By TIANTIAN XIANGSHANG
Education Correspondent
BEIJING (China Daily Show) — An English teacher has fled the country after a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and mistakes, accumulated over a 24-hour period, finally proved too much.
Earl Cooter, 33, of Delberville, Mississippi, had kept a conspicuously low profile ever since his TEFL certificate was exposed as fraudulent.
But last Friday’s events have put the wayward teacher back into the headlines again.
The day began innocuously enough when Cooter, already awake from a neighbor’s jackhammer, received the early-morning news that the friend he had recommended for a kindergarten position turned out to be an escaped mental patient.
“It’s happened before but both times, I swear I had no idea,” Cooter told friends. “At least no one got hurt this time.”
As he went to prepare breakfast, Cooter discovered both his gas and electricity cards had run out overnight and there was no trace of the roommate who’d promised to replenish them. After accidentally locking himself out of his apartment, Cooter used his last 100-yuan note to hail a cab to work, only to find himself the victim of the classic “fake-note switcheroo.”
Cooter is reported to have lost the ensuing fistfight, along with his wallet and laptop, and from that moment on, according to a friend, “the day began to go downhill.” Arriving late for work, Cooter plunged headlong into a grueling four-hour schedule, without benefit of PowerPoint, plan or DVD player.
“We had a lunch date, which he forgot. Earl always only thinks of himself,” said Cooter’s long-term girlfriend Fang Li, 19. “When he arrived for a coffee time with no money, so I throw the coffee in his face.”
Called in by university chiefs for a routine ticking-off concerning over-stringent marking, the American ESL teacher is said to have finally lost his temper. “There was the shouting, then I heard a glass break,” said assistant Zhao Wei.
“Any one of these incidents taken individually could be enough to trigger extreme irritation and even anger,” explained Beijing-based life coach Atkins Peiterman. “Two or three together might reduce a man to tears of impotent rage. But taken as a whole, and in just one day, most people would be driven to hunt down every single last one of those motherfuckers and personally drive a blunt stake through their chests.”
Cooter was last spotted at the Beijing airport departure lounge, after his housemate reported a small backpack and “some books and stuff” were missing from their apartment. Whether the teacher is US-bound or not is unclear but a China Daily Show investigation suggests not, as we can now exclusively reveal:
- Cooter owes child support to a Minnesota mother of two
- Résumé claims that his interests include “Kunqu Opera, Tang poetry and Taoism” were dismissed as both “hilarious” and “complete bunkum” by fellow teacher Carl Wade, 28
- Neighbors at his former trailer park describe him as “unemployable, even for these parts”
- Cooter’s father is engaged in a long-running court battle to disown him
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