2017 Blog: When things don’t quite go to plan.

After accepting a job in Bangkok nearly a year ago we were excited about the move and I began to sort all of our belongings into two terribly messy ‘keep’ and ‘don’t keep’ piles. I blocked out the fact we had only accepted one job for a good 6 months and it only really began to sink in when I was doing my usual gain time task of sorting out all my files. I had absolutely no idea which syllabus I would be teaching next, or indeed if I’d ever actually teach again! This bubbling panic was masked pretty well with a busy trip home to see our family. There were a few wobbles, where I felt totally worthless and couldn’t imagine how I’d fill my days once we had moved and the kids were in school all day, but mostly I felt fine.

Fast forward 5 months and with hindsight, I can see that I handled the move fairly well. Logistically it couldn’t have gone better! Using the short term storage place to keep our stuff here over the summer was a stroke of genius. The kids settled into school straightaway and the apartment we saw in June was as lovely as we had remembered. Everything was great, right up until I finished dropping the kids off at school and suddenly had hours on end to myself. It sounds heavenly doesn’t it. It sounds heavenly to me right now actually, as I sit here and type this. But at the time it felt terrifying. Moving to a new city is daunting at the best of times but doing so when you are feeling low on confidence is particularly hard.

The plan is ever changing for our time in Bangkok and I have now managed to secure temporary work as a teacher until the summer and then, at a different school, a full time position for August. When I think about the fact that I have somehow managed to sort it all out, I can’t quite fathom it at all. I definitely changed as a result of my unemployment. I hope it has made me more grateful. I think it has made me more curious about what I define success as, and how best to chase it in the future.

As I work on my preparations for my new job, the preparation that I felt I should have been doing last May, I will try to document more of my teaching strategies on this blog.

Click on the next post to find out what I’m reading at the moment.

2017 Blog: I ate a pie and it was awesome!

We have lived overseas for 22 months. I am so proud of what we have achieved over here and how we have managed to make a home for ourselves in a place that is so far from home.

I really struggled with homesickness to begin with though and a wrote a lot in a journal. I referred to the homesickness as being similar to processing grief. I felt very sad about leaving my family and friends behind. I then felt really angry that I had made that choice, and that I felt guilty about it all the time. Gradually, I accepted our decision to move. I got used to communicating with my family in a different way and started to enjoy the perks of living overseas.

The crazy thing is that the 2 year contract is now over, we will return to the UK at the beginning of July to see family and friends before the next chapter of the adventure begins.

The things I miss the most about the UK (apart from family and friends) are:

1. The NHS. I miss the local doctors’ clinic and the feeling of being part of a smaller community. I miss the friendly service we had back home.
2. Pies. I love pies. Really.
3. Draught ale. With a pie.
4. The blue sky. Is there anything better than a gorgeous sunny day in the UK, maybe sitting with family in a beer garden?
5. Driving. Having the freedom to explore as a family in the car. Music on, windows down.
6. The view out to see over the Solent. This just brings back memories of hot, sunny days and blue skies.
7. Queues. Or more importantly, as I hate waiting, I miss a queuing system that everyone understands. In China, you have to be very aware of what the person behind you is doing. If you don’t keep your eye on them and your elbows out they’ll move past you and squeeze into a gap that isn’t there faster than you can say ‘excuse me’. Which of course they won’t understand.
8. Tap water. We are so lucky in the UK to have clean tap water. I will treat myself to a big glass as soon as we get to the hotel.
9. British bread. For toast with lots of butter, sandwiches with extra cheese, to dip in hummus…
10. Access to a wide range of cheese!

Fortunately, I can have some of these things when we are away from the UK, it’s not the same but it’s enough to tide me over. I do think there is something really special about being so excited about these things though. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

What I don’t miss:

1. Road rage. Some of the questionable/insane driving I see here gives me road rage and I’m not even driving. Sadly, it is my first instinct to get frustrated. Other drivers in China generally do not care. I hate road rage. I am guilty of doing it, but it’s so ugly and unnecessary.
2. Expensive petrol prices. It brings back bad memories of having no money and trying to drive so economically in order to conserve every last drop. It’s so expensive to fill up the tank on a big car!
3. Being able to understand every conversation. It’s tiring listening in on everybody’s conversations. I am so used to zoning out nowadays.
4. Realising people can understand us. Yes, I know there are Chinese people who speak English but when the majority don’t it’s easy to feel in a bubble when out in public. The number of times that we have started to argue on holiday and I’ve realised that actually because we are back in the UK, people can understand us and are listening.

Of course, there are many more things I miss and don’t miss. But the fact that I’m in a position where I can even miss these things and look forward to a holiday in the UK is pretty special to me for now!

How to teach internationally… Travelling with young children.

