Yip, Wuhan Dave is talking absolute gollocks. Contracts are written by the employer first and foremost for the protection of the employer. I have never seen an international school contract that offers reciprocal rights that allow employees to declare “force majeure”, and I’ve seen and written a lot of contracts.
In good schools, the declaration of “force majeure” comes with certain contractual guarantees in terms of compensatory ex gratia payments, flights and shipping, but those are discretionary and may change year on year. In many countries, immigration law may mandate that, if the employer brought in an expat on a working visa then the employer has the obligation to pay for the flight back – but that is by no means assured.
Of course, anyone can go into the head’s office and declare “force majeure” if all it means is “I’m quitting right now and heading to the airport.” In all the schools I know, that would mean: no money, no flight, no shipping, no reference. (Except of course in some countries in the ME, where it would also mean no passport until you’ve fulfilled whatever obligations the schools decide.)

Err Dave, you wouldn't happen to be from Texas, now would you?
www.forbes.com/top-colleges/
U Penn = #6
Brown = #7
Dartmouth = #10
Cornell = #11
UT Austin = #76

This is a discussion board for "Educators"
Sure you're in the right place, Dave?
"Force Majeure" is a contractual clause that outlines the existence of certain conditions because of which an employer may be able to forego contractual obligations. Usually, the clause indicates examples of circumstances that may provoke the declaration of "Force Majeure" (Earthquake, insurrection, pandemic and the like) but these are always "inter alia" and not exclusive. The clause should also make clear what are the remaining obligations of an employer (in our case, repatriation of teacher and belongings and four months' salary).
There is no such reciprocal right of an employee in any contract I've ever seen. However, in exceptional circumstances, good employers ought to recognize that when living conditions become unusually difficult they will at least agree to flights and shipping.
The idea that a teacher can declare "Force Majeure" and expect to have the contract paid up is a step beyond stupid advice.

And there I was, moping around my office, feeling sorry for myself because there were no children about and up pops Wuhan Dave on my screen. Excellent!

You do work yourself up into a lather, Grumbler. I wonder why. Who are you to set yourself up as the arbiter in determining a hierarchy of crimes on boards like this? When Dave poses as an expert on all things in international education and bullies and belittles others who disagree with him – and meanwhile claims credibility on the basis of mendacious and duplicitous experiences and qualifications – then I think it is right and proper for me to call him out. If you think otherwise, so what?

As for what you so inelegantly call doxxing, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the one threatening to expose Dave. It was his lies about the SEARCH Fair in Australia that prompted that threat from someone else. I was only concerned with the lies about the SEARCH Fair in the States.

And you need have no fear that, by some mischance, you may end up working with me. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I prefer to hire face-to-face. I’m confident of my ability in such situations to detect and weed out the smug and the self-righteous.

Grum, Grum, Grum, the most important decision a school leader will take is in the hiring of personnel. If I choose to hire face-to-face because I believe that doing so helps me to get the best possible teachers in front of students, then that is my prerogative.

Back in the day, before the advent of SEARCH, there were only three recruitment fairs: ECIS London; ISS in Boston/NYC/ DC or San Fran; UNI Iowa. Airfares back then were proportionally more expensive, international schools were spread out around the world and teachers still traveled. Now there are probably 30 fairs in virtually every region. It is far more affordable than it ever was for teachers to attend – all of which seems to undermine your claim that: “…it's 2019. It's international teaching (i.e. candidates are dispersed throughout the world). Teachers are busy. Teachers aren't millionaires.” Of course all this is teacher-choice and leadership-choice. No one is forced to attend a fair, but the idea that fairs shouldn’t exist because you don’t want to attend them is, I think, a little presumptuous on your part.

It was interesting that you chose to ignore the supportive comments that followed my own:
"As an international teacher for almost 20 years, I agree with Walter. Even with the added expense, it's a great way to get to know an Admin a bit and hear about the school culture to judge if the school is a good fit (and vice versa). I find that face-to-face interviews give me far more information than Skype interviews. I also believe I come across better in person. So while I hate "internet dating" thing, the "speed dating" concept at fairs is well worth it for me."

"Pretty much agree with everything @walter mentioned. A couple of the most extraordinary and exciting moments I can remember have been walking into a fair and knowing that I could be going almost anywhere in the world in the next few days time. I'm sure there are admin out there that see the fairs purely as a boondoggle and are the sinister beings psyguy describes. But in top tier schools, that hasn't been my experience. The admin I've worked for have had the utmost levels of integrity. Even if I didn't agree with their decisions, or even aspects of their vision at times, they were in education for the right reasons and there was a mutual respect that framed our relationship. I've met admin during interviews that don't match that description, and those are schools I've chosen not to work for."

