International school educators live more adventurous lives than their peers back home. Why not you too?
1.2 Top Three Reasons to teach overseas
1.3 Identify Your Personal Motivations
Why I Want To Teach Overseas…
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. ”
Before you make this huge leap into the exciting world of overseas teaching, you must be brutally honest about why you want to go.
So take out a pen and paper or your laptop and do the six exercises that follow. Nobody needs to see the results, so you have no reason to lie or dissemble.
Exercise #1 - What’s MY Crossroads?
Which way?? Sometimes it seems almost impossible to decide.
Since so many international school teachers come to this life because they are at a crossroads of one sort or another, a useful first step is to figure out what that fork in the road looks like for you.
Describe the situation that prompted you to think about teaching overseas. How was the seed planted? Write it down. _____________________
Exercise #2 - Elevator Speech
Answer as honestly as you can:
“I want to teach overseas because…” This is the place where you produce what is known as an elevator speech (30-seconds tops.) Write it out, hone the prose, memorize it, try to distill the essence of your rationale. __________________________________________________
Enthusiastically deliver this speech to a person who knows you well and won’t be fooled by any of your wishful thinking or evasions. If this elevator speech makes sense to your listener and rings true, you’re on the path to a happy experience.
Emotional Factors Which Influence a Decision to Teach Overseas
“Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.
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Next let’s think about some deep-seated personal motivations for teaching overseas, those less likely to impress friends and family, possibly even a bit embarrassing i.e. I’m bored.
Work further through the decision-making process to answer the question “Why teach overseas?” The more honesty at this stage, the more likely that teaching overseas will be a memorable, positive experience.
Disclaimers First.
You may misidentify your actual reasons for teaching overseas, even if you think you’re being completely honest.
Or you may put a particular reason at the top of your list (travel) and it turns out not to be your favorite reason after all (stimulating expat community.)
Or you may make the leap for a particular reason (money) and then another motivation (adventure) takes its place once you’ve settled in.
It is perfectly fine to change your mind; just do the work of thinking deeply about why you really want to go overseas.
Personal Inventory Continued
“Know thyself. ”
This is excellent advice from nearly 25 centuries ago. So let’s proceed with the work of analyzing whether you are likely to be happy teaching overseas.
Exercise #3 - Travel History
Briefly write your personal travel history. Be particularly attentive to how you actually dealt with culture shock, frustrations and the inevitable disorientation. Were you constantly overwhelmed? invigorated?
Once a traveler returns home, the painful parts of the experience tend to fade. Try to remember it all; dig out any journals or photos to jog your memory. Be honest. Nobody else needs to read this. Write down a summary.__________________________________________
You might want to start a journal as you work through this process to help you focus. But be careful about posting a public blog, as things don’t ever really die on the Internet and your musings could come back to bite you.
Exercise #4 - Stress
Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale is a well-known scale to predict how the amount of change in your life might lead to illness. Note that even good change like Christmas or marriage can be stressors.
The resulting insight might make you wary of how much extra change like moving overseas you ought to load onto yourself without danger of implosion. It might be best to wait for a better time. Write down the results of the Stress Scale________
Exercise #5 - Personality
Your personality and grit will make all the difference whether you are happy or unhappy overseas. Take one of these (not very rigorous) self-analysis tests and reflect. Write down the results. ______________
1. Big Five Personality Test (Psychology Today - AM/PM Personality Profile)
2. My Personality Test – 100% free (and rudimentary) personality self-tests.
You just need to be a good sport, not necessarily ‘perky.’
Do not despair if these analyses reveal you to be grumpy or a bit of a loner. If you’ve been teaching long, you know perfectly well that not every good teacher is perky, organized, or outgoing; the good ones come in all configurations.
However, the one crucial trait for a successful overseas teacher is the cluster of adaptability/sense of humor/congeniality/coping skills.
