Suzanne Furstner Foundation Scholarship 2009: Winner Announced
Monday, 23rd November 2009
Cactus is thrilled to announce Tatty Scott as the deserving winner of the 2009 Suzanne Furstner Foundation Scholarship.
The prestigious prize will allow Tatty to jet off to a location of her choice in Italy and embark upon a four-week TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualification and a two-week Italian language course. The prize also includes accommodation and return travel to the UK.
As part of the selection process, candidates were asked to complete a scholarship assignment entitled ‘’Six weeks in Italy”, interpreted in any way they chose. In addition to this creative writing project, candidates were also required to complete a short language awareness task to assess their grammar skills ahead of taking a TEFL qualification.
The entries were assessed by a panel of three judges against the following criteria: content and structure, originality, language and accuracy, relevance to the scholarship theme and overall impression.
“I can’t tell you the feeling I had when I saw my name on the Cactus website saying I’d won the Suzanne Furstner Scholarship. I thought it was a mistake!” comments Tatty. “Winning this competition feels like rounding a bend on a river and seeing a whole new vista stretching out ahead. It’s all so exciting and new. I’d taken the decision to study TEFL in 2010 after years working as a journalist and in the arts, when I saw the scholarship. Winning this chance to study TEFL in Italy is such an amazing treat. Wow. Ohgollygeemy. Here’s a big thank you to all at Cactus. You’ve just opened a giant door of opportunity for me. Wine and fabulous hams are on me.”
Jenny Johnson, Head of Cactus TEFL, commented: “Competition for the scholarship was fierce this year and we received dozens of excellent entries. Tatty’s assignment stood out due to her understanding of what’s required to be a great teacher and her creative flair. We are delighted to be able to offer her this prize which will kick-start her career as an English teacher, and wish her every success for the future.”
Tatty’s winning entry can be read in full below. To read the other shortlisted entries please click here.
Tatty Scott
Six Weeks in Italy: No Hexes on Italy
I first knew for certain that I wanted to teach English in Italy when I was sitting in a field in Northumberland surrounded by horses. During the summer a friend of a friend was visiting the county from London and to get into the spirit of the local history she was taking part in the annual Flodden ride-out, a commemorative cavalcade from Coldstream to the hills above the infamous bloodied battle fields. Now usually I like to keep a safe distance from horses. They’re big with strong legs and ferocious teeth and unpredictable minds of their own. I don’t want to feed Dobbin an apple let alone sit on him. However, this friend of a friend was a TEFL teacher in London and as I had just completed a TEFL weekend taster and was building up the confidence to swap my career in arts management for a new professional route teaching English abroad, my friend said this would be an odd but perfect opportunity to meet and greet and find out more, especially over the civil niceties of a picnic in the summer sunshine. So I quashed my fears, roasted chicken legs, and schlepped up to the ridge to wait.
At a little after 1.30 pm we were joined in our roped enclosure by 200 slavering horses, my friend’s friend, and two of her friends who happened to both be former CELTA teachers. Between chicken legs and the snorting cavalry the conversation went from saddle sores to our luck with the weather to the life of a TEFL teacher. I asked questions and passed round apples and listened. The three teachers had taught across Europe at one time or another and reckoned they could spot a learner’s native country at 20 paces. It could be their attitude to learning or even their ‘tell’. Each country, they told me, has a distinct pronunciation idiosyncrasy that imbues the students’ spoken English and is often the hardest thing to change.
Then one of the group began a eulogy to her stay in Italy. She’d taught in the country for two years and as she gushed about her students and her apartment and of the long hot summers riding around on her Vespa, it took me back to my own travels in Italy nearly 20 years ago, to my own long hot summers and experiences with students and riding around on Vespas. How different her visits had been to mine and how much more purposeful and orderly.
‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me…’
When I was in my late teens my father worked in shipping and lived in Arenzano near Genoa, where pesto comes from, (did you know pesto comes from the Italian for ‘to crush’? Think of pestle…) and latterly further south in the town of Lucca, Puccini’s birthplace and sometimes host location for the Miss Transvestite Pageant. Trips to see him were a self-indulgent teenage blur of laziness and yoga in the sun followed by nights of drinking and dancing in open air night clubs partying hard with the holidaying Milanese.
Sitting in that Northumberland field at the age of 37, best-forgotten memories came trotting back. Far from the fruitfulness of teaching, my Italian experiences were days of disorder and unencumbered calamity. Of the memories suitable to report here I remembered being at a bar on the beach that very first summer and my growing delight as the vodka tonic I’d ordered was more vodka than tonic. I remembered sitting on a park bench singing toe-curling harmonies after too many of these vodka tonics while Paulo, a doe-eyed musician, was playing me self-composed songs on his guitar. I was too drunk to realise that if I’d shut up he might have kissed me. I remembered racing Cesare, the pool attendant, to lengths of front crawl on the Pineta and how he never forgave me for winning. I remembered a pal coming to visit us one summer and how I crowed about my command of Italian only to order, ‘Due… pieces of pizza please,’ at the hatch of a pizza concession, even holding up two fingers to be super sure the bored waitress had understood me.
