TEFL has been a career step for a number of famous writers, a film director and a well-known member of a US political dynasty.
EFL teaching has been an early step on the career path for a variety of well-known people who logically went on to have careers in literature. However, there are some more surprising famous people from the worlds of politics, pop and cinema you probably wouldn’t have guessed who started as TEFL teachers…
JK Rowling
The most well-known and financially successful ex-TEFL teacher in the world is JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, which are the best-selling books of all time.
Whilst still an unknown but ambitious young author, JK Rowling answered an advert in the Guardian newspaper to become an English teacher in Porto, Portugal. She spent 18 months teaching in Porto, and it was during this time that she began work outlining the plot for the seven-book series, started her writing, and even took Portugal’s ex-dictator Antonio Salazar’s name as inspiration for one of the book’s baddies, Salazar Slytherin.
JK Rowling married and had her daughter with a Portuguese journalist, however the marriage ended quickly, and she returned to Edinburgh with her daughter, which is where she wrote the Harry Potter series.
“…in those first weeks in Portugal I wrote what has become my favourite chapter in the Philosopher’s Stone, ‘The Mirror of Erised’ – and had hoped that, when I returned from Portugal, I would have a finished book under my arm. In fact, I had something even better: my daughter, Jessica.” JK Rowling
Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone is one of the best-known film directors of all time. His works include JFK and Platoon. In 1965, the US was engaged militarily in Vietnam and an 18-year-old Oliver Stone dropped out of collage at Yale and went to teach English to high school students for six months in Saigon at Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam.
Afterwards, Stone worked for a short while on merchant ships, and was able to get a ride back to the USA. In April 1967, Stone enlisted with the United States Army and requested combat duty in Vietnam. Stone served for a little under a year and was wounded twice.
From the army he went on to study at New York University and his career in film flourished. A career in which he made films that consistently challenged US foreign policy.
James Joyce
One of Ireland’s most famous authors, James Joyce (author of Ulysses, born in 1882), had a difficult start to his English teaching career. He accepted a job in Switzerland which turned out to be a scam. Next he went to Pola, formerly in the Austro-Hungarian empire, stayed there for one year, teaching English to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base.
After a year, the Austrians weary of foreign espionage evicted all aliens from the city. Joyce returned to Trieste and secured a job with the Trieste Berlitz Language School. He stayed and worked in Trieste for the next 10 years until 1915 when most of Joyce’s students were conscripted to fight in the First World War. During the First World War, Joyce’s family moved to Zurich, then Paris after the war and the South of France before the Nazi invasion.
Joyce’s best-known works are Ulysses, Dubliners and Finnegan’s Wake and he is credited with being one of the most influential and innovative writers of the 20th century.
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is a former itinerant English teacher turned author who draws on art, food, history and travel to enrich his stories of power and corruption in Brazil and Italy. Robb never intended to be an author, having spent many years working as a TEFL teacher in Italy, interspersed with trips to Brazil. He returned to Australia in the 1990s, during a period of economic recession and a shrinking EFL market.
Facing middle age and unemployment, Robb worked as a writer for a magazine before it eventually folded, and his boss went into publishing. At the same time in Italy, the Prime Minister Andreotti was about to go on trial regarding involvement with the mafia. Robb convinced the publisher to fund a trip to Palermo in Sicily to cover the hearings and this formed the basis of what went on to become one of the most respected works on Italian history and politics in English, Midnight in Sicily.
Robbs other most notable book is A Death in Brazil, once again weaving together cuisine, corruption, history, politics and travelogue, he deals with the rise and fall of Fernando Collar, president from 1990-92. In a dramatic scene near the end, Robb confronts the ex-president, accusing him of ordering the murder of his own brother.
Robb sees similarities between Italy and Brazil, which will likely ring true for any English teachers who have travelled to these countries:
"They are quite similar societies: the political and social structures are Mediterranean, and, politically, they are appalling. They are the exact opposite of the English-speaking countries, which are relatively well governed and provide a framework for people's lives, but which, I think, are rather soulless. There is something that is lost in that efficiency. Mediterranean countries tend to be humanly richer, but socially appalling. It's a perpetual riddle."
Bob Geldof
Member of the Boom Town Rats and founder of Live Aid, Bob Geldof was once an English teacher. Bob never qualified as an English teacher; he left school in Ireland without a leaving certificate, but he went to Murcia in Spain to teach English.
Apparently, discipline was a bit as a problem in classes for Bob and he sometimes had to get physical with students to keep them in line – maybe doing a CELTA first would have improved his classroom management skills. Who knows if it was these classes where his dislike of Monday’s started [link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kobdb37Cwc]!
Jeb Bush
John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, brother of George W Bush and son of George Bush, was Governor of Florida and a businessman. Jeb achieved most worldwide fame as he ran to be the Republican nominee in the 2016 election, losing out to Donald Trump.
When he was 17, Jeb went to a small village in Mexico to teach English as a foreign language as part of his high school’s summer programme. It was whilst he was teaching there that he met his future wife, Columba Garnica Gallo.