At this point, exercises #1-5 should have helped you develop a truthful self-portrait. Now let’s continue further the work of identifying exactly why you want to teach overseas.
Running Away, Or Running Toward?
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
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Would you say that for you, teaching overseas comes under the heading (a) running away from or (b) running into an experience?
The away part can cover multitudes of negatives while the into part is largely positive. Just be honest with yourself. This is a profoundly emotional decision, but do not attach judgments to your motivations; just acknowledge them.
Impartial Critique
Regardless, I suggest you sit down with someone who truly knows you: most frequent travel partner? childhood best friend? colleague who worked with you under pressure? mom?
Explain why you want to teach overseas to someone who will not put up with your crap. You might even consider asking a person who does not exactly think the world of you.
A brutally honest critique should help you identify your chances of a happy experience, before you step off the plane for that new job in Ecuador or Ethiopia and are stuck for two years.
Exercise #6 - My Reasons To Teach Overseas
On 3 X 5 cards, write down as many of the following reasons why you want to teach overseas that apply to you. Add others if you think of them. Then shuffle the cards into priority order.
Running Toward…
1. I’ve come to a fork in the road and feel ready for a change.
2. I feel intensely alive while traveling and I want more of that feeling.
3. I have a 2/5/10 year career and life plan and now is the time for me.
4. I love the thought of starting over where nobody knows me.
5. I’m in a rut and the routine doesn’t satisfy me; I need a reboot.
Running Away…
6. I feel disconnected and not close to people. I seek a sense of community.
7. I’m coming off a bad breakup/divorce and need to hit the reset button.
8. I feel poisoned by the consumerist rat race of the Western world.
9. I need to flee suffocating family pressures.
10. I have always felt I don’t exactly fit in my home country, and the thought of joining the expat society appeals.
Put your reasons in order and be honest – there is no right answer, just what works for you personally. Keep shuffling those cards until you intuitively feel you’ve got it right.
Unknown Unknowns
A decision this momentous is littered with murky and tangled motivations. In spite of your best efforts, you can be sideswiped by feelings you could not have predicted. Oh well. You can only do your best.
Please pardon this incredibly awkward quotation, but it is just so awkwardly filled with wisdom on this point.
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense after 9/11
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”
This is the place where your big plans can come to grief unless you prepare for the unknown unknowns. Just be as honest as you can and go for it.
In the next post we’ll continue exploring more underlying emotional and personal components of this decision. You can come to grief if you fail to take them into consideration.
1.4 More Good Reasons To Teach Overseas
Reason #1 - Change
“Things do not change; we change. ”
The changes described in this post come under the heading of emotions. You’ve taken charge of you life, you feel connected, and the black-and-white picture of your current life might burst into full color.
The Reset Button
One of the most unexpected and pleasing results of teaching overseas comes under the heading personal growth. No matter how well (or badly) the experience turns out, you will absolutely be a stronger person than the one who got off the plane in Shanghai or Stockholm. Gym rats know the only way to get stronger is to stress the muscle; same thing with overcoming the inevitable challenges of an unfamiliar environment.
Another of the biggest payoffs of the teaching overseas lifestyle is that you can start over every two years if you want to. You’ll be working with a completely new set of teachers, parents, and administrators. This reset button can be immensely invigorating.
New Worldview
Your school may have students from 50+ countries and their parents will be well-traveled and multilingual Embassy staff, CNN reporters, and leaders of NGO’s or important business people, all of them with a background as unlike yours as possible. All this diversity will crack open your shell as you grow, change, and become more tolerant and open.
A Thai person might pity you for eating alone or a European may laugh to see you blush at a topless city swimming pool or nobody pays the slightest attention to baseball, cricket, or AFL scores. Adjust or go back home.
But you really can’t go home again, because your worldview has changed forever and you can never again see your home country uncritically. But overall, that’s a good thing.
