Paperwork

Well it seems that I have gotten the paperwork delivered (by email) to our new school. Copies of passports, teacher certification and college transcripts were all scanned and sent this week. Now we will get our physicals and have everything done from our end, we hope. Busy getting our local paperwork done such as "wills, power of attorney, etc." so if something needs to happen while we are overseas; our daughter can handle it here. I am also making arrangements to be able to handle banking, bill paying, etc over the Internet if needed.

Keeping updated

One thing that you do notice is the time difference, being 7 or 8 hours ahead of EST, e-mail I send to the school during the morning, gets there after they have gone home so they answer it the next morning (8 hours before I log on). We have gotten a couple of email from people in the area and I have kept up with the story over the web concerning the attack on the Doha Players.

Is this a concern, sure, but no more than any other risk when we do things? We have to evaluate the reward based on the risk and at this point we feel that everything (mostly) is still in our favor.

We are emailing all our paperwork and documents this week so things are progressing.

Now we got questions?

If you noticed, Qatar is our country of choice for our overseas teaching experience. The attack on the theater does cause some concern, but at this point, we are still very upbeat about what we will be doing next year.

I will bring things up to date with the steps we are going thru during the next two weeks.

This is easy, so far?

Things are falling into place, yea, right, I did get some info about housing and where some of the married staff lives. Looks very nice, hopefully we will get to live in the lap of luxury or at least in a place you want to invite your family and friends to come visit. (Wonder how many visitors people get when they teach overseas)

We have also gotten copies of the course outlines and the names of the textbooks we will be using so we can do a little advance planning and study. Really that advance planning stuff will probably be more my wife, too much organization and planning gives me a headache. I have started the e-mails to other staff and department heads with questions; hopefully they will be patient and put up with my inquiring about everything.

Questions, Questions O’ more questions

When we got home we started putting together the things we had to have for this adventure, make sure passports are up to date, think about things that might need to be handled while we are gone, etc.

Our first step was to email the people at the school and start a dialogue about our moving, with timelines, checklists and other things that will pop up.

Some of our questions:

1. Medical tests, vaccinations, physicals
2. Paper work needed by the school
1. Transcripts
2. Teacher certificates
3. Marriage license (try to find that after 36 years)
3. How do the tickets work for the flights
4. How does the shipping work
5. What should we ship
6. What kind of housing will we have
7. What do we do till we can get phones, car, Internet
8. What textbooks will we be using
9. Does anyone play golf (would have been 1st question but wife was watching)
   

We have found out that the Dean of the school and his wife both have EdD’s from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Would you believe somebody else might speak “hillbilly”. Another of the small world things, our friend, the headmaster from Gaza has a former staff member who is now working where we are going to be located. Got her email address, contacted her and asked if she would help with some in-county questions. Would you believe she called this week and we visited for 30 minutes, seems to be a great lady, but we were told she was. We are going to talk when she gets back to the States this summer about packing/shipping and other things.

Return home

We finally got to leave Boston on Wednesday afternoon and as we returned home, lots of different thoughts entered our conversation. Right or wrong, good or bad, exciting or scared, we had made a decision to try teaching overseas.

Now that we are home and getting back into the day to day of our present jobs, questions keep arising and planning is progressing (we only have 4 months to get this together). The school we are going to does not have (yet) a complete written description of all the steps needed and things to arrange for moving to the country. I have done a lot of research on the web concerning our future teaching destination. We did some research while still in Boston, but that was mainly about the school and the country. Now that we are home and have time, we are looking at living conditions, places to get questions answered, how travel and shipping will be handled, permits, medical requirements, etc. Probably for old hands at overseas teaching, these are “no big deal” questions, but for rookies, some who like advance planning, it is a little fluid.

The good things about our choice are finding a couple of staff members are also from Tennessee, a supportive family and friends who have offered to handle things at home (even a neighbor has offered to mow the lawn) while we are gone and the excitement of our new adventure. It is going to take (probably) the 4 months till we leave to get our act together, things organized, and everything put in place to be gone for most of a two year contract. We are planning on returning this first Christmas, one because we have time, and two because we will have a new grandbaby to visit. That will probably make the going back overseas a little tough but we are not the only grandparents to be a few miles apart from our family for a while.

We don’t know how this will work out but in today’s world of the Internet, VOIP, digital video, fairly easy travel, etc., being away from our comfort zone will not be as hard as previously. New information and thoughts will be added to this discussion as time goes forward.

What stress?

Part of the process is for schools to put invitations in your folder to ask you to interview with them, when you don’t get any or only a few, it can be a little discouraging. Don’t get down, putting together people and jobs takes a juggling act and takes some time to shake out. The other part is for you to put your resume into folders of the schools in which you have an interest. We finally ended up with 6 schools that wanted to talk with us, from what others have said, that is about the average number on interviews that get scheduled at first. We had already had our first interview on Monday morning before most everything got started.

The next day, Tuesday, we had breakfast with another school head, the one we had met on Sunday evening. He made us an offer (very attractive) at breakfast and we told him we would like to look at the other schools that had matches for us and we would let him know before we did anything else. From there we attended the signup for the teaching positions at the 173 schools that were still looking. We ended up deciding to take the offer that was made at breakfast, after looking at what was available to us from the other schools that had shown an interest. Based on our taking the offer, we contacted the other schools and the ISS office and took ourselves out of consideration. Having made the decision, allowed us some free time and we ended up having extra time in Boston to visit the city. It also allowed us to relax and not worry about finding the right opportunity. We had made a life changing decision in about 6 hours, if you have to spend a lot of time on decision making, this process will cause some stress.