"Agree with many of the points Walter raised, but with increased cost of living, pressure cooker-like work conditions, and reduced potential for savings, the so called dream schools are no longer the favorites of veteran teachers. I'd rather live in Budapest or Prague than in Paris or Bangkok."

Teachers, like administrators, find reassurance in meeting the people they are going to be working with. For many of them, this will be a life-shaping decision, and they want to be as sure as they can be that they are making the right choice. But I presume that you believe that they, too, are dinosaurs.

As for this part, it’s just silly straw man stuff. Frankly, I expect better from you:

"And if you really feel that you learned more due to that closer proximity, I fear many will allow it to substitute for rigorously scrutinizing candidates in other ways (especially considering that many offers are made during the time crunch of a fair).

"You're digging for the tiniest of distinctions while leaving mother lodes of data unmined. Do you really check references? Look through portfolios? If it's about collegiality, are you actually calling current/past supervisers? Are you verifying degrees? If it's about protecting your students and upholding the highest standards, what are you REALLY doing with background checks? Even at GREAT schools, I've seen background checks handled in perfunctory ways. Maybe they run one, maybe they don't. Internationally, they're just asking for a police clearance. Do you understand what that means? I can just contact my current state and get a certificate that I have no record. That proves practically nothing."

You move from a fear of something happening, to an assertion that something is happening and then having set that up that totem you proceed to knock it down as though that proves your point. So for your information, I check out all teacher candidates. And I understand at least as well as you do the flimsy value of a police clearance certificate.

Meanwhile, you ignore completely the point I made about hiring teachers at fairs who had never thought about working in my region and would, therefore never have sent in an application or made themselves available for Skype interviews. Why would I want to miss out on this talent? And why should teachers miss out on opportunities they hadn't thought of? Because in your opinion fairs are for dinosaurs? Maybe you ought to consider other people's opinions.

Grumbler, you do seem to get a frisson out of your self-selection as the adult in the room on this board. As it happens, your opinion of whether I write or what I write is of no moment to me.
Now for the matter in hand. I have long taken exception to PsyGuy’s contemptuous, bullying ways, especially of women, but more troubling to me is the mendacity that runs like an open sewer through most of his contributions. (I say “most” because I recognize, as others do, that, if you want to find out about the teacher certification process in Burkina Faso, then there is no one better to perform the slog through Google.)
Dave has 9000+ posts on these pages – about 20% of all the contributions – and he sets himself up as the resident expert on all things concerning international education. So far so okay. If this is how Dave chooses to spend his waking hours, then that is entirely his business. What I object to is that, in order to bolster his credibility, his posts are riddled with deception.
Most obvious, of course, is the relentless trick of Dave’s Disappearing Data: “Only the data matters”; “This is what the data says”; “My posts are based on data”… only there is no data, just a few synapses twinkling faintly in Dave’s brain. I find much of this funny, to be honest, but what doesn’t amuse me at all are the various claims that Dave makes about his past and present experience that are designed to demonstrate to others that he really does know what he’s talking about.
If someone is so unhappy in his own skin that he has to use this forum to play “Second Life”, then I guess I should feel sorry for him, but the problem is that many people who read his contributions may be taken in by his claims and believe that they should give particular credence to his views on schools, administrators, the recruitment process and to his casual rejection of any of the moral principles that ought to govern a profession like ours. Dave’s opinions themselves are just that – individual perspectives – and can be listened to or laughed at. Where Dave crosses the line is by saying – implicitly or explicitly – these aren’t opinions; these are truths and his qualifications and experiences make them true. Except that the qualifications and experiences are fabrications. All of the claims about the doctorate, or DODEA or the admin job in Denmark, or the stealth appearance as a recruiter in SEARCH Melbourne – they’re all lies. And periodically I see it as my bounden duty to take a jab at him just to remind him that I know they are lies and to let others – perhaps less experienced readers of his stuff – know that they shouldn’t treat Dave as though he is Moses coming down from Mt Sinai clutching in his sticky paws the 10 Commandments of International Education..
Anonymous boards (pseudonymous boards, if we wish to be pedantic and pretentious, Grumbler) like this can be helpful and informative, but their inherent danger is that they can easily be monopolized by frauds and humbugs. I see it as my responsibility to expose people like Dave and will continue to do so.