Reason #2 - Sense of Community
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. ”
Bonding
Another impetus to personal growth comes from features peculiar to the world of international schools. For a start you’ve been dumped into a world of unfamiliarity and culture shocks.
All this stress produces the instant bonding that happens in close-knit environments with a common purpose. Think sports teams; think freshman college dorms; think the military. These stressors build a tight community immediately, unlike everyday life in your home country.
I remember our middle school kids on their first day at AIS Vienna. They were swarmed by the other kids who wanted to know all about them and had already begun absorbing them into school life and friendship circles.
The reason for this openness is obvious, once you think about it. Most all of these kids had been in the same situation themselves, especially those with Embassy parents who move every few years.
The same dynamic applies for teachers. The community can always use a member with new and interesting stories, maybe a potential travel partner.
Expat World
Since you’ll be living in an expat bubble and probably don’t speak the local language fluently, your chances of socializing with host country nationals are slim. This only serves to draw you closer into the school and expat community.
Family
Marriages in a new environment can flourish and refresh; you share a common challenge and spend a get deal more time together than usual.
Children will grow, adapt, and change utterly. They will engage with kids unlike themselves and begin to take a changed worldview for granted.
In a good international school, their peers expect to attend prestigious colleges, work hard at academics and possess the habit of success. For a parent, what’s not to like?
Singles
Several practical day-to-day features of school life also promote community and encourage friendships, particularly for singles and especially for women.
Frequently, schools will supply housing in a particular building or even a compound. Then it’s just like a college dorm where you can head down the hall and knock on a door to arrange a shopping expedition or happy hour.
Singles then have some relief from loneliness and the opportunity to make quick connections. This lifestyle can be a godsend, making a return to their home country unbearably isolating.
In ordinary life, making new friends can be difficult and take a great deal of effort and cultivation. Overseas teachers have an enormous advantage in this effort, mainly the openness of the community to welcome new and potentially interesting members.
Teaching overseas can provide an automatic sense of community, if you open yourself to it.
Reason #3 - Richness of Experience
“Travel is intensified living. ”
Memorable
This feature of the overseas teaching life is fundamental, but I need to pound home the idea once again: teaching in an international school isn’t just a job but is life-changing.
In your ordinary life in your home country, chances are that you may not remember what year such and such happened except for the spectacular anomalies: had a baby, first job, bought a house.
But milestones of your overseas career will not fade into mush, guaranteed. First job in Russia? Two years in Vienna? These dates are clear mileposts in my memory and remain so.
No Regrets
Of all the overseas teachers I have ever known, none regret having gone. They may have suffered plenty of negative experiences and regretted a particular school or their own behavior. But no, they do not regret going. Plenty of them regret coming back home, but that’s a story for later.
To repeat my overarching theme: Go.For.It.
Reason #4 - Alienation
“Almost every truly creative being feels alienated & expatriated in his own country. ”
The feeling that I never really fit into my home culture provides the unacknowledged motivation of many a happy overseas teaching experience. At some partially unconscious level, you just never felt like an ordinary citizen of your home country.
The thought of living in the same neighborhood you grew up in gives you the willies. You cannot imagine why anyone would stay at a chain hotel or go on a tour. When you travel, you bumble around on your own seeking new experiences and finding them. You have just always felt like an outsider.
I am here to tell you that there is a cure for this particular affliction, which is to teach overseas. That makes you a citizen of a new country or an Expat.
Expat
Expats exile themselves from their home countries either permanently or temporarily. Many find themselves breathing a deep and invigorating sigh of relief – they feel, at long last, that they finally fit: I have found my tribe.
Overseas teachers live in a self-selected community of like-minded souls, colleagues who take for granted that, at least for now, overseas is better than being back home. Plus the lifestyle is a tremendous amount of fun.
“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. ”
What if you’ve read this far and decided you want to teach overseas? If so, it’s time to explore this new and exciting world. Let’s start with some definitions and categories, mainly what exactly is an international school?