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Sad to say, but I’ve lived more intimately with this book than just about any other in my life. I used Learning Teaching on a daily basis in Korea, where I spent a couple of years instilling the finer points of EFL pedagogy into trainee teachers to whom the finer points of the English language were themselves a little murky. But Koreans always make up in enthusiasm what they lack in know-how, so I have no complaints there. As for Learning Teaching, it’s not a bad resource. I mean, it’ll still suck a little joy out of your soul every day, like most textbooks, but at least it won’t lead you into the arid wastes of Jeremy Harmer’s How to Teach English , where passion goes to die (in the withered arms of hope). Unfortunately, there are certain brute, existential facts about teaching that even the best training manual won’t address, because to do so would undermine both its own raison d’etre and the tacit assumptions behind the whole education racket.

In job interviews over the years, I’ve often been asked to outline my teaching philosophy. There are two basic approaches to this question: there’s the ‘correct� one, composed of whatever bland and reassuring jargon you’ve picked up from books like Learning Teaching, and then there’s the truth. Of course, you can never tell the truth in a job interview, but you can sometimes tell it on the Internet. I’m going to tell the truth here.

For me, teaching has always been a form of seduction. Now, just in case my boss ever stumbles onto Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, I’ll add that this seduction ought to remain purely (and non-actionably) metaphorical. There’s a real conquest involved—if you’re doing it right—but it’s mostly a moral conquest, even before it becomes an intellectual one. When you walk into a classroom and get your first look at the lumpish human material you’ve been fated to work with—mere swaying slabs of boredom, nervousness or hostility, as the case may be—your overriding concern is simply to win those people over, to get them on your side. To do this, you need to draw on the same inner resource used by salesmen, pickup artists, entertainers and similar lowlifes: i.e. charisma. Authority and expertise are nice too, but they only come into play later on, once you’ve sold them on whatever jerry-rigged classroom persona you’ve outfitted yourself with.

Jim Scrivener, the author of Learning Teaching, naturally avoids the word ‘seduction�, but he does acknowledge that good teaching boils down to a cluster of winning personality traits such as empathy, honesty, a sense of humour etc. Where he goes wrong—where he gets downright mendacious—is in suggesting that all these qualities can be learned and improved upon by the diligent trainee. I don’t have a lot of hard data to back me up here (any more than Scrivener does), but from what I’ve seen of humanity, things like empathy and honesty are, beyond the age of seven or so, pretty much innate. Either you empathize with others or you don’t; either you’re reasonably honest or you’re a lying sack of shit; either you’re naturally funny or you’re Sinbad. Even assuming that lifelong, incremental progress is possible in some of these areas, it certainly won’t come about by skimming Jim Scrivener’s little handbook, or taking a TESOL class on weekends.

Teacher-training programs, then, are governed by the same cruel law as MFA programs: the really gifted students don't need them, and the really bad ones won’t profit from them, but are nonetheless sent out into the world, shiny diplomas in hand, to sow boredom and confusion wherever they go. In my years of training teachers, I never saw a shitty one get good; all you can do is try to help them become a little less egregiously shitty. Now maybe that failure is down to my inadequacies as a trainer, but I sincerely doubt that an Albert Pujols, for instance, could teach the weak and uncoordinated how to crush a hanging breaking ball, or that Elizabeth Bishop could show the verbally inept how to spin out brilliant metaphors. A gift for teaching may not be as remunerative as the ability to hit a curveball or as exalted as the ability to write a beautiful sestina, but like those other talents, it has its source in some deep-seated mojo that can’t be explained or passed on.

Despite my weary tone, I actually don’t have a huge problem with mediocrity. Every profession is beset by mediocrity. It’s the statistical mean to which human enterprise always regresses. I just have a small problem with covering it up and wishing it away. But then, my hunch is that these textbooks are usually written by teachers who are themselves mediocre. Most good teachers wouldn’t bother, because they know that what makes them good is, ironically enough, the one thing they can’t teach.