There comes a time in your teaching career when you can put together a CELTAtastic lesson on just about anything, be it “gardens” in a course on “architecture, cities and gardens” with design students who have no special interest in those topics or “sea creatures” in unit 3 of a book for seven -year-old beginners just because the writers had to stick Nemo in there to match the Disney theme. As those two real recent examples illustrate, however, that superpower of being able to keep students stimulated however odd the topic can also be used for evil.

Back when every day of teaching was a struggle, my reaction to being given those two topics would have been to protest about how useless they were, got through them as quickly as possible to do something more interesting, or simply skipped them without telling anyone and done some TEFL classics instead. Nowadays, I just brainstorm a few ideas, sit down to write some worksheets on the topic and fairly successfully teach them some completely and utterly worthless language. I have a terrible feeling that the 25-year-old Alex was actually doing a better job for his students and the profession more generally…