Re: VPNs. Our family purchased our own subscription for use on our personal devices. I think it was USD $10 per month? A very nominal charge, and certainly one you could afford if your school didn't provide it.

My family lived in Zhuhai for 6 months and found it very livable. It's not as huge as the mega-cities, and it's touted as China's "green city." That means there are more grassy boulevard strips and the air is cleaner. It's a 1-hour train ride from Guangzhou. It's also directly adjacent to Macau and now accessible to Hong Kong via the new bridge. Between those locales, you can get anything you need. (Although there was a local import shop near our Zhuhai apartment where we could purchase authentic, blue box mac n cheese, albeit for quite a premium price.) There are at least two international schools in Zhuhai.

For that matter, Macau would be a relatively easy place for a western family to dip their toes into Chinese life. Originally settled by the Portuguese, it has a strong European/Christian influence but predominantly an ethnically Chinese population.

Hi everyone, just a quick update. First, I don'[t mind the banter back and forth between old regulars here. I know that's how these boards tend to operate.

Since PsyGuy asked for an update...
Back from two fairs (Iowa & SF), and no contract in place at this time. My husband has received a few offers, but nothing that would work for us. He received a very low salary offer from a school in Kuwait, and given the salary plus the fact that it was low on our list of destinations, he declined. He also had an offer from a school in Qatar, but they gave him no details at all about the compensation package and communication was pretty confusing, so he said no to that as well. The other offer was from a high school in Taiwan. From what I gather, this is a bilingual school for Taiwanese students, not really a school for international students. The compensation was good and the mission of the school really tugged at our hearts--a nice blend of Chinese cultural heritage and western-style education that encourages independent thinking. However, the lack of a primary school for my son, coupled with a few other site-specific issues, led us to reluctantly decline. I hope we don't regret that decision, as it probably could have worked well for us. For now, my husband has several second interviews scheduled over the next ten days, and at least one first interview with a school that had to cancel due to weather-related travel delays. So,we gamble and we wait.

Thames Pirate wrote:
> Some other thoughts:

> Oh, and do you have an email you'd be willing to share since there is no PM
> function?


sdgc@mail.com

It's not my primary email, so I'll have to remember to go check it. ;-)

Thanks all for the continued insights. He had his first Skype interview this week and found it an overall pleasant experience. Not sure if it's the right match for him, but no sense worrying about that until he has a contract offer in hand, anyhow! He has more leads in Iowa this weekend.

The suggestion of some online coursework/seminars in IB/AP or classroom management is a really interesting one. It may not be the critical piece to securing something, but it is one more signal that he is serious about the career and cognizant of the differences between high school and college teaching. I neglected to mention that he has previously published articles in peer-reviewed journals about curriculum design and pedagogy for incoming college freshmen, so that's another signal that he's serious about quality educational delivery.


Responding to a variety of points from various posters:

I am quite willing to seek some sort of credentials along the way. Realistically, I'm probably not cut out for full-time classroom instruction. (My admiration to all of you who do!) I am a skilled technical writer, and so the possibility of working in a school's writing/editing lab to support ELL is quite appealing to me. (Not sure if these even exist in international high schools? They are quite common in colleges and universities, and that's my familiarity with them.) I also could happily work in a library, tutoring, ESL, etc. I'm not able to commit to licensure at this time--I work one and a half jobs, plus parent the two small aforementioned children. If he actually *gets* a job, then I could drop one of my current commitments and start down the path towards licensure. I'm just reluctant to give up my current career options in pursuit of credentials for a likely low-paying job as a trailing spouse, when we don't know if we'll have the opportunity to use it. Worst case scenario, I need to stay employed here and now, in the event we don't go abroad next year. (My current careers are in environmental science and nonprofit/community development. Not particularly transferable for short-term positions.)

