Teaching - It'll take you where you wanna be

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Hey all!

So for my first entry I thought I'd give a little blurb about me and see how things go from there.

I'm a Canadian. I earned my undergrad degree here in Ontario and then went to Queensland, Australia for teachers college. I lived in Australia for 2 years. I successfully completed my course in November 2009. I (foolishly) then decided to get my feet wet by attempting to work as a supply teacher in London, UK.

Supply teaching is a horrible business. Or at least, it was for me. The work is unreliable, it's hard to build up a social network becasue you're (almost) always at a different school every day, and you never really get much of a chance to get ahead financially because the sheer number of bank holidays and week long term breaks means that once you get ahead, you spend it all during the down time. Now to be fair, I have friends who landed long term contracts there (like maternity leaves, etc) and they didn't experience quite so much stress. And to be fair, I didn't either. Not unless you count coming back $1000 CAD further into a $45k+ hole stressful. (Student loans are evil.) I only lasted 5 months there (February - June). Which was silly again. The agency that recruited me told me that there'd be HEAPS of work for me for the second term... Failing to mention a whole heap of little conditions that meant I'd have a hard time getting work at all, let alone the work I wanted. (If you're thinking about doing some secondary supply teaching in London, only go in September. Send me a message and/or leave a comment if you want to know more... I don't particularly feel like ranting any further on this one.)

Other than the lack of steady work, London was fantastic and I had a great time. I did a fair bit of traveling (which I know I shouldn't've done if saving money was my goal) and even got to catch up with some extended family up in Scotland. Over all, fantastic experience - if not especially lucrative.

Now I'm off to Sharja, UAE to teach Humanities at a school there. Currently though I'm still jumping through all the hoops to get that side of things sorted out. Authentication/Attestation of my degrees, couriering everything to all parties involved and other such non-sense. Plus they want 18 passport photos. 18! Nobody seems to be able to tell me what it is they do with them all. Apparently if I were going to other countries in the Middle East, they can want as high as 40!

And that's where I"m at for now. As my departure date grows closer (which I don't exactly know when that is yet either...) I'll be posting more (or less) about my adventures.

Tootle pip!
Katie Mac

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