The meat market

Let me say up front that the large majority of the people from both sides (interviewees & interviewers) were super, there were some interviewers who had a little overbearing sense of their power or position and there were some interviewees who seemed to lack a personality or experience. We met a lady (headmistress) the first evening (Sunday) that we were visiting with about the process and being rookies, etc when she introduced us to a gentleman (another headmaster) that she thought might need someone with our backgrounds. We expressed an interest, even though it was a country that we hadn’t at first considered. When you are looking, keep an open mind. Another hint is to make every effort to attend the education meetings before and during the IRC, we learned things we needed to know about the process and we met a couple of people who had been here before and they were happy to share their knowledge and experiences.

After we returned to our room, we got a message from another school (that had seen our resumes) that wanted to interview us on Sunday night, and since the signup for interviews on Monday didn’t start till late, we met for breakfast. A very nice gentleman offered good job matches but not a country we really wanted to work in, depending on our other choices. We tried to be as honest as possible about what we were looking for and when we could make a decision. The process is setup to make fairly quick decisions so we knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t wait till the end of the IRC for us, the schools have to leave (if possible) with their positions filled. It did feel good to know that at least one school wanted us, but this process is not like any other job search we had undertaken, if you snooze, you may lose, kind of like the “Price is Right”, do you take the job offer you have or try for something better and lose the one you had (take door number 3).

At the start of signups for Administrative interviews, we got in lines at the schools that we thought would want us and that we wanted to look at. Beware; this is a meat market, beauty contest, cattle call type experience (kind of like airport security without the metal detectors). You are going in mostly blind, to talk to a person you don’t know, about a job experience that may or may not be what is advertised. Some of these interviewers had very limited requirements, such as they only wanted a person with very recent experience or overseas experience and that was more important than whether the person could do a good job, etc. They really didn’t have time to look at other candidates because they had narrow requirements. Some others (the majority) were very nice, friendly and offered advice or help if you were not a good fit for their school.

Behind at the start

After finding what we thought were good matches, we sent e-mails to the schools to show our interest in their positions. Funny thing, we really didn’t know about some of the other overseas teacher placement services that do somewhat the same thing as ISS. To make travel easier (I think), these recruitment conferences are scheduled back to back to back. Some of the school headmasters, etc had already left for the states before we sent our e-emails. Prior contact with schools that you have an interest in would be a help to both the candidate and the school, instead of everything happening in the short timeframe of an IRC.

Based on this feeling of being behind or being rushed, we went to Boston for the ISS IRC. A second suggestion, stay in the conference hotel, get there a day early if possible, listen and meet everyone you can and don’t get offended easily. Because I was applying for an administrative position, and the first day was for the administrative interviews, we arrived on Sunday about 2:30 PM, after a flight delay (seems to go with flying in today’s world). We checked in, got our packet, got the lay of the land and how things were supposed to work, found a cheap (kind of) place to eat and started to meet people.

What we learned

We started asking around about the best ways to acquire an overseas position. Based on our friend’s advice, ISS and their IRC was the way to go. We started the process the end of November (a little late in the process) with a call and email to ISS. Told them what we taught, and our backgrounds and certifications and they agreed to let us attend the IRC in Boston in Feb 2005. Getting the paper work together, all the transcripts, letters of recommendation and state certification documents was a little pushed because of our short timeline. Another problem was the Christmas holidays; one of my colleges was closed for two weeks, so no transcript till Jan 3. Contacting past administrators during the holidays was also a challenge.

I will say that the ISS staff was very helpful, courteous and supportive even though we were late to the party. One of my first suggestions would be to plan ahead; our finally pulling the trigger caused us to have to do certain things in a very short time frame. Because we couldn’t get access to the job opening at the International Schools website till everything was completed, we had a very short amount of time to contact the schools that sounded like they might have two opening that fit our skill set. When you go as a teaching team, it has pluses and minuses. When the jobs match for both of you, schools like it a lot, save a little money and kill two birds with one job offer. The downside is finding a school that needs both of you.

We started looking for positions that matched our training and were in places we wanted to go. Because you can only search for one job at a time, we had to look for a Science job and see if they needed the other person. We would also try a counseling job and then see if something was available for the other person. Then you have to check the benefits, the country, the pay, etc. It would be a great help to a teaching team to be able to enter both jobs in the search and to enter a region of the world (not just each country). The present system works but it could be so much more powerful if the search process had a little better capabilities.

Thoughts from an International Hillbilly

Let’s start this discussion about how two fine people from East Tennessee ended up going overseas to teach/work (and travel).

First, we decided to look at overseas teaching because of a friend that has been working in Cairo and Gaza, off and on for the last 15 years. She has been a headmaster and kept saying good things about the experience. 12 years ago, I went to Egypt and Kuwait to train teachers in her elementary schools in the uses of technology in education.

When we ended up this fall, closing my business and my wife a little burned out with her job at a college, it looked like the time to consider something different. We would have liked to tried retirement and travel but that would take money and time, neither of which we had extra. An adventure in an overseas job, with a chance to see more of the world (and make a little extra money for retirement) was a real draw.