Some of you seem to have very different ideas of fun to my own. Schlepping through airports, sitting on a long flight next to someone I’ve never met and never wanted to meet and being in a box in a hotel for 12 hours a day are all painful to me. I’d much rather be with my family than spend time at recruitment conferences. So why do I go? There are two reasons:
1) Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like online dating. I firmly believe that I gain much more insight into what people are really like when I am the same space as they. And I believe that the candidates I interview get a much better sense of who I am because of that proximity. Of necessity, international school educators uproot and relocate many thousands of miles from where they originate. Work, the school, their colleagues are much more important to their lives than if they stay at home, close to family and friends. So when you interview for a job – in Bali or Bombay or Brussels – the potential impact on the teacher is much more significant than if the plan is to move from one district in NYC to another. That’s why the “fit” is so essential for the teacher and similarly so for the school where it is important that the community of educators gets along. This is more important in Bali and Bombay than it is in Brussels, because expats in those places are invariably thrown together more. Interviews in person give both sides a better opportunity to see if a future working relationship has a good chance of making it through the contract. Those of you who find your lifetime partners through Skype and don’t meet them until the wedding ceremony will disagree. Good luck to you.
2) Schools in some locations will get thousands of applications every year: AS London, AS Paris, UWC/SAS Singapore, IS/NIST/Patana Bangkok have it made. They have oceans to fish in. Not because the schools are necessarily exceptional, but because people want to live in those places. Other schools in other locations aren’t so lucky. It makes no sense for me to limit myself only to those people who actually apply to the school I work in. Meanwhile, in every Fair I’ve been to, the advice that candidates get at the very beginning is “keep your eyes open”, “don’t rule anything out”, “be prepared to be surprised”. The saddest of the Fair candidates are the ones (usually first-timers) who mark as their regional preference “Western Europe” and cross out everything else. The Fair construct allows teachers with a sense of adventure to go places they’d never dreamed of – and relying only on the direct application and Skype interview runs completely counter to that.

There is another reason why the Fairs can work for teachers. Go to the candidate lounge and you’re one handshake from someone who knows something about the school(s) you’re interested in. You can get direct feedback from someone, or someone who knows someone. In other postings, Dave has warned about the dog-eat-dog atmosphere at the Fairs with teachers stealing other teachers’ resumes from folders and giving false information. From my experience, which is much more extensive than Dave’s, that’s bo11ocks. Of course a Fair is a nerve-wracking experience, but, approached in the right way, it can also be fun and exciting and instructive.
Every year, we hear stories about how the Fairs are dying off: that they are an anachronism; that the world of recruiting has moved on. And every year, yet another Fair opens its doors.

by reisgio » Tue Sep 17, 2019 6:32 pm

I don't think I've ever had a head of school who wasn't either a pathological liar or viciously abusive - or both.

by PsyGuy » Wed Sep 18, 2019 11:48 am

I concur with @reisgio the best leadership I ever worked for were monsters who just hid it better than most.

Hahaha The Dynamic Duo - Fatman and Throbbin. I don't think it would be hard to guess what your heads of schools think about you.
As a matter of fact, Dave, I know what two of your former heads - one from Europe and one from the Far East - think about you, because I've spoken to them.

"Especially at this fair (SG), which consists of a trivial number of offers and appointments being made. Since there is such a minimal amount of hiring, yet the attendance level at what it is, what do you expect leadership and recruiters to say, they came on the trip not to talk to you the IT but they just came to have some fun and network. Of course this fair is a beneficial location to do that, no ones really hiring."

Dave, you're such a nincompoop. You just blurt and blurt and blurt. SEARCH Singapore is a new fair and only in its second year. As recruitment moves earlier and earlier into the academic calendar, so Fairs like this have the chance to grab more of the hiring action, and later fairs - like ISS in February - will become less and less relevant. The GRC Fair in Dubai in November has grown to the point where it is now offering a Bangkok Fair - also in November. As I remember, you scoffed at the idea of a GRC Fair ever attracting high calibre schools and, consequently, high calibre candidates. But then again, when was your opinion about recruitment ever sensible or relevant?

Please pay no attention to the drivel that Dave has written in his list of supposed difficult to fill positions. You need to know that he has never sat on the administrator side of a table – neither in a school nor in a recruitment fair. Where he isn’t gratuitously offensive and ignorant (as in his comments about librarians or early years teachers) he’s just plain wrong. Finding high-quality teachers to work with 3 and 4-year olds can be really difficult (no, it isn’t just child care, you buffoon!), and I worry more about being sure I’ve hired the right guidance counselor than almost any other position.
Over the years, almost every position has the potential to cause trouble for recruiters. I remember one recruitment fair where there was just one authentic librarian; she was pursued down corridors by school heads. ES Music teachers can be as rare as hen’s teeth, as can teachers who really, really want to work in middle school. Sure it’s true that I’d rather be out looking for an upper ES teacher than a physics teacher, but show me the head who cares more about G11 physics than she does about G4 and I’ll show you a head who deserves to have her arse canned. And while there may be more HS English teachers at a fair than HS chemists, every school I know has more English teachers than chemistry teachers.
As for his stories about field science – maybe one school in 200 has a job that might target a person with that experience. And the only school I know that offered equestrianism is a third tier place in Japan with a lot of vowels in its name – and they didn’t really offer it. It was on their list of after-school activities that “might” happen if there was demand. Just like the school on Jeju that used to brag about its skating rink but, five years after its opening, had still not seen a vestige of ice in the basement.