Our kids are 6 and 4 years old.

In some ways, I do think they are the perfect age for all of this galavanting around the world that we are doing. They are in classes with children from all over the world so they are learning about different cultures and viewpoints every single day. I hope that this provides a mindset in them to be open minded and accepting adults in the future.

They also don’t dwell on the distance from family. To them, the concept of time and space is different and less upsetting. They speak frequently about their grandparents and things that happened back at home as if it happened last week and not last year.

With both of our moves, we have been very upfront with them from the start. We included them in the move; they helped me to sort out their toys and books, they learnt about the skyscrapers in Shanghai and they watched videos of children at their new schools.

With our move to Bangkok we have been able to go and visit the city recently, so they got to see the type of apartment we will live in and we took them for a tour around the new school. I am so proud to say that they seem happy and relaxed about the whole thing.

I think preparing our children for change is an important job for us as parents. After all, they will spend the rest of their lives coping with change. Moving from school to uni, relocating to a new city or country and coping as relationships with friends and partners change.

To say I’m proud of our two is an understatement. I look forward to seeing what the next few years hold for us.

How to teach internationally… Preparing for The Big Move.

I definitely feel more productive once I’ve written something down.

With that in mind, once we knew we were moving the China it was time for a new notepad. What is pretty cool now though, is that I’m using the same notepad for our second Big Move.

Here are my top 5 tips for packing for a family move overseas:

1.  Be totally ruthless. If you haven’t used something for 6 months then get rid of it.
2. Take photos of the kids artwork and Star of the Week certificates, you are likely to lose them.
3. Do your homework on what to bring. I was advised to bring shampoo and conditioner from home but it’s easy and inexpensive to get what I need here.
4. Do stock up on footwear and bras if you are moving to Asia. For our move to Bangkok, I am planning on investing in at least 3 pairs of shoes for each of us. We also got the Clarks shoe size gauge so we can measure the kids’ feet at home and family and friends can then bring shoes out to us. It wasn’t expensive.
5. Bring over the counter medicines that you like and are familiar with. We tend to stock up on cold and flu, indigestion and hayfever tablets, as well as Calpol for the kids. What you need to bring from home depends on where you will be living. Where we are in China, we are not in an expat area so you can buy some things here, but they are not that easy to get. On the other hand, when we were in Saigon recently we bought Tylenol with no problems for very little money.

In terms of the logistics of getting your stuff here, there are a few options. You can have it shipped. This might be the cheapest way to send a lot of items (see top tip number 1 above, do you need them all?) but you will have to pay for the storage of the items as most countries won’t allow your possessions through until you have your work permit. Alternatively, you could go for the air freight option. We only had a couple of items for our move to China and it arrived about 3 weeks after we did. It was amazing to be surrounded by our things so quickly.

Or, if you have managed to de-clutter to the point of just having your belongings in suitcases you could take it with you on the plane! This time we have taken all of our stuff to Bangkok on the flight. We are halfway through this process and so far it has gone to plan!

We took 7 cases and 4 hand luggage bags for flight 1 with China Eastern (each passenger is allowed 2 bags at 23kg per bag). For our second flight with Thai Airways we will take 3 suitcases and one bike box, as well as the hand luggage (each checked in piece can be up to 30kg). The bike box comes in under our allowance as long as it is below 30kg.

This should be plenty of space for all of our belongings and will mean that we have everything with us as soon as we have found an apartment. For the moment we have rented a small storage unit in Bangkok (Bangkok Self Storage) until the end of August.

Logistically, the only real issue is getting all these suitcases to and from the airports. In Bangkok, we used Hoppa which was excellent and very reasonably priced. We’ll do the same at the start of July.

How to teach internationally… Finding a job and starting the paperwork.

As I said previously, our first international teaching job came about more by luck than by judgement. I was already looking on TES Jobs for positions in the UK and one evening, feeling particularly fed up, I clicked on the international section out of curiosity. Had things been better at home, I think it would have stayed in the wishful thinking pile. Alongside our favourite long distance car journey game of ‘what would you do if you won the lottery!’

As it was, China seemed like the perfect option so I applied. Of course I wouldn’t actually get the job. We wouldn’t really go! It just provided us with an escape plan, a secret escape plan. We dreamed of the salary, the saving opportunities, the travel opportunities and went about our Christmas holidays as usual.

Of course, I was then invited for a Skype interview. I was terrified.

It turns out that SLT in international schools are indeed pretty normal human beings. And that aside from internet connection issues and time zone differences, Skype interviews are kind of ok. If you have internet connection issues, which is quite likely if one of you is in China, then it’s awful as I would later find out, but that first chat was fine.

