Ways In Which EFL Is Like “Lost”

I admitted my latest addiction here and it’s to Lost. I’m just finishing up the first season, but it has already struck me that teaching EFL has a few things in common with Lost. (Note that you an also bring Lost to your higher level classes with EFL Geek’s ready-to-go lesson on the Lost pilot.)

• You’re in a new – possibly strange, scary and hard to understand – place, without access to many of the comforts you enjoy at home. Fortunately, however, polar bears are unlikely.
• You may end up with quite a mishmash of personalities and even English levels in your classes. In one group, you may have some who don’t speak at English at all, and others who at first don’t reveal their English skills. You may have a doctor, a former soldier, a lottery winner, a former rock star/heroin addict and a single mother – though she will hopefully not bring her baby to class.
• You may have troublemakers who turn out to be not so bad after all – or at least handsome – and you may have average-seeming people who turn out to be good at things like knife-throwing and hunting boar. Ideally you will not have an oddly large portion of students who are or were involved in crime.
• People may separate themselves into different groups or cliques. Perhaps the better looking people will take the starring roles in class, though in an EFL class those with more fluency and confidence are more likely to dominate, if you let them.
• Quite possibly some will think your class is some kind of miracle, enjoy it greatly and not want to leave. Others will jump at the first chance to go.

All kidding aside, you really are likely to meet a diverse group of people from all backgrounds and walks of life through EFL. I’ve also found that, just like the characters on Lost, most everyone really does have a story, even if you don’t have access to it right away.