TEACHING THOUGHTS #8: MY RACIST TSUNAMI EXPERIENCE

Right-wingers are very fond of using water metaphors to describe aquatically the hordes of foreigners arriving on this fair island. We have long heard about being swamped or flooded by people coming in to the UK from more benighted parts of the world. Racists love using water metaphors because everybody understands the idea that water is powerful and overwhelming. It’s also very dehumanising to compare human beings to a homegenous elemental force.

So it was with some surprise that I once received an email from management at a language school where I was working that said they were grateful to the staff because very few students had made their way to the office to complain about things. The management were delighted at being unburdened by the needs of the people paying everyone’s wages. So delighted in fact that they said they were pleased that there hadn’t been any “tsunamis” of students coming to the office.

For me, this choice of words was breathtaking. A tsunami is of course a destructive wave unleashed by an earthquake with the power to destroy entire cities and cause mass casualities. Language teachers ought to be sensitive to nuance and in this case the rather plainly stated nuance was racist sentiment. It was somehow both anti-foreigner and anti-learner at the same time.

What was also revealing – apart from the casual racism – was the sense of how management saw the role of teachers. In this case, it was quite plain that teachers were seen as some kind of human sandbags whose job was to “mop up” the liquid complaints of the students to prevent them from intruding on management space. The management quite simply wanted to have as little to do with learner problems as possible. They saw learners as a danger and a threat and they saw teachers as a buffer zone that protected them from having to interact with any issues.

This experience made me wonder if I should perhaps return to my CV and change my job title from EFL/ESOL teacher to “tsunami control operative”.

When management shows you its true face, it’s often very ugly.