Notes from the General Manager

The 7 (billion) signs of ageing!

 

 by Diane Jacoutot

 

This coming month the world will welcome its 7 billionth child. That's 7,000,000,000 people alive right now! To put this in perspective, when I was born, there was less than half that number .... and I know what you are thinking and no, I'm not THAT old. We had quite a bit of fun with the BBC birth number calculator here in the office.   I have to admit that realising the world population has more than doubled in my lifetime did make me feel a bit ancient. How could the world population have doubled while I wasn't looking and have I been around that long?

 

Age is a blessing and a curse on the international circuit. It's a blessing because schools usually want experienced and stable teachers. They want professionals who won't spend their evenings clubbing and spend their mornings with a hangover. But at the same time -this is the curse part- they don't want tired teachers because frankly teaching really takes it out of you (I realise I'm preaching to the choir here) and teaching in a foreign country takes a lot of resilience especially at first. So sometimes schools come to us and they say "we want young teachers!". And no, it's not illegal for them to say this in their country as laws against ageism are few and far between, and enforced laws against ageism are even fewer and farther between.   But we know what they really mean is "I want someone who is energetic, resilient and open minded".. which is of course what we aim to deliver. 

 

Now one of the dirty little secrets about international teaching is that quite a few countries have age related work visa restrictions. They are not the rules of our countries - but the rules of foreign countries which they are free to make. In many cases you cannot get a visa after you hit 60, which makes schools nervous at about 55, and in other cases such as the UAE, the visa becomes twice as expensive and not as easily renewed.  Among the countries with age restrictions are the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Brunei, Indonesia and parts of China. This makes many people indignant (including me) but then again New Zealand has an age limit on immigration at 55 for a Talent Visa, and up until this year in the UK there was a mandatory retirement age of 62. So it appears that many of us are guilty of the same. 

 

There are countries with no published age limit, but yet they turn away older teachers when they apply for a visa (these ones are irritating because teachers will sometimes not believe us since it's not written anywhere and sometimes it depends on the particular school that's asking!), and there are countries with truly no age limit, many of which are in Africa and Europe. 

 

It's a minefield out there and schools are often stuck in the middle. They want experienced, professional and stable teachers, but they are often blocked from hiring them.  Luckily at Teachanywhere we can give you a steer on which countries and which schools are more worth your time if you are a more mature teacher, and my main advice would be to be as flexible as you can be in choice of country. I find that teachers often get fixated on a particular country and if that country has an issue with age, then you often have no choices at all. 

 

So here's to Baby 7 Billion. And to his or her many teachers!

Notes from the General Manager

All Change by Diane Jacoutot

As you have no doubt heard, Colonel Gaddafi has been captured and killed. Following Mubarak in Egypt, Hussein in Iraq- it’s clearly not a very good time to be a megalomaniac dictator of an oil rich nation.  All the while, an historic prisoner exchange has been quietly going on between Palestine and Israel. We can all hope that this all might be the start of something good.

It’s human nature to compartmentalise and to categorise – to put things in boxes. Scientists believe this skill is what made us so biologically successful – these plants are good when you are sick, this area has lots of deer in the winter and so forth. Categorisation provides a mental shortcut which has allowed us to leapfrog over other species.   I find that we also think of our lives as a series of stops and starts in little discrete categorised boxes labelled “beginning” and “end”- The ending of one job, the setting of the sun or a break in the weather bringing on a sunny afternoon... with change happening only during those brief transitions.

But in reality change is happening all around us, every day at every second. If you look at a satellite photo of the earth you’ll notice that it’s a swirling mass of change – everywhere at every point in time. All the change might lead up to something finally noticeable to us– the toppling of a dictator, the start of a new job, or a clap of thunder, but in fact, it was all the little steps along the way that really made it happen.  Everything around us, including ourselves, is changing and growing constantly at a rate that’s usually too slow to notice until something finally startles us out of our reverie.

Teachers who are thinking about going abroad need to remember this. I find teachers often feel a sense of panic as the flight date arrives, as if they cannot remember all the little steps that happened to get them to that particular jetway – a longing for change and adventure, a frustration with their current job, a cold and dark night spent thinking about how warm it might be in Thailand right now.. all of these small steps had much more to do with the impending change than did getting a plane ticket in your email inbox from your eager new school.  Change is inevitable, and the end of one thing overlaps with the beginning of another but in a way that’s more like a relay race baton hand off with both racers running side by side than it is anything else.  It’s just that we suddenly wake up when the baton hits our hand even though we’ve been running the whole time.

So let’s raise a coffee mug or tea cup (I am in England after all) to change!  And to hoping that the particular changes in the news, as well as the changes you are making right now by subscribing to this job mailer (and taking the time to read my notes!) will lead, eventually, to something really great.