Re: quality of the education for our own children. My older child is a very strong student, albeit in his first year of primary school. We are already in the habit of supplementing his schoolwork with additional material and so if the school was not particularly rigorous, I suppose we could survive for 1-2 years of primary before seeking a high-quality school. If there were significant behavioral/safety issues among students in the classroom, that would be another issue. Then we'd be looking at the legality of homeschooling or cutting short our contract after the first year. Hopefully it isn't that bad!
Our younger child is only 2. When we previously lived in SE Asia, we dropped our older child (then 3) into a government-run, foreign language preschool and he adapted readily. I tend to view that as a potential alternative for the younger child, too, if the school only provides one tuition reimbursement, etc.

I'm not sure how I phrased my first post--will have to go back and review. We aren't opposed to the Middle East as a whole... just slightly more selective due to security concerns and, in my case, some ideological issues with Saudi Arabia that I know I couldn't overlook. A friend of mine used to teach at a school in Oman and raved about the experience--both the school, the society, and the natural environment. So, yeah, we'd consider many places in the ME.

We hadn't looked seriously at private international schools in the U.S. Frankly, they tend to be located in very large urban centers with high cost of living. The assumption was that his first-year pay wouldn't be sufficient to handle the rather extreme housing costs, even though we otherwise could live a lean lifestyle. Perhaps that was shortsighted on our part, and we should reconsider. The option of teaching at a public high school offers a lot of potential. Of course, his state-issued license isn't valid in all 50 states, blah blah blah, so there would be some limitations. But he could probably find a public or charter school job somewhere in the country with a cheap cost of living. That's not nearly as appealing as the adventure of living abroad for that year (not to sound like the dreaded "tourist teacher") but a very reasonable consideration and a step towards our ultimate goal.

Friend, I wish that $77k were the average for his line of work! Perhaps that’s true of R1 universities, but it’s nowhere near that in small liberal arts colleges, which are more teaching-focused. They’re worlds apart. I’ve been dismayed to see new tenure-track hires—that’s a person with a PhD in their field—start teaching at a liberal arts college for $38,000. And I’m not talking about backwater, unheard-of schools. These are colleges that rank among the tops of their states. As with other teaching fields, there is a vast oversupply of qualified individuals, and the schools get away with underpaying their faculty. So, sadly, the salary drop is not so much as you’d expect.

I’m mentioning the leave of absence here in the forum, so as to say that we have a back-up plan, but that doesn’t need to be shared with the recruiters. A two-year contract is a two-year contract, right? If he loves it and stays longer, great. If he decides “thanks but no thanks,” we’re in the fortunate situation of having a fall-back option.

His current college rarely has a class of more than 30 students and there’s a huge emphasis on individualized attention and mentorship, so I think there’s room to expand upon those experiences and highlight his skills there. Your comments remind me that much of the world doesn’t distinguish between research universities and liberal arts college (which are such a North American phenomenon), so it may be beneficial for him to really emphasize those student-focused qualities. I imagine that one strength th would be his ability to counsel students on how to sucessfully apply to colleges and universities, at least in the Americas. I’m not sure if that’s important enough to be a selling point.

This is a whole new world to us, so I admit that I didn’t even know digital video portfolios were a thing. Aside from footage of him teaching, what would such a video portfolio include?

I don’t think we’d feel right about misrepresenting our family. We’re all along on this together. One of our kids is only 2, so no need for her to go to school as of yet, and that saves the school some money. Our older child will be entering Year 2, and I’d frankly love to drop him into a local school for the language immersion, if it were a global language that would potentially be of long-term benefit (So, Spanish or French, yes. Kazakh or Thai, not so much.)

This has given us some good material to discuss and develop; thanks so much.

FV2020, the optionnof teaching domestically is certainly on the table. I’m honestly not sure not sure how equivalent a public school job is compared to an international school (and I literally mean, I don’t know). Certainly, the ages of students are the same, but the demographics of the students and the style of administration will be wildly different. Still, it’s a viable option.

