Jeff and I have accepted contracts at an international school in Mongolia (Located between China and Russia)! We’ll be teaching our subject areas – Jeff is teaching math, grades 7 to 10 (ish, we’re still not entirely sure), and I’ll most likely be teaching grade 1. One of the best things about this school is that it teaches the Ontario curriculum! When we get back to Ontario we’ll have had experience working with the curriculum and some of the textbooks – this is pretty cool (and rare)!
We’ve been working with a recruiter since February, applying to jobs and hoping to get ourselves employed by September. Our recruiter suggested that we look at jobs in the Middle East. She said that since we have such little experience that we would likely find jobs there since the international school industry is exploding. She originally suggested Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Later on she informed us that there is too much competition in those areas and that we should look to Kuwait or Qatar since we’ve only been teaching for a year, and because it’s ESL it doesn’t count towards anything! Qatar I was okay with, but Kuwait is just a bit too close to Iraq for me! So we applied, and waited. We emailed and tried to get things moving… but not much came out of that situation. If they had told us straight up that they couldn’t place us I would have been fine, we could have moved on and found our own jobs or anther recruiter. I was a bit disappointed that they seemed to have dumped us!
So, as we were dealing with the recruiter (or lack of recruiter… they were SO attentive in the beginning, but seemed to fall apart after a while…) we talked to people. It ended up that a close family friend’s daughter had just been offered a job at a school in Mongolia. My mom got some basic information from Megan (the daughter) and sent along Megan’s email address too. After a few emails back and forth with Megan we decided to apply to the same school where she had just accepted a job. We applied directly to the school. Our contact was interested in interviewing us, but wanted to make it soon – within the next 24 hours! He had already interviewed some other people who needed to know if they were being offered the job. They had received job offers from a different school and wanted to know if they from the school in Mongolia before they responded to the other job offers. (Does this make sense? It sounds confusing… sorry!)
We ended up having an interview on Tuesday night, we had contacted the school on Sunday. We spoke with the school contact (who is in Ontario) at 9pm (it was 8am for him…) He offered us jobs at the end of the interview. A day later we accepted.
So, we’re off to Mongolia. We’re excited! The only thing I’m not excited about is the fact that Ulaanbaatar (the capital city, where we’ll be living) is the capital city that records the coldest average temperatures in the world. I am going to freeze. I’m hoping there will be lots of yarn so I can knit my self warm! Mongolia will definitely be a change from Seoul. It boasts 2 million people – the whole country! Half the population lives in Ulaanbaatar. Seoul has a population of 14 million... more if you count the city suburbs. It will definitely be a change, but one that I are really looking forward to!
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