It is standard to have a couple of Skype interviews, possibly one with an SLT member and one with the relevant HoD. Then, if the school is interviewing at a recruitment event you might then be invited for a face to face meeting. This is what happened to me. I enjoyed my day trip to London and although the interview was tough in places I did well. I received a life changing phone call a day later and that was that. We had agreed to move to China!

After signing initial contracts, I was emailed a very comprehensive document called the New Staff Onboarding Checklist. It seemed scary to me and involved collecting a variety of documents from police checks to legalised copies of every certificate I’d ever been given. I needed to pay for letters from the doctor for each of us stating we were fit to work overseas and we began to investigate additional vaccinations that might be sensible.

All in all the collection of documents was time consuming and expensive. But the school did provide us with the information we needed and the checklist was helpful.

Trying to figure out the visa requirements for China was a nightmare. We tried to find guidance online and failed, so we always said we would write our own guidance to share with others in the same situation. After living in China for almost 2 years, I think I understand why the guidance doesn’t exist. It would be outdated almost immediately, as the goalposts move so often and without warning. The one tip that we did read about which paid off was to send our visa applications by post to the office in Edinburgh where it was supposed to be a quicker turn around. We’ll never know if that is actually true but we’ve found them to be very helpful.

Once all of the paperwork was sorted, it was time to tackle what my mom and I came to call The Big Move. How would we decide what to sell, what to give away, what to take and how to get it there?

 

How to teach internationally… Deciding to go.

In January 2015, I found out I had a job in Shanghai and would, therefore, be moving my family of four out of our routine lives in the UK to live in the most populated city in the world. I actually applied for the job on a whim. It was a case of ‘how can we get out of the UK?’ and then I saw the job advert. We didn’t have a bad life in the UK. We are lucky enough to have a very supportive family who were always helping us out, whether with childcare or money. The problem started with Mr Chadd’s NQT year. Thinking of words to describe how difficult it was for him or how much of a terrible impact it had on our family life is hard. Let’s try…. he went to work early, came home late, worked into the night (every night) and all day on a Sunday. He marked and he marked and he marked some more. And then he was told his marking wasn’t good enough, or there wasn’t enough of it or it needed to be in a different colour. He was taking photos of work done as a class or on whiteboards and painstakingly sticking them into the books to prove that the children had done work that lesson. He was writing in their books when they were absent so SLT would have an explanation for the missing work. He was teaching a Thai boy English, he was monitoring and providing vital support for several children who has serious issues at home. He was constantly sending down hexagons (yes! Sending down hexagons!!) to call for help to stop a particularly troubled young boy becoming violent. More than once Mr Chadd became a human shield as children we moved out of his classroom and the situation diffused. Mr Chadd lost weight and became depressed. Our family life suffered and our marriage was essentially put on hold.

Somehow amid all this chaos he began to enjoy the occasional lesson. He was hugely inspired by several literacy strategies that I’ll let him explain because I’ll no doubt get it wrong. He developed as a maths teacher and his students made excellent progress. Was this progress the result of the hours spent marking? Or was it that these children, some of whom desperately needed a strong father like figure in their lives, simply adored him and worked really hard every day. He developed positive relationships with the kids and the parents. He really cared about the well-being of his class but he had to make sacrifices in his own well-being to provide the care they so needed.

I was coasting. Being part time I was able to spend time with our children, with other mothers with pre-schoolers and I was able to be a part-time housewife. The other side of my life saw me working at the school where I’d completed my NQT year. A school where I had some friends but largely kept myself to myself.  I was frustrated by decisions made that I had no control over and felt like I spent a lot of time fighting for working conditions I believed were fair. I loved spending that time with my own children but something was not sitting right. I was unhappy at school, I was unhappy at home and on top of everything else we had absolutely no money.

We have never overspent. We have always been careful with money, calculating and budgeting down to the last penny. We even allocated a ‘fun fund’ to allow us to eat out or get a takeaway at the weekends.  We didn’t buy clothes, no gym memberships and I would often cut my own hair. And still we were building up debt. As I said we have an amazing family and they always helped us. It couldn’t go on though…

I don’t think I believed it was real until I saw the visa stuck into my passport. However, once we knew we were (probably) going, I started to prepare the kids and we showed them YouTube videos of the city. They couldn’t wait to see the skyline with their own eyes and enjoyed looking at photos of the other students in their school uniforms too. We were keen to know where we would be living and googled for hours and hours to find out more information. We found it really frustrating that we couldn’t find much. I think I was so busy preparing for the move by selling or moving all of our belongings that I didn’t get the time to get too frustrated but we have been saying for 18 months now that we should share our experiences online to perhaps help others in the same position.

So that’s the plan folks. Over the next couple of weeks I will try to describe our move to Shanghai. What did we decide to take? Where do we live? How have we coped with the culture shock and language barrier?

If you have any questions please do ask.