This is a review of the 11-week English For Academic Purposes (EAP) course at Nottingham University which I had the misfortune to teach on during the summer of 2024. I could list a thousand issues with this job, such as the long hours that often spilled over into evenings and weekends, the low pay, the lack of support by management and Course Coordinators (CC's), the micromanaging, the bullying groupthink culture that forced at least one teacher into taking legal action, and the suppression by management of any kind of creative response to the EAP course, the prescribed materials, and student engagement. One thing that really irked me was when one of the managers told all the teachers during the orientation week that they should not teach anything that was "cool". I was taken aback when I heard this as I know from my 35 years of teaching experience across the globe that students really do respond to creative teaching styles and stimulating course materials. While I accept that there must be some standardisation across a course, the fact is that I felt that even tweaking materials to make them more interesting would be frowned upon by management. As a consequence, students became highly de-motivated and often complained to me. I did my best to make things interesting for them because I know that they are paying top dollar for their education. It made me angry that a course that should have been dynamic and engaging ended up being highly prescriptive and soul-destroying. In fact, if you were to ask me what the difference was between the Language Centre at Nottingham University and a McDonald's franchise, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with an answer.
