After scraping through the end of year exams in the first year of university (43%!), I decided that going to lectures might actually serve some purpose. It also occurred to me that if I didn’t want to spend most of that term getting halfway to university and then just deciding I couldn’t be bothered like I had a couple of times before, I was going to need some kind of simple and effective resolution to keep me going. I therefore resolved to do the solo-up- Everest-with-no-oxygen of university life – attending every single lecture for a whole academic year.

Not only did I get through the whole 9 months without missing a single class, I also managed to take notes in every one. However, I got so bored doing so that I only managed to stay awake by inventing a code for writing things down in. That worked perfectly, except for the fact that my code changed over the months and I often got stuck reading my notes from the beginning of term. Luckily, my far more sensible friends who managed to attend a reasonable 50% of lecturers got so used to reading my notes that they could tell me what it meant when I no longer remembered, so no regrets on that code at all . In fact, it was probably the code keeping me awake that dragged me up to the academic heights of a 2:2.

Little did I know then that I’d end up with a job where I got paid for knowing and using a very similar code. It’s rather prosaically known as the “phonemic script”, but for me those squiggles remind me of something tied to the leg of a pigeon in the war comics of my youth, and I simply can’t understand why anyone would think of it as anything but fun. It was almost certainly taking great pleasure in learning that code before I got on my TEFL course that dragged me up the academic heights of a B, because it sure as hell wasn’t my performance during my observed lessons!

The whole story above probably makes a lot more sense when I tell you that my subject at university was Physics. Even though I thought I was running far away from Physics in Brum in both geography and profession, I guess I was always destined to become a TEFL otaku…