The thing is, Italy, you haven’t seen me at my finest hour. Now, though, things are different. I did a degree in Film and English in my mid-20s. I trained as a journalist too and worked for newspapers, magazines, and in PR for seven years. I still freelance these days in between managing arts projects. (See, these days I even manage things.) I’ve travelled the world. I’ve trained as a European tour leader. I’ve been a radio journalist and producer and presenter for the BBC. Yes it was only a local radio station, but still it was the BBC. That’s got to count for something. I write. I write a lot. I’m working on two novels and currently write two blogs – one on astrology, a favourite subject of mine, and one as an agony aunt character. She’s a Parisian barfly who offers her lascivious advice from the bottom of a bottle. It’s not me though. I’m not like that. I’ve taught too. I’ve taught creative writing and PR and arts awards.
‘And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves…’
My life feels like an on-going adventure and this chance to study a month-long TEFL in Italy will tie together my love of talking and English and writing with my love of travel. Such an intense teacher-training course will show me the holes in my knowledge of the English language – and will also help to fill the gaps. It will give me other useful skills too like classroom management and the ability to stand at the front of a room staring out at a sea of faces and to be able to speak in coherent sentences. And to remember to breathe.
Yes I want to learn how to teach you English but I also want to get back to your beautiful, boot-shaped land so you can teach me Italian. I want to be able to ask for two pieces of pizza and so many other things without having to resort to charades in a country that invented commedia del arte. Of course I want to share comedy words like thingamajig or hooter with you but more than that I want this two-way learning street to be a purposeful adventure.
Italy, what I’m trying to say is, “Please let me back in… Things will be different, better, I promise.”
We can learn English by re-enacting real life in modern day Britain; we could create our own soap opera and base it in a job centre. We can bring English grammar and dialogue to life using real film scripts by famous directors such as the Cohen brothers, “Well, sir, it’s this rug I have. It really tied the room together.” We can examine sentence structure and tenses using dramatic stories about well-known characters – how about, ‘Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In’? We can use these stories to explore English in so many different ways, for example a perfect starting point to help us with vowel sounds Pooh… stew… soup… goo…
And we can learn beauty and vocabulary and how to express the desires of our souls through the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Jenny Joseph…
‘And satin sandals and say we’ve no money for butter...’
And through these adventures, I hope to help you understand how the spoken word sounds, how the written word looks, and the differences between them. Before you know it you will be laughing and joking and sharing witty banter confidently like urban taxi drivers or dodgy bankers.
Above everything that’s my ambition, to help you become confident in speaking English. According to my friend’s friend’s friend in the field with the horses, the pronunciation ‘tell’ of the Italian student is ‘H’. “They don’t want to pronounce them where they actually are,” she said. “They seem to shift them around and forget them – or place them where they don’t belong so they say things like, ‘I ave a happle.’”
We can address this, you know, and here’s the perfect poet to help us. Please listen and repeat…
When I am hungry I shall eat eight hamburgers
With Eeyore by the ancient arches in the evening
And I shall honk my hooter higher than his, my hands
Held high in the air and say we’ve no Euros for oil.
Tags: scholarship, sff2009, suzanne furstner scholarship, tefl, english
Posted by Michelle Curtis 2009-11 under Cactus TEFL, Cactus News,
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Posted by SAM on 11/30 at 04:46 PM
I was idly browsing the web site wondering whether or not TEFL would be a stimulating course to become involved with when l came across this extremely amusing 'job application'. l so enjoyed reading it and actually laughed out loud in places. congratulations Tatty
Posted by Kirsty on 12/09 at 09:24 PM
This is fantastic and I can see why she won this prize - it has inspired me even more than I already was, I just need to choose a course and a counrty to go to now!! Thanks Tatty!
Posted by Tanya Avetoomyan on 03/30 at 11:13 PM
Thank you Tatty and WELL DONE!! i was looking for needs be funding so that i can Tefl when i came across your application, fabulous, creative and funny - i bet your lessons will go down a storm..wish me luck.. :-)
Posted by Elisel on 04/23 at 10:58 AM
What a fortunate lady to have had the opportunity to enjoy so many colourful experiences in life. Full credit to her for ambition and effort in the pursuance and achievement of her goals.
I feel it is a pity that this wonderful prize gift was not presented to someone equally deserving who had not had the privileged background of extensive travel and adventure. It was normal -even run of the mill to Tatty ;whereas it could have been a fantasticly magical inspirational eye-opener to some-one with less experience in life.