Posted by fústar in 
Once, in a former life, I taught "Business English". Really.
I taught students proper forms of address. I taught them formalised small talk. I taught them how to compose a professional looking fax. I taught them all this hideous shit and much more.
The nastiest, most cynical, most soul-sucking school I worked for was called – wait for it – "The Wall Street Institute". Classes were not "classes", but (through a master stroke of rebranding) "encounters". Classrooms were glass-walled cubicles – encouraging (so the corporate rhetoric would have it) transparency.
But they didn't encourage transparency. They encouraged self-consciousness and despair. The atmosphere was "futuristic" and dystopic. It was exploitative and evil. I quit after a month. The canteen served Soylent Green.
Company propaganda drew exclusively on stock images of square-jawed, blue-skyed optimism and can-do spirit. Images that I had to look at 300 times a day. Images that made me want to dive headfirst through the glass walls, while shooting myself in the face. Images like this…
And this…
Shot from below, with the viewer forced to gaze up at his/her betters. Message? You're a maggoty worm flopping about uselessly on your soft belly. But you could, one day (if you tried really hard), be just like these fuckers. People maggoty people look up to. Literally.
And don't forget…
…the business world is one where traditional divisions of race and gender don't apply. It's a brighter, braver place. Glass walls. Encounters. You get the picture.
The name “Wall Street Institute” obviously gets funnier the further it is from Wall Street. Where was this one? Please say “Limerick”
“Encounter” suggests something quite dark and disturbing to me. Like “an unsettling and unnerving erotic encounter”. Which,m I have no doubt, is exactly what you gave your students, you dirty fecker.
It was in Barcelona. But they were, when I last checked, sprouting up everywhere. Like Tescos. Like cancer.
I didn’t give myself to the students as wholly (or hole-y) as you suggest, but the whole thing reeked of “high-class” prostitution alright. I’ve had countless shit jobs (forklift telesales, anyone?) but this was the first (only?) one where I felt my soul (if it existed) being gradually gnawed away.
Also, the whole Wall St system was a house of cards built on a foundation of snake oil. I told the owner as much when I left. He nodded his head and asked me to consider staying on to help him improve it (i.e. make the con a bit less obvious). He was your classic polished turd in a nice suit. Nothing behind the eyes. I declined.
A caption for the bottom picture: “Well done, Jenkins! By bulldozing that orphanage to build our corporate HQ, then organising a Shoot The Orphan competition on a deserted island for our CEOs, you’ve earned a nomination for our Most Heartless Bastard of the Year Award!”
My favourite (i.e. most hated) version of this kind of stock photography is when the models they use are so unrealistically, conventionally hot that you KNOW they have never had to work a day in their lives. It just makes things more demoralising for those of us who actually have to look at them.
Ah yes Con el Wall Street Institute tu tambien puedes hablar ingles. For me this place was like TEFL Valhalla, the sort of place a scumbag like me teaching in a shitty owner-run academy would never get within a hound’s gowl of.
Ms Avery, Most female corporate stock photo models look a bit like Sarah Palin. Males are all Tony Robbins. Polished teeth, firm features, tanned skin. The sort of brutal (inhuman) good-lookingness you might warm to if you were a heartless autocrat.
Hugh, Behind the imposing facade it was all smoke, mirrors and horse-shit. The great and powerful Oz pulling levers behind a curtain…only much less charming.
I remember Wall St Institue as well. They started sprouting up in Bilbao in the late nineties like red-brick bliss in Limerick during the eighties. Rather than selling the Enlgish language, they opted for selling a lifestyle which was the antithesis of the owner-run academia that Hugh Green recalls. No more grubby little rooms with old grammer books tailored to EOI exams, no more husband/wife from out foreign married to local husband/wife with one or two of their older offspring on the staff – in my experience, quite relaxed places to work in. NO! Such places, so often the preserve of people such as myself who could not find gainful employment anywhere else, were for the fuddy-duddies and the the incompetent. Wall St. Institute was for the ambitious, it employed certain teaching ‘methods’ (does ‘the Callan method’ ring a bell?) and constantly vetted teacher’s standards and results. Niche marketed for inveterate pijos, they frightened the life out of me! They didn’t want to teach English, they wanted to teach a certain kind of English that would make your skin crawl. Glass walls, sqaure-jawed jocks on the posters, suits abounding and ever-present monitoring pin-headed directors! How did you survive Fústar? How did you survive?
Well I only survived a month…if that. I felt dirty that whole time. Dirty and wearing a tie. While being constantly surveiled through the glass walls.
One thing the whole experience did teach me was that there are no shortcuts to language learning. Anyone who tries to pretend otherwise, and flog you a method, is a con artist. It’s hard. It’s long (ooer). It’s painstaking. There is no other way. Which is why lazy arses like myself will never be fluent in anything but their mother tongue.
The evil genius of the Wall St approach was to pass blame for failure onto the (shamed) student.
“Not progressing? Well that’s just because you’re not fully embracing the method. Your mind is trapped in a traditional mode. So very sad…”
Signs of improvement, on the other hand, were all thanks to the system.
Those corporate types only look like that because their personal morphing machine is in full working order. When they turn it off they revert to their normal form, which is a slitering, many-eyed, tentacular blob (they hail from one of the moons of Saturn, so they have to transform themselves in order to survive here). They’re replacing all of the light bulbs with the lethal mercury filled ones, which will ultimately transform the environment to one that favours them.
Or have I just been reading too much by David Icke?