By Alexander Zaitchik

Learn to Teach! See the World!
What else do you have to do?

Rejection came in the form of nothing. They just forgot to call and tell me. Five days went by, then 11. Finally, a week before the paid internship was supposed to start, I called the magazine and meekly asked if they knew when they might make a decision.

"Oh, it’s you," said the guy who interviewed me. "What’s up?"

"Well," I said, "I was sort of wondering when you’d be able to tell me if, you know, I got the spot or not."

"Right," he said, stretching out the word like pizza dough. "We decided to, uh, go with someone else…someone with more experience. I guess someone forgot to call you."

Oh, okay, I guess someone forgot to call me, I repeated. Back then I was very polite. When I told my father what happened, he shrugged and said, "What else do you expect from the Nation?"

Actually, I’d fully expected them to be impressed by my college zine clips and hire me as an eager-beaver, barely paid intern, the kind that lives in the bus station and waits tables six nights just to factcheck Alexander Cockburn. Looking back, I realize my confidence was misplaced, but there I was, in my underwear with a dial tone coming out of the phone on a late-summer late afternoon, three months out of school and with no back-up plan. What now?

Purgatory was brief. Later that night, flipping through the classifieds in the back of the magazine that forgot to call me, I saw my future: a small box promising "guaranteed employment" in Eastern Europe. That sounded better than my real estate job in Boston, so I ordered the $65 mystery product immediately, just as I had ordered all those sea monkeys and Venus Fly Trap seeds as a kid out of the back of Boy’s Life. It was also like a riddle: What comes in third-class mail and guarantees a job in a place you’ve never been?

What showed up a week later was in fact the publishing equivalent of magical sea monkeys, also known as brine shrimp dust. It was a large book listing phone numbers for language schools from Krakow to Moscow. It also listed helpful bits of advice like: "Tuck in your shirt when attending a job interview in Eastern Europe." And: "Never sign a lease written in Polish without first seeing the apartment."

I toyed briefly with contacting the Better Business Bureau, but instead ripped out the three useful pages from the otherwise useless tome and booked a plane ticket. After two months of meandering travel through Euroland, I finally entered Eastern Europe through a cold and snowy Prague. The Czechs prefer to locate their country in Central Europe, but at the time there were still Cyrillic signs in the train station, and the Koruna stretched blocks around the Deutschmark. It was Eastern Europe.

I checked into a hostel on the edge of town and pulled out my crumpled pages of phone numbers. Most of the $65 phone numbers no longer worked, but a few did, and they were hiring for the winter session. I tucked in my shirt and made some appointments. Guaranteed employment here I come.

Or maybe not. The first interviews were humiliating disasters. I soon learned that there are people in this world who take Teaching English as a Foreign Language very seriously, and they don’t want to hear that you are just passing time while traveling and trying to get laid and have absolutely no interest in, or knowledge of, basic English grammar. The vast majority of these people are British and Canadian. When they asked me why I wanted to teach English, I shrugged and admitted that I’d never really thought about it, concluding thoughtfully that it was probably better than working in a factory, which wasn’t really an option anyway. Wrong answer.

Eventually I learned to feign interest in teaching. That was the easy part. Much harder was feigning qualifications. One Canadian lady interviewer seemed utterly convinced that I had long desired to teach business English and help people communicate better with their fellow man. She was about to offer me the job when she suddenly thought to ask me to briefly explain the present perfect tense.

"I’m sorry to ask you such a basic question," she said, misinterpreting my wide eyes as a sign of hurt pride. "It’s just a formality. Sometimes you get these completely ignorant American kids who walk in here not knowing anything at all. You wouldn’t believe it."

I looked at my shoes and tried to think of some way out of this. But she wanted an answer, and the silence wasn’t letting me out alive. Twelve years of American public education had taught me many things, but the present perfect tense wasn’t one of them.

"How about just an example of the present perfect?" she offered nervously.

The interview ended like all the others. I began to hate Canadians and Brits, and all their grammar questions.

Then something saved me, something American. Actually something started by a German based in America, but now owned by the Japanese: the world-famous "Berlitz Method." When most people think of the Berlitz method, they think of Charles Berlitz’s trademarked "immersion" pedagogy, a world-famous system that teaches foreign languages through mimicry and colorful visual aides. People tend to think of smiling Argentineans in pink power-suits pointing at a big picture book and learning the difference between "next to" and "in front of." Attractive, professional Berlitz teacher: "Juanita, where is the red car?" Smiling power-suited Argentinean: "The red car is in front of the white house."

That’s the commercial anyway. The real Berlitz method is a successful international business strategy with the sole aim of making the firm the McDonald’s of language instruction. In Eastern Europe, this involves hiring greenhorns without a TEFL certificate who can’t get a job anywhere else and paying them low wages under the table. Meanwhile, corporate HQ in Princeton, NJ, works overtime to craft the company’s profile and image via saturation advertising, which the company uses to justify exorbitant rates for its 45-minute "units of instruction."

But while the Berlitz scam is bad for its customers and long-term employees, it’s great for desperate TEFL-less kids who can’t get a job anywhere else. All you need is a pulse and their one-week training seminar. (It’s also pretty easy to steal Berlitz’s corporate clients once you explain the scam to the overcharged managers and offer to teach them for half the price. I know one kid who started his own language school by stealing a single heavyweight Berlitz client.)

It was at Berlitz that I finally learned what the present perfect was. After paying my dues at the Blue and White, as it was known among teaching types, I went on to other things, but when times were tough I often returned to teaching English on the side–from day school to college. The pay was always bad, the students usually uninterested and the status boost negative. But it was steady, easy work I’d recommend for anybody caught jobless in the crummy American economy. At the very least, it’s a good way to kick around working 20-hour weeks until something better comes along. And in Eastern Europe, something always does.