Hey, you're going to make the choice you want to make, that's up to you. I can tell, as with others, you are clearly articulate and educated and have considered what you're doing. I'm not sure you're going to get what you seem to want, but...

I am fully willing to state that I don't agree with the notion that the USA or US states should act as some sort of universal pool of credentials for any English speaking person from anywhere in the world who wishes to have one. Absolutely, that's my opinion. US credentials should be for US citizens or residents, people who have been trained to deliver American curriculum to American students, and have experience in American schools. It's not America's fault that your country doesn't issue non public school teaching qualifications, just as it isn't, say, France's responsibility to provide health care for Americans because America can't seem to manage to provide decent universal health care to its own citizens. I'd personally like to have a Japanese teaching license (Finnish? Turkish? Uruguayan?), myself, but, big shock, Japan doesn't offer qualifications to non-Japanese. Why should you be any different than me?

You don't seem to have considered how a CV with a qualification that has absolutely zero DE experience in the US is going to be self-evidently obvious, how it came to be. Whether you launder a UT AEL via HI over a span of 5 years, even if that actually works, which even PsyGuy notes it very well may not (IF Hawaii accepts previous, non-US IB experience, 'might' 'may', quite a lot depends on if the Hawaii education authorities accept being the credential laundering service of all the states going forward, just as all the TeachNow scammers are desperately trying to scrape themselves to QTS before the UK authorities stop permitting TN to set the terms of QTS from abroad)...even if you get it, so what? You obviously think you will get a benefit from it, moving up the tiers or having some kind of job security. Obviously, there are many schools who want the 'license box tick' as has been mentioned on this forum, sure, but are those the kinds of schools you're talking about? I think not. Any first-tier or desirable school is not looking for a box-ticker, they want a genuinely experienced American teacher, with not just a paper qualification but actual DE experience. You don't and won't have any such, which will undermine your chances to move up.

As for the money issue, nice straw man, but sorry. It's not about buying a qualification. Recall my position on TN? The point is the notion of value. You obviously believe an American license has value, but to the extent it does, it's because such things are not just handed out like candy on Halloween. It's because they demand substantial time and cost from people that their supply is constrained, and why parents in many countries are willing to pay large amount of money for schools that have staff with them. If any random human being around the planet can lay their hands on an American license, or QTS, or whatever, then by definition those things will decline in value (as the DC license already has) and eventually some other thing will arise as a means to demonstrate true teaching capability.

Personally, as I work in a terrible school by IS standards, if I had 9 years experience at good IB schools...well, let's just say I'm envious of you, haha.

'there just isn't a I don't want to do anything, or go anywhere, give me a western credential for foreigners pathway.'

You missed the part that should include 'a western credential that lasts for my entire career and doesn't require any PD or additional expense or effort ever again, but at the same time grants me access to the best-paying and most desirable jobs for as long as I choose to work.'

I think this statement should be a sticky for this forum. It is truly amazing to me how many people post the same question/request over and over again. Either this or the 'I'm a US/UK citizen but I don't want to go back and actually get a qualification, can't I spend virtually no money and stay at my current job and get the same benefits as someone else spends tens of thousands of USD/GBP and years of effort to get?'

I sometimes want to go back and count the threads. Sometimes.

As I'm the one who said it, I believe, I would just add that obviously it depends on a lot of factors. Some people will be lucky, some not. The world changes over time, so what was true then, and is true now, may not be later on. When you make a major decision like this, I think the best bet is to be cautious. Go for the high standard and you'll be prepared for almost any switch in the climate down the road.

When it comes to high quality ISs, they want the best candidates, which means people with domestic experience, which in turn generally implies a domestic program leading to a domestic license. TR and TN are not that, not any more if they ever were. They are loophole programs for people living abroad teaching ESL or unqualified people teaching subjects (like me at the moment). UT AEL and MA Provisional even more so. There is no way to spin the reality away from that. Everyone at every decent school knows what they are and what they mean. That's not to say that certain people haven't been able to get perfectly decent jobs using them or that some recruiters/schools don't care.

