I know I'm leaving myself wide open to heaps of abuse from Turnoi and Amused, but I want to share something with you, in all seriousness.

ESL teachers often get a 'bad press' because we're not seen as being 'proper' teachers, especially by people back home.

OK, so there are Turnoi's 'deechers', dancing monkeys etc, but not all of us work in crappy training centres.

I've just finished a 12-day summer camp job at my school. There were 3 x ESL teachers, (including myself), and we are all subject teachers, and 4 'proper' teachers from England. These 4 teachers all work in mainstream British schools and are fully qualified. However, none of them had even a basic TEFL qualification and had never taught ESL before. All 4 of them were completely out-of-their-depth, (by their own admission), and were constantly asking the 3 ESL teachers for help and advice, which we all gave.

I found it to be quite an eye-opener. ESL teachers may not be qualified to teach in NES schools, but without an ESL qualification it seems that even 'proper' teachers find it difficult to teach ESL.

As it turned out they all got through it OK, but I was beginning to wonder how they would have managed if they were working with no qualified ESL teachers at all.

This was my first experience, (as an ESL teacher), sharing classrooms with fully qualified English teachers. On the final day they all said that they couldn't have done it without our help. Maybe we are not so useless after all?