"No one on here has seen my resume, many years ago the leadership on this forum were very upset at my contributions breaking away their smoke and mirrors about IE, but you cant discredit someone if you cant claim to know who they are, so @Walter and the rest of the LPN (League of Psyguy Nemesis) simply fabricated that they knew who I was. No one on this forum knows who I am or has any clue, nor have they seen my resume."

Dave, Dave, you’re such a silly boy.
For those who are really interested in the background to all this, it began in a post entitled “Blacklisted” dated Tuesday 17th January, 2012 (easy enough to find if you just type the title in the search function) . My first comment is on page 3 and is a response to lies Dave told about the SEARCH FAIR in Cambridge. It gets more interesting by page 5 with the input of Hawkeye who takes on Dave about more lies regarding his claim to have attended the SEARCH FAIR in Sydney. Dave maintained that he was working for a public school in Denmark as a junior administrator and the school paid for him and another administrator to fly to Sydney and stay in the same hotel and acting as “stealth recruiters”. An utterly preposterous story of course.
Then Hawkeye challenged Dave on his identity and of course with the clues that he had left (he talked about having worked at an American School in the Eternal City, described the then head in unflattering terms and had left after one year; he named his SEARCH Associate in even less flattering terms – which subsequently got him barred from the organization – he talked about his multiple certifications and other details of his background) so of course it was easy enough to log into SEARCH and discover his name. And then I found that he was also writing on the DODEA site as “Dave” – where his lies and boasting made him even more unpopular.
Over the years, he’s come up with various fairy stories about his so-called career, including going to ISS Bangkok as a “stealth” candidate and being bombarded with job offers (he didn’t), having a doctorate (he doesn’t), having experience as a recruiter (he doesn’t) and working at DODEA (he certainly doesn’t).
As I’ve said before, I’m fine with anonymity on this site; what I object to is someone “bigging up” his resume in order to give false credibility to some of his ludicrous claims. When I can be bothered reading his stuff, I mostly chuckle and move on, but my concern is that people new to the site might view him in the way that he likes to portray himself - as the Delphic Oracle of international education.
No fabrications, then, I know exactly who you are, and I'll continue to point this out to the forum whenever your braggadocio gets too irritating. And we''ll always have Kaohsiung, Dave.

@Dave
"No, we disagree mainly because your wrong. I have significantly more recruiting experience than it seems you do, since your approach like most leadership that want to maintain the mysticism of recruiting in IE.
Having tools to assist in recruiting instead of this witch doctor who has to have some connection to the force to understand or do it. Yes, we disagree about how the hiring process works."

Setting aside your quite appalling use of the English language, may I just say that it's one thing to write tripe, but it's quite another to inflate the tragedy of your resume to try give credibility to that tripe. I know (and you know that I know) that:
a) You don't work for DODEA
b) You have zero leadership experience
c) Your employment history would, if it were read out in full at the Edinburgh Festival, be a contender for joke of the year.

Hahahahahahahahahaha - priceless, Dave.
"We just dont use the backpacker, traveler, dispatch and house IT because thy dont come up often and tourist and traveler ITs got commingled."
Especially the word "We".

Dave, you do talk such cobblers. No Top Tier school would hire a teacher who's had ten successive 2-year contracts. The only reason I can imagine you'd write such fatuous tripe is that you're looking at your own track record and sending up a silent prayer that someone, somewhere will find your resume worth a punt.
In the meantime, for the more intelligent of our readers, please understand that no serious school is interested in "tourist teachers" or "hoppers". Doubtless, Dave will try to turn this advice into "admin-fear-mongering"; this is his standard riposte to people who know what they are talking about.
Fact is that, from a school's perspective, a teacher who stays in a post for only two years really doesn't make much of a contribution when you factor in the time it takes to bed in during Year 1 and the time (and interest) it takes to find a new job in Year 2. If you're looking for a job in a good school, you need to be able to demonstrate that you have enough talent for previous schools to offer you repeat contracts and that you have stuck around long enough to make a mark.