The question is how much will their value decline year on year, as more and more people try to use them? Go back and count the threads just on this one forum in just the last year/18 months from person after person trying to use the same paths. Then add on the increasingly desperate attempts to hide the true origins (HI or CA license laundering, trying to get UK QTS based on Teach Now, on and on). If no one treats them differently or cares one way or the other, then why do so many people seem so 'motivated' to shield their shiny new UT or DC or FL credentials under the blanket of another credential?

There's no free lunch. When something seems too good to be true, it is. Add your own cliché here.

In fairness, I would like to say I didn't mean to sound overly harsh to the OP. I can see that he was a journalist once, he writes well and responds to criticism effectively. I do, in fact, understand the situation he's in. He wants to do something more satisfying than teaching Korean ESL. I would imagine that's a pretty universal experience.

As for learning curriculum, I'm not saying he should study it intensively, more just examine what the different standards are looking for. For example, I have a job now teaching ALevels, which before I took it, I had never even heard of, let alone taught. My first year was pretty rough. He could avoid this by having an idea of which of them he'd prefer most, versus which he might rather avoid. Some Americans, like me, can do ALevel teaching without too much trouble, while others like my colleague here find the whole thing exasperating and strongly prefer AP style programs. Once he knows what he wants to teach, he can focus on those kinds of schools. We all know that once you have experience doing a type of teaching, it's much easier to find future jobs doing that subject.

I don't think 'urban/rural' is a useful distinction in international teaching. That's more like Korea, because it's so small. Any school that has money to hire foreign staff is going to be urban. In most of Asia, it's more about how bad the city is. For example, in China, if you have good qualifications you are looking at Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen/Guangzhou. Besides these, there are a handful of decent smaller cities (Chengdu, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Qingdao, Xiamen) and a LOT LOT LOT of fairly appalling cities that almost no Westerner would want to spend more than 2-3 days in, let alone live in. These places may have large populations but are mostly just massive sprawls of ugly concrete and crappy shopping and lousy food and air pollution (for example, Xi'an, Hefei, Jinan, Shenyang, Wuhan, Changsha, Nanchang, Zhengzhou...plenty more). Because those places all have many millions of people, they have wealthy people who may want to send their kids abroad, and hence they have international schools. Those schools need staff, and since they often can't get properly qualified staff who will want to be in Shanghai, etc, they may hire someone like yourself. You may say you could tough it out, fair enough, but living in those places is a pretty difficult gig. I did it once, I know. It can be exhausting in a way that even rural Korea isn't. You can always take the KTX a couple of hours and be in Seoul or Busan for the weekend, but China is so huge it can be most of a day and a lot of bucks just to get out of a backwater city. Besides China, plenty of other Asian countries with ISs have similar cities that are either horrible or extremely isolated or both (for example, I would never voluntarily reside in Hanoi, it's a sweltering furnace basically every day and every night too, with atrocious traffic as a bonus).

This isn't even to speak of the many, many schools in good cities, which are essentially trash cans for students too stupid or ill-behaved or lazy or all of the above to manage in better schools but still remain extremely rich (Beijing in particular has lots of these).

To answer about myself, yes, OP is correct. I really cannot teach outside of China. As I said, I'm very similar to him in my experience (although actually I'm not teaching ESL or any kind of English here...basically just luck of the draw to get out of it 4 years ago). My issue is with his original statement 'my life is abroad' and PsyGuy's claim that it 'isn't an option' for him to do proper training. I think it would be more accurate to say, he doesn't WANT to do that. He wants to stay over here and keep earning, he doesn't want to write a big check to an American graduate program, he doesn't like the idea of sitting in a classroom as a MA student for 1-2 years (assuming such things ever happen again, sigh) and/or he doesn't want to be student teaching in a ghetto urban or rural meth school for however long, among others. Right, OP?

