I suppose you thought when I said "Greece", you were going to see pictures of idyllic beaches and people in swimwear. Well, this is another side of the country that I discovered soon after starting my first teaching job in the village of Domokos. The snowfall pictured here was more than a metre deep and resulted in the "National Road" being closed for eight days leaving Domokos cut off from most of the outside world.

And if you think that sounds wild and dangerous, you should have seen my students. Not having the stern disciplinary airs of my (otherwise wonderful) boss, I frequently had to resort to hammering a large spanner against a butane gas cylinder to restore order (briefly) to the classroom. Often the textbooks on offer were a little too serious or a too tame for Domokos teenagers but I soon found that by embellishing lessons with drawings of "lager louts" and "punk rockers" I could just about keep their attention. It's always slightly disappointed me that every single text-book publisher seems to shy away from such material.

As you can imagine, classroom equipment was a little on the basic side. There was a "blackboard" but it was only attached to the wall by two hooks at the top, and started wobbling / swinging whenever you wrote on it. I soon developed a technique for writing with one hand and pressing the board against the wall with two fingers of the other hand. The only other equipment in the room was the farm machinery that a friend (or distant relative) of my boss used to keep at the back. Occasionally he would interrupt a lesson to come in and collect it which, with a little inventiveness from my students, somehow managed to displace about half of a one hour class. A little more troubling were the sacks of chemical fertilizer also stored there. I shudder to think what an EU safety inspector would make of that.

For the first six months, there was also no cassette recorder so I soon became quite accomplished at reading tape scripts with two different voices to maybe create the illusion of dialogue.

The picture on the right is a view of Domokos High Street, where shortly before noon each day, the local inhabitants were treated to the amusing spectacle of a flustered English teacher running along here with a big pile of photocopying, desperately trying to get to the copying shop before they shut for their (very) extended lunch break.

Despite all this, I have fond memeories of my year in Domokos. Apart from my students, I made a number of friends in the local population, who were more than a little curious about their foreign visitor. I did in fact gather that I was probably the first foreign resident they'd seen since some goose-stepping Germans in helmets had departed in the 1940s. I also became relatively fluent in "free-form hand signs" because the local accent bore absolutely no resemblance to the smooth voices on my "learn Greek" tapes and all my attempts to use the langauge resulted in incomprehensible replies that sounded more like throat-clearing than a dialect.

I will also never forget the fantastic views across the the top of the cloud-covered plain of Thessaly towards Mt. Olympos, which towered up from the clouds.

I spent the next four years working in the city of Volos, which as you can see is closer to the idea most people have of Greece. Yes, there was a beach and also a long sea-front promenade with twenty nearly identical cafes to choose from and a port, with ships leaving once or twice a day for the tourist islands of Skiathos and Skopelos, which were just an (Olympian) stone's-throw away.
Life was more normal here than "up the mountain" but not much. Photocopying was still dependent on the whims of various stationery shops and the students were still pretty wild. Volos itself has a population of around 100,000, which is only a bit more than Tunbridge Wells, but in Greek terms it is a major city and while I was there it was home to a staggering ninety-three private English schools. As you can imagine, the language teaching market was very competitive and many of the school proprietors were more than a little ruthless. Other unlucky English teachers were always complaining about the volume of correcting work they had, about not being paid on time or even in one case, about not being paid at all.

But I was one of the lucky ones. I got a job working for the longest established school in the city and my boss turned out to be a Greek version of the "good old fashioned English gentleman" of nearly aristocratic stature. I really was very well looked after and I think that's probably why I ended up staying for four years.

In those days, English teaching in Greece seemed to consist almost exclusively of preparing teenage students for the difficult Cambridge First Certificate exam and the even more difficult Cambridge and Michigan Proficiency exams. I often found myself teaching to Greek fourteen-year-olds vocabulary items (and the concepts that went with them) that many fourteen year-olds back in Britain wouldn't understand. If you haven't taught in Greece, try and imagine explaining "literary criticism" or the "ethics of cloning" to the class pictured here. Actually, I must say that they did nearly all pick up these things very quickly and a very high proportion went on to pass and pass again.

Naturally, all of this required many hours of hard study and hundreds of hours of mock tests, pre-mock tests, Saturday morning tests, and plain old "in-the-lesson" tests. One the many useful things that I learned was how to write tests and in particular "cheat-proof" tests.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.