Features
The tourist teacher Hedley Willsea looks at the nomadic lifestyle of international educators I spent one summer in Thailand and, as I sat on the beach with nothing more than a cold beer, I began to wonder what life would be like living there. Being based in Moscow with its long winters and heavy traffic, the attraction of Thailand is a real temptation. Later that day, as the sun went down and the smell of after-sun lotion reminded me I was truly on holiday, I picked up a copy of the Bangkok Post. Brighton College was to open a school in Thailand and, in an interview, the headmaster commented: ‘One of the problems in international schools (in Thailand) is that you get teachers who head to Southeast Asia because they want to have a nice two-year holiday and want to enjoy the sunshine in a different culture … We want them to move to our school because they care about teaching’ I saved the newspaper article and as I now re-read the quote, I think it’s an understandable concern for an Spring
Autumn |
| 2016
administrator: the teacher who does a year here and two years there, never being held accountable for his/her students’ exam performance and perhaps not having enough time to embrace the school’s mission statement. But I can’t help feeling it’s also a generalisation which doesn’t do justice to the landscape of international teacher recruitment, of which Thailand is inevitably a part. I left the UK as an English teacher sixteen years ago and my first international school was in Kuwait. Lured by the idea of travel and something different, I intended to give it a go for a year and save some money, with the vague idea of returning home and continuing teaching or finding a new career. Well, fifteen years later I’m still teaching overseas. In that time I’ve worked in four international schools, which averages at around four years per school. In fact, I spent five years in Kuwait, two in Portugal, two in Oman and I’m now into my seventh year in Russia. I was in
39