NOBODY really wants to do all that, including me. All we have to do is look at thread after thread on this forum, going back years, from people trying to find some kind of method to get all the rewards of IT with little if any sacrifices and paying the least amount possible in terms of money or time or both. Getting what the OP accurately calls a 'Monopoly Teach-for-Life Card,' parachuting into a cushy position at a cushy school in a nice city earning a big salary for easy teaching of brilliant and well-behaved kids.

I just don't think that's likely. Not the way the world works.

The idea on some parts of this forum seems to be, yes, you'll have to do some crappy jobs for a bit, but then you'll kind of miraculously move up the tier system as you put your time in. I doubt this. I think there will be, or maybe already is, a dual-layer system, one layer for people with home-country experience and actual licenses (Elite tier, one, most of two, as PsyGuy would call them). The second layer is the tier three schools, and not even all of those. People with TN/DC or TR/FL credentials, or MA Provisionals, or UT AEL, or QTS with no home country/all in Asia experience, or whatever else...they'll be stuck there. They'll not be able to move up the system with those marginal credentials. Maybe moving up happened before, it will happen again in individual cases, but I mean in the aggregate. Don't all hiring staff in every country know exactly what a DC credential on a CV means by now?

(I'm choosing to do the hard thing and going back and doing the MA program and the license. I don't want to, not really, just like he doesn't. It comes with a whole bunch of sucky trade-offs, absolutely. But I want to work in schools better than where I am now, and I want to not be tethered to China for the rest of my life, either. Day-to-day this country is getting more and more unappealing to live in, as this forum and many others will confirm).

He may get a tolerable job, sure, but he may very well suffer more than he's doing now, at least for a while. I can understand what he's doing. It's entirely reasonable. He should take the likelihood of him ending up here in the PRC, with me, as a high probability. At least for now, China still has enough apatite for foreign teachers to accept light resumes like his (and mine, as it was when I got here 5 years ago).

Been a while since I looked at this forum. I see there's been a bunch of stuff posted. Just to give my view on a couple of issues:

I personally think PsyGuy is being a bit optimistic about the chances of landing a good position given your background. From what I read, you're an ex-journalist who's been teaching ESL in Korean hagwons for some years and doing 'coding on the side', whatever that means. That's a very thin basis, if you ask me, to hope for a FT ICT position at a decent school making decent money. I don't think there are an overwhelming number of schools, on or off 'the circuit' who hire 100% ICT and if they do, they might look for something a bit more substantial than a passed Praxis exam and TeachNow, UT AEL, MA Provisional, or whatever other pseudo-license can be cobbled together while living abroad.

I actually have a colleague in my school now who has that UT 'credential.' She says she cannot renew it at all and it's going to be a dead letter, useless going forward. And by the way, she earns ~7% less than I do, although she has that credential and I have no such thing. Credentials are not the be all end all for a decent job and better pay.

I had a colleague a couple of years ago who got TeachNow, and used it to get a position at what seemed like a fancy Egyptian school. He said it was a disaster teaching there. Spoiled rich brats who cared about nothing and argued about everything, every day. He quit after a year. TeachNow-only CVs are pretty obvious, these days. Reputable schools aren't going to be interested in those. Teaching at low-tier schools can be pretty unpleasant, if you're not careful.

In China, there are so many 'international' schools and programs, there's such a gap between good and bad. Our school has another, totally separate program downstairs with kids not even half as capable as hours, and pay that's probably 70% or less than what we make. There's another campus of our school, same name, that has even worse conditions for foreign teachers (students are a couple of notches above feral animals, I've been told directly). I know a high school in Dongguan that has both a very good IB program with excellent students and a dual-degree Canadian program with absolute moron students who have been kicked out of other programs. All the teaching staff are technically employed by the same International Departments of the same high schools, but the work experiences are hugely different.

At the end of the day, if you are determined to move forward without going back to the US to do anything at all, well, you might be fine. PsyGuy might be right. People have done it. I would just advise caution and expect the worse, not the better. Be prepared. You might have some unpleasant experiences until you have something that you can really show for yourself. Study the IG and AP and IB curriculums, that can help you more than Praxis.

