The People You Meet...

Five People you meet...

So this post is another one that is tongue in cheek, but there are some grains of truth in this. Please note that any of the character archetypes I describe do not relate to anyone I know who has elected to follow the path less traveled from the UK and teach abroad - well actually, that's not true, the three people I know personally who went to teach abroad all fall into the adventurer category, which is not a bad thing.

These are the general personality types you seem to find in an international school - if I've missed any out I apologise, please feel free to add them in the comment section.

(Again, please note that any resemblance to actual people in the real world is purely coincidental... honest!)

1: The Adventurer

These are the people who leave the comfortable middle class world of teaching (ha ha!) to have an 'adventure'. They actually account for all ages and family situations, from young and single to married with older children. This group make up a large proportion of the teaching population and are, by their very nature, migratory.

There are variations who go native and live in the same spot for more than one contract round - these become difficult to distinguish from a 'backpacker' or digital nomad. They have a disturbing amount of local knowledge, but this makes them an excellent source of information to those who are new in town. 

The adventurer is looking to find new cultural experiences and is often attracted to the travel hubs of the Middle East and South East Asia. 

True Adventurers may be found in more obscure and remote teaching spots such as Nepal and the 'stans' (Kazakhstan etc). Places that are mostly considered 'off the beaten track'.

The adventurers may or may not return after a period of time, but they tend to have an annoying quantity of photographs to accompany their travels - they also often blog too.

2: The Instagram Influencer

These teachers are either the uber-professional who have their own twitter following and website and post regular teaching and learning updates, or they fall into the second category, which I will expound upon shortly. This first category are the teachers who make us mere mortals feel secretly jealous and inadequate, but whose resources we freely plunder! There are any number of these based in the UK itself (I have no idea when they must sleep, but nevertheless they find time to run a full time web business and teach), but there are also many of them out here in the wider world. They seem to have it all - perfectly pitched lessons, amazing resources and the Conde Nast lifestyle. I, on the other hand, am stealing resources from anywhere and everywhere (frequently from these self-same people) and leaning heavily into over two decades of teaching experience just to get by.

The second category is the Instagram teacher who posts endless travel pictures (Note: I am fully aware of the irony of me writing about this on a blog about travel). These are the truly baffling ones. Whilst I struggle to work out when the first category sleep, it's clear they are teaching. The Instagram teacher in this category never seems to be at school - unless it's a school trip to a tropical island somewhere, a ski resort or an opera house in one of the world's cultural capitals.

These teachers make us jealous in a different way - they seem to have found schools that actually don't demand that they teach or do anything even remotely school related and their holidays seem to occur with astounding frequency and be of unbelievable length. They also seem to be able to afford to travel to remarkable locations all of the time, so heaven knows what the salary for this not working lark is!

Interestingly this particular group have been very quiet of late... wonder why?

3: The Escapee

The Escapee is different from the Runaway (see the following category) in one important aspect - they are loud and proud! Oh yes, they will tell you the horror stories of kids at their schools holding them up at knife/gun point, about the unreasonable demands of SLT who would phone them at 3am demanding to know where the exam analysis presentation or data collection spreadsheet was. 

These poor souls have also escape the doldrums of the UK or wherever they hail from. Places so dull and grey that they nearly crushed these vibrant children of the world into non-existence. They never tire of telling you of how much better their lives are (really???), of how much money they have saved (how???) and how blahblahland has hot and cold running monkeys and a vibrant art scene and such a darling food culture!

These people seemed to really hate where they lived prior to leaving and I feel for them as they seem to have been born into and lived a significant part of their lives in a Mike Leigh film, only without the sense of hope and slapstick comedy that so typifies his oeuvre...

This type of teacher is kidding themselves! They are deeply insecure about their life choices and are desperately trying to convince themselves and the world at large that they were right to choose to move half way round the globe and then to stay there.

 

4: The Runaways

Again there are two basic categories. Category one are like Caine (from Kung Fu not the bible); they have fled because of the situation in their home country. They couldn't stand what education stood for there any more and wanted to work somewhere where students were treated like individuals rather than a series of statistics.

Honestly there is a little of this type of teacher in all of us. Teachers whinge - we do, we are whingers -but that is because we care about what we do. It's important and we don't like when it isn't done properly or can't be done properly because of external factors. The end result of this feeling is probably one of the biggest drivers of teachers exiting the profession, or, in this case, moving abroad.

The second category are those who have fled because they couldn't hack it. Not because they were tired or burned out, but because they just couldn't teach in their home countries - they weren't good enough.

It's a sad fact, but this does appear to be the case in an alarmingly large amount of international schools from what I can tell and have been told. A good school can be a place where you can hone your craft, try our really innovative teaching styles, get your group work practice refined and look carefully at your differentiation. However it can also make you lazy and soft; things you should stay on top of don't really need to be done and the kids will always do well as they are tutored to within an inch of their lives and they are naturally quite hard working and compliant. I have seen examples of lessons where students have spent an entire hour copying from the board or from a textbook and apparently this was standard practice in more than one classroom. I have seen excessive 'chalk and talk', classes that seem engaged, but are merely compliant and the staff are too comfortable (or maybe too uncomfortable) to check to see if real learning is taking place. 

Some staff have maybe fallen into poor habits having been working with 'easy' students for a long time, others definitely started like this and have stayed this way.

It is a salutary lesson for me to remember that I need to stay sharp, keep my skills honed and make sure that anything I do would be good enough to work in the most pressured of UK schools and that I don't fall into the trap of assuming compliance equals learning - because it really does not!

In the category of runaway there also lies a more disturbing subset. The teacher who actually hates kids and hates teaching - sorry to say these rarities do crop up and they are best avoided where you can.

I've had the misfortune to meet some of these in my time in the classroom (fortunately not many) and I've never really worked them out. I honestly don't understand teachers who genuinely don't like kids - why would you stay in teaching if you have to work with a demographic of the population you actively dislike? This seems like madness to me. The thing is the kids know - they aren't stupid and they very quickly pick up that you don't like them and they will, understandably, take this personally and will  be less compliant and more confrontational. Combine this with the fact that this category of teacher seems to delight in telling kids off and using punitive measures and you will see some very unhappy classrooms.

5: The Weirdos

Okay this is a pretty broad and subjective category, but a valid one nonetheless. Now I don't mean that this is that teacher or group of teacher who is a little offbeat or eccentric. I count myself as a little idiosyncratic in many ways, not least of which is my monochromatic dress sense - something which I don't think my parent's have yet worked out is not just a teenage phase. 

No, idiosyncrasies are a feature that actually makes a teacher more distinctive and interesting, I'm talking about downright weirdos. The kind of person who does weird stuff like not make any eye contact with you when talking, asks you a question and then just walks away whilst you're answering or refers to themselves in the third person (I'm reasonably certain that I've met at least one person who has done all three of these things in a single encounter). 

These teachers are often at least half runaway and couldn't cope in either the private or state sector in the UK or wherever they hail from. 

They are the kind of teacher who may decide to abandon the main topic of the lesson and put on a puppet show they have been working on that shows how people are all different. A laudable endeavour no doubt, but not when you are teaching differential calculus to the sixth form...

They are the sort of person who may have a significant other in their lives, but no one has ever seen or met them, despite having worked with them for several years... You know, the sort of person who is an amateur taxidermist and insists on giving you examples of their work - usually based on material they have collected from 'road trips'...

In short they are just a bit off - like the paintings of Disney characters on an ice cream van, they seem normal, but if you look closely they are very slightly off (note: this witticism is based on an original idea... of John Finnemore's).