I’d be interested to read some responses to the Venezuela post in this forum. Because we have kids, We have some responsibility to not putting them in a dangerous situation. But generally speaking, yes, we will travel to a place with some low-level unrest. I just haven’t been monitoring the situation in Venezuela to know how bad things are or are projected to get.


Here’s a question: are there any steps a person with dependents can take to minimize the expense to the hiring instituion? Again, salary is not the greatest concern in the near term, as we’ve saved up for this and view it as an experiment, at least for the first two years until he gains more experience. So, could we offer to pay our own transportation costs? Our own health insurance? Etc.

Dear PsyGuy, don’t worry. I’ve acquainted myself with the forum enough to know not to expect anything positive, supporting, or uplifting from you.

I know it doesn’t fit your narrative, but I expressly stated that he’s looking for a career change, not “2 years and done.” I also addressed the salary issue, and frankly, I’m not sure you know what an average college professor earns. (Hint: less than an equivalent American public school teacher in a teacher’s union state.) I listed the regions of the world that he would be willing to work in, and you may note that I didn’t even list Western Europe because it’s not a practical consideration for us. As I further explained in my request, he’s applying now at the “dump fairs” because he just recently finally obtained his teaching certificate. So I appreciate your reality check, but you actually didn’t tell me a single thing that we didn’t already know. What you didn’t do is answer my question about how to improve his chance of being recognized and considered as someone who can do more than “lectures and labs.” I take it that your real advice is “don’t bother; it’s impossible.” And I appreciate that perspective, truly, I do, so thanks for that.

Hello all,
I'm actually the potential trailing spouse in our family, but my husband and I are approaching his career options as a team. And he's averse to message boards, so here I am, asking questions.

We are American. My husband is mid-career as a college professor. He has his PhD and has been teaching at a small American liberal arts school for about 15 years. He has tenure and has held some low-level administrative roles. There is no drama or controversy in his career, and he has colleagues/supervisors who are willing to serve as references.

He/we are contemplating a career change. He has been given up to two years' leave of absence, and wants to explore his options in international teaching at the high school level. His interests are in teaching foundational science classes (as opposed to the research many professors prefer), so he usually opts to teach the intro courses to 18/19 year-olds. He is an excellent mentor and many students seek him out for career advice. He loves curriculum development. Since these are the parts of the job he most enjoys, we believe that high school teaching might be a good fit. He does not want to be an administrator at this time.

He has twice been hired as a guest professor for one-semester programs at universities in China and elsewhere in SE Asia, and really enjoyed those experiences, where his students were EAL.

To this end, he has recently obtained a state-issued high school teaching certificate. However, he has not done any high school teaching to-date. He has, over the years, guest taught in high schools, coached science fair projects, etc., but no formal classroom instruction.

Additionally, we are a family of four. I don't have a teaching license. If this is our family's new path, I would be happy to pursue TEFL and eventually teach at that level, or I may investigate other remote/IT careers. Immediately, I'd be happy to work a school support role if visas allowed it, or just spend some time as a stay-at-home-parent. Do we have any chance at all of finding a placement for next fall? Financially, we have savings and back-up for him to take a low-paying job for the first year or two, just to check it out. Then he'd either need to find a good-paying position or go back to his home university.

We aren't interested in going to Saudi Arabia. China isn't our top choice, merely because we spent six months there are we'd really like to explore a different part of the world. Our top choices would be eastern Europe or South America, although we'd consider the rest of the Middle East, stable parts of Africa, and Asia--anywhere, really. We're pretty adventurous and adaptable.

He has signed up with ISS and Search. He's late to the job season because he only recently obtained his teaching certificate. He's going to the Iowa and San Francisco fairs. What can increase his opportunities, as he heads out to job fairs in the next few weeks? Any tips? Suggestions? He's a phenomenal educator and has a tremendous track record in the classroom. If given the chance, he could excel at high school teaching, but he's not sure how to get his foot in the door.