PS: I saw a mention of Myanmar as a 'hardship post' in Asia that isn't China...that's for sure. Myanmar is VERY VERY rough. I spent about 10 days there a couple years ago. Yangon is just barely tolerable, the rest of the country...yikes. Mandalay is possibly the worst city I've ever visited in Asia. Better visit first, that is a HUGE jump from Korea in terms of just about everything.

I was interested to read your post for a few reasons, so I thought I could give you my experience.

I was like you, I taught ESL in Korea (public schools) for a couple of years. I think, from lurking on this forum, there's quite a lot of ETs like us who see the pointlessness and burnout that pervades English 'teaching' or edutainment as it's practiced in Korea and the rest of Asia and want to get out, with the nominal 'international school' job the seemingly natural path if you do actually enjoy the teaching aspect but would like to make a real income and have some dignity, etc.

Currently I work in China. I would agree with Sid that China and the Middle East are your only two possible paths given the background you state. I guess I'll state the obvious and say that a person currently doing an ESL job with absolutely no experience or background in math or physics hoping to become a math or physics teacher does seem a bit odd. You should prepare yourself for a lot of questions from schools along the lines of 'how do you know how to teach math?' In China, the subject of your undergraduate degree tends to matter a fair bit. Not to say you cannot get away with things here (in my school we have a guy with an Accounting degree teaching Economics) but still, they are looking for some kind of link, some experience somewhere, something. Simply saying you passed the Praxis exams for math isn't really going to do much for you. That doesn't show you how to stand in front of a group of 25 kids and get them to understand a calculus problem so they can pass an exam, which is why schools here hire us in the first place.

Also, from my understanding Chinese kids get a LOT of exposure to both math and physics even when they are in elementary school or middle school. By the time they hit high school age they are pretty advanced. In my school they all take ALevel Physics and ALevel Math, which are quite difficult for anybody, and AP/IB are tough too, and even IGCSE is not a cakewalk. If you don't really know your stuff your life as a teacher can be rough--I've seen it happen. Kids will tune you out and you'll basically be a joke in the school. The Praxis exams aren't the be all and end all in terms of subject knowledge, they're more like a baseline or safety net. Look at the ALevel, IGCSE, AP and IB curriculums. That's what schools want teachers to be able to do. Take the mock exams and see if you can pass. If you can't, you're not ready to teach those subjects.

You talk a lot about doing CompSci as the thing you mainly want to teach... I guess you think having Math or Physics as the background would help you get hired? Thing is that CompSci is not a core course in most Chinese ISs. I believe there is something called ICT that ALevel schools sometimes do, but I don't think they hire people mainly for that. As Sid says, better to specialize in either math or physics and offer the CompSci thing on the side.

Really, it just seems like what you're suggesting is kind of unlikely, in my honest opinion. You want to go to an 'international' school with nothing except a TeachNow credential, and they would hire you to teach ESL while you do Praxis and/or a 'post-bacc' (not sure what that is), and then you will be doing math? The gap I see is that you need to actually demonstrate ability to teach math and/or physics. Not pass an exam, actually do it.

There are a lot of schools in China, so you might be able to convince someone to give you a chance with really low-level, badly-behaved, stupid etc kids, but honestly I've never heard of a teacher being hired as ESL and then switching to math. Your best bet is to be willing to work in cities that other people don't want to work in (lots of those in this country, lol. Look up Lanzhou), and deal with kids other people don't want to work with. If you can manage that for a year or two, then you have actual math experience, then you can move up. The demand for foreign math teachers is reasonably good, but you need to get over the proof of competence bar.

It will probably be unpleasant for a while, because you'll be trying to figure out how to teach math from, essentially, nothing, and that will be evident to at least some of the kids. If they ask you to explain something and you can't...it's not good for you. In China, if the kids think you don't really know your subject and are just BSing them, that's not a good experience. Just warning you.

PS: You won't be able to use Search or ISS with a TeachNow credential and no home country experience. The good and middle schools will not be available to you. You'll be looking at very low schools, at best.