Venezuelans are radically unteachable. They show up forty minutes late, if they show up at all, then spend the rest of the class cunting around on cell phones and roaring at each other in Spanish. I wasted two years of my life trying to teach these people English. It can’t be done, any more than you can train a cat to build a chess-playing computer. You spend an entire week trying to teach them future tenses, then you ask what they are doing at the weekend and they say, “I go to the beach.” To hell with them.
There was this young guy who got a job where I worked. He would arrive two hours before his class, all enthusiastic, and cut up bits of card to make activities for them. I took his scissors away and told him to sit down. “Daniel,” I said. “Daniel, Daniel, Daniel... these people... they aren’t going to learn English. I mean, you can’t just waltz in there with your TEFL certificate and your coloured pens and think you’re going to ‘teach’ them ‘English’. You’re not being realistic.”
When you arranged his cards in order it would spell out a sentence such as, ‘What would you have been having for breakfast, if you hadn’t had what you did have?’ Grammar, you see. The student asks his partner this half-witted question, and he is supposed to say, ‘If I hadn’t had toast, I would have had cornflakes,’ or something equally surreal. In reality he merely frowns at it for a few moments, like a baboon with a Rubik's cube, then goes back to bellowing in Spanish.
Looking back on my career, I think I can honestly say that none of my students has ever learnt to speak English, and fewer than 10% of them have made any detectable progress at all. The whole thing has been a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and money. I might use that as a slogan when I start my own business:
The Hutton School of English
Wasting your time and money
