ABSTRACT
My first glimpse of teaching English as a second language (ESL) occurred when, as a college freshman, I read Robert Graves’ (1957) autobiography Goodbye to All That. Graves had barely survived the trenches of World War I, and after the war had been unable to find a decent job in England, so he applied for the position of Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University, Cairo. With the help of his friend, T.E.Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Graves got the job, but it did not go as well as he had hoped. Graves taught only one class per week, but he describes it as “pandemonium”:
Four years after reading these words, I was facing an equally exuberant group of students at the other end of the Nile River in Debra Marcos, Ethiopia, as a Peace Corps English teacher. And, yes, I took the position because it would delay for 2 years my serving in the trenches in Vietnam. Debra Marcos was a small city with electricity but no paved streets. King Tekle-haimanot High
School, where I taught, had some fairly nice stone buildings with tin roofs and hard dirt floors, but all of the windows, except those in the principal’s office, were broken. One day in class I used a device to get the students’ attention that was as desperate as Graves’. I was teaching the English present progressive tense to a ninth-grade class of about 40 students (I had 25 such classes per week). About half of the students wore shoes, and most of them had notebooks and pencils. They sat on benches, some with narrow tables in front of them, facing the blackboard. At the back of the room stood the two tallest boys in the class, who served as monitors. Each monitor carried a walking stick, and if discipline broke down, one of the monitors would come up behind the disturber and knock him on the head with his stick.
