church you find yourself wondering why the hell they are so keen on Kentucky Fried Chicken – only to discover that, well duh! KFC obviously stands for Knighton Free Church.  Only it used to be written out in full…

Facebook is one of the worst places for this, and if you don’t know the lingo it can drive you insane.  What is the MSM and why does nobody trust it?  What is BDSM and is it rude?  I know what L’s and G’s are but now they’ve been joined by B’s and T’s and sometimes Q’s as well.  If you go to see a film it can be CGI; if you watch a TV programme it can be ICYMI.  If you have a facebook conversation as well as the obligatory LOLs and OMGs it can be peppered with CBA’s, IKWYM’S and ISWYM’S.  SWIM?

Enough is enough.  I’m suffering from acronysm.  Or acronicism.  Or acronyism.  Or maybe even anachronism.  My head is close to exploding: it’s all TMI baby and I can’t even say TGIF because it’s Monday so I am going to sod off PDQ and go live in a hut for a while until it all blows over.

TTFN

Kirk out

ESOL, ESL, TEFLON…

I have decided the time may be right to return to teaching ESOL.

A bit of background here: I started my Adult Ed career in ESOL, then known much more logically as ESL but because no organisation can survive more than a decade (or a week) without changing its acronym, they decided that English as a Second Language was somehow wrong and it should be called English for Speakers of Other Languages.  Presumably it would be offensive to these SOL’s to imply that English was somehow secondary – or that – oh, hell: I don’t know what they were thinking.  Just as I don’t know what the people at Embrace Arts were thinking when they changed it from the perfectly good appellation of The Richard Attenborough Centre to Embrace Arts and then back again following the death of its eponymous founder.  I wonder how many people it took to decide that; not to mention the cost of changing letterheads, websites and publicity?

It’s very annoying when they change the names of things for no good reason other than marketing or hyper-sensitivity.  But I digress.

Anyhoo, following the recent announcement of more funding for classes for Asian women, I thought ‘Aha!  They’re going to be doing lots of that in Leicester, which means they’re going to need more teachers.’  So I phoned the number, detailed my qualifications and experience and was told I could apply.  So apply I jolly well did.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/18/muslim-women-to-be-taught-english-in-20m-plan-to-beat-backward-attitudes

Actually the news item was mixed: it’s good to have more money for women who might otherwise be isolated and unable to communicate outside their community.  What’s not so good is that Cameron singled out Muslim women and indicated that a lack of English might lead to ‘extremism’.  He got criticised by a member of his own government for this: Baroness Warsi called it ‘lazy politics’ and quite right too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35345903

For myself, I have mixed feelings too: I enjoyed teaching ESOL as I get satisfaction from helping students and seeing them progress.  I am also greatly interested in other cultures so I learned as much from them as they did from me.  However, I am concerned about the amount of bureaucratic bullshit I may have to endure and I am worried about how much these procedures will interfere with the creative processes necessary to write.

But I must make money somehow.

So we shall see.

Kirk ou