School Week 2 and Banking

This week had some good classes and had some bad classes. Because we are teacher trainees, these Classes are free for the students. One gave my group some sweets as we were leaving class Friday. She's probably the least developed learner but a really nice person. 


Students are cool, and they want to be there. They joke about tequila and partying sometimes. They know that they don't know much English, so they're not concerned with getting everything right. Today's lesson ended on depressingly funny note when one of the other teachers showed me a sentence that a student had written: 




"I'm meat chocolate."


That's it?! That's all we taught you after 2 weeks?! "I'm meat" fucking "chocolate"? Who the hell knows how much good these free classes with us are doing for them.


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Another day, I went to a bar after class and was bsing with other students. The guy from England started talking about his days at Morgan Stanley before he began traveling. He explained to me what he did and the gist I believe was: he and a few other guys were playing with other people's money. Here was a 25 year old guy out of college, given money to play with. They traded with it, thinking that the market would go up, but they really had no idea. 


There was a lot of hostility between the sales department (guys who brought the accounts) and management department (guys who lost the accounts). He was on the management side, which mostly lost money. He told stories of losing one guy $60 thousand and another $2 million. When someone mentioned a UK celebrity, he mentioned that his only connection to the celebrity was losing their money. When his department made a mistake or the system crashed, their clients lost thousands or hundreds of thousands. I got a taste of a small slice of Wall Street that the average person has no idea about. 


So after going to school and working for a prestigious banking firm his only financial wisdom was:
Markets are really just going up or down. There's a 50% chance you make money. You hang on to your money and don't give it to anyone to "manage" or lose. 


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Friday was about the halfway point. The school director came to talk to us about getting a job after our training is done. The main thing I remember him saying was, "The very good thing is that on Oct 1st you will become very highly employable." The way he said it made it sound like you'd be set up for life. Obviously that remains to be seen. He talked a lot about how easy it would be to get a job, resources to help find a job, and schools and requirements in different countries. 


It was a good inspirational talk, a nice lift, that was given at a time - halfway through - that we likely all needed it. A bit of sunshine for an hour or so before getting back to the storm of lesson planning and assignments. In that short time of him bsing about all the opportunities that we will have after CELTA, it gave us time to reflect on all the open doors that await once we get the hell out of here. Or so he says. Whatever. It remains to be seen, but it is cool to think about all the places you can go to once you have a highly regarded qualification through a school that has over 100 branches throughout the world.