Small whinge

According to the rules of the world I live in I need a little piece of paper that says I know that probably the best way to create a comfortable and encouraging learning environment is NOT to pick out students at random with as little notice as possible to answer taxing and pointless questions to which they have no answer before laughing at their answers and inviting their classmates to join me. Unfortunately said little piece of paper costs $2,400 and will consume four weeks of my life during which I will be unable to work to start earning back the ridiculous amount I just shelled out for the privlege of being let in on the prized teaching methods that characterise popular (even if slightly misguided) theories on second langauge learning in 2007. God forbid I should go out there and just start teaching people with my own methodology created from the broad reading and research I have done covering a whole range of theories and methodologies. I must be five kinds of naive to have thought that a teacher would have a say in what, and how, they teach in their own classroom. But even though it's ridiculous and even though it makes my entire (increasingly expensive) education redundant I'll probably do that stupid course and spend the $2400 because when the person who is in charge of deciding who works as an ESL teacher in their college tells you that your university education is "useless" because it teaches you to teach drawing on myriad of methodologies when she just wants someone to teach "the way we do here", what else can you do? Perhaps it is just the narrow-mindedness and exam focused tuition of private English colleges but it would appear that there is a dichotomy between what it is possible to do in the ESL teaching world and what the Applied Linguistics faculty seem to think is happening out there. Which begs the question - what am I wasting my money on?