I want to start by saying I have been fortunate enough to have studied many years of university education, I started in 1992 with a degree foundation in technology on the Open University, which taught me how to use a computer quite well amongst other things, I then studied for an HND in business information technology and topped up to a science degree, I also qualified postgraduate as a teacher and I have spent about seven years teaching both in London and in various places in Asia.
I worked out that my university education and my teaching experience added up to about twelve years. A small amount of research I’ve done expands on this in that in 2009 only 7% of the adult population of the UK were postgraduate qualified and even as recently as 2016 only about 5% were considered computer literate at a high level, I have really met both of these standards but as early as 2002 I really struggled to find work. Back in 2002 I was fortunate enough to study a PGCE teacher training course as an option but when I found myself in a similar situation without work in 2008 I thought about all my teaching experience in Asia and my time in London and thought of the possible things I could do in PowerPoint presentations to help people with grammar and things like IELTS (International English language testing system) which prepares foreign students for entry to British university courses and I thought about starting a website as I wasn’t doing anything else.
Then what to call the website? After some deliberating, I came up with third-conditional.net, it was dry humour in a way and also quite an advanced function of English grammar which is quite difficult to explain (if, then would have) talking about hypothetically changing something in the past to change the present. I think I’m right in saying that many languages don’t actually have a way of saying this and that made it a good title for an English teacher who had gotten to know how difficult and frustrating learning English can be. So I got the domain name and found a host server and started creating some content. I turned forty in 2008 and then unfortunately for me I was sectioned under the mental health act a month later. I had been living with my mother beforehand but when I came out of hospital, I moved into a downtown bedsit paid for by welfare. I lived there for six months, going for daily walks and watching Diagnosis Murder in the afternoons with a certain respect for their positions as doctors, one thing I didn’t appreciate then was that as a teacher who was four levels up the lecturer scale I was probably equivalent to a clinical medical officer just three years earlier when I was teaching in London, which is all part of this story in a way.
I didn’t have a good computer in my bedsit, just something my mother had used in her work years before, and I remember I also had very little money but I did try and put together some material for my new website. It started off with some accumulated PowerPoints about grammar and I made some about IELTS and polished it over the years.
It’s now 2020 as I write this so I’ve maintained the same website for twelve years now, I’ve added some interesting stuff about literacy and facts about education, I’ve also added my qualifications and a page on research into mental illness and it has had a steady stream of visitor all these years. I think the total number is quite high, well over 100,000 but it’s around 40 or so a day rising to 200 a day sometimes. By 2013 I was getting good results on google, if I typed in third conditional as a search term I was getting in the top three sometimes and often higher than say the British Council page on third conditional or the BBC’s page on third-conditional, I also had a page dedicated to mental health and that would come in highly on searches for mental illness and the eqa (The Equality Act) or schizophrenia and the eqa which I was quite surprised about when I looked up schizophrenia and the eqa by chance I found my website was at the top of the list. My rating disappeared for third-conditional in about 2015, it’s nowhere to be found in a search now but I still get forty visits a day, as far as mental illness and the eqa was concerned I got top ratings up until about mid 2017 then it disappeared as well, but I think that I did demonstrate some ability worth noting and I also had the foresight to print screen some of my searches which no one has been remotely interested in as yet and I still have a welfare flat in one of the poorest parts of town but there it is, just a short story about my website www.third-conditional.net
Mark Benniman 2020
Two print screens of search results on google for my website third-conditional.net
(In the second image all the top three searches were mine, two youtube videos and my website)
