TEACHER?

“By the way, the Academia Europea are looking for Portuguese teachers, the pay is good, not going to be as interesting as working in the Finca Tatin for sure, but I tell you because that long trip of yours will definitely need some capital haha!” – wrote Maria Andrea on a recent comment.

A Portuguese teacher?

Not so long ago someone else also mentioned that I should do some teaching. Hmm.

I’ve haven’t consider teaching as a tool to help my travels. But I’ve learned that if two or more people mentioned something to me then I need to do/see it, thus I did what any 21 Century guy would do: I Googled it. Found the following webpage:

http://www.academia-europea.com/ingles/bolsa_trabajo.html

It looks kinda cool and made me think that although I haven’t been a teacher per se, I have trained a lot of people, all with mixed results.

Sometime with amazing results.

I taught this 49 years old guy all I could in one day about Computers, Internet and Networking. Two years later, I received an email from him. He informed me that he’d packed in his sales job and invested all his savings in a small computer repair company. He was his happiest ever.

Sometimes with drastic results.

I worked as a Night Auditor in a Hotel for 2 years. On my last month there, I trained my substitute, a young guy called Sancho. To the best of my knowledge, I showed him everything that needed to be done in a night shift. He took copious notes and even wrote down checklists.

One night he asked “Paulo, every night we add up all these 700 restaurant slips for two hours and compare it with the total sum in the computer. Every night they match up. Don’t you think we could just skip counting them and just accept the total sum as being right?”

“It’s part of the night job, Sancho. I know it’s rather tedious and so far, in two years, I haven’t found any discrepancy on the totals but you never know what might happen. My job is to teach you what you need to do on the night shift. Whether you do it or not, I leave it up to you.”

A year later I learned, via a common friend, that Sancho got fired because the auditors found six months discrepancy on some slips.

Sometimes with amusing results.

I hired a law student to work as a barman in a London Pub. He seemed very knowledgeable and was amazing playing Trivial Pursuit. One cold February afternoon he was standing in one end of the bar and I was at the opposite end talking to some punters.

I heard a loud laughter and quickly turned to where the law student was standing, and noticed that his shirt looked wet. I thought that one of the customers had thrown a drink at him, so quickly marched towards him.

The customer was still laughing and pointing at the law student, standing there with juice all over his hair, face and shirt.

I immediately asked what the F. happened.

“Pa-pa-polo, you see”, - he stuttered whilst holding an empty bottle of pineapple juice, - “err, I op-ened the bottle, and then, err, I shook it.”

...

Do I have what it takes to be a Teacher? Perhaps. I guess only time will tell.

Ciao 4 now

~ Paulo ~