Laura's earlier job logs

• Laura's fourth job log: This is the plan
• Laura's third job log: Year of the dog and kitten
• Laura's second blog: If you can't do
• Laura's first blog: After years abroad, it could be time to take some decisions

This is the plan

(8/3/06)

Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last three and a half years trying to escape the inevitable getting-a-proper-job malarkey, I do think about getting myself a real job. I think about it all the time.

In fact, I would go so far as to say I’m an obsessive life-planner. I know the starting salary of newly qualified teachers, all about working as a qualified teacher in international schools abroad, I know the following universities websites like the back of my hand: Newcastle, Northumbria at Newcastle, York, Manchester, Leeds, Sunderland, Durham and Sussex. I know all about postgraduate funding and Career Development Loans, about converting my degree to a law degree, about the Local Government Graduate Scheme (NGDP), about the Civil Service fast-track programme and, bizarrely for me, about the National Audit Office graduate programme.

More worryingly, I’m also familiar with the prices of farm houses all over Europe; I have daydreamed about owning a little language school in a multitude of countries, perhaps buying a campsite in France and reliving my childhood on a permanent basis.

Oh, and I also have a wonderful vision of what my life would be like if I were a best-selling novelist – it’s remarkably unextravagant, I’d pretty much just lounge around all day, upgrade my teabags from Tesco Premium to PG Tips, and perhaps install a few runs in the back garden for homeless cats (you can do that, you know – I’ve looked into it).

At my most self-indulgent, I have even daydreamed about having an orphanage of loving, needy kids somewhere hot. (I’m aware of how terribly wrong it is to be so nauseatingly self-aggrandising, even if it is in a daydream, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.)

Six months to go

Anyway, the last two weeks, my life-planning obsession has been even more debilitating, to the point where I feel very anti-teaching and, well, downright anti-children too. I think this is down to a few things. Firstly, after having a week off, I’ve remembered what it’s like to not have the constant activity of children banging in my head, and secondly it’s now official that I’m leaving Taiwan in six months time. I haven’t got the airfare yet, but I do have Charlie’s rabies test results which means that six months from February 15, I’m officially free to leave the country with Charlie in tow (I know all about the UK government’s Pet Travel Scheme too, so if anyone ever needs any advice on international pet travel, just drop me a line).

This official six-months-to-go landmark has got me thinking more realistically about what I’m going to do when I get back. I’m going to be in competition with all the new and recent graduates and unless I do some kind of course, the return to the call centre is pretty much inevitable.

So, after trailing through lots of courses, I’ve narrowed down my options to two ideas: despite my utter lack of experience, I could apply for a journalism course, or alternatively, I could apply for a MA in Social Justice and Society at the University of Northumbria.

The obvious advantage of doing a journalism course is that it’s actually heading towards a career, and I think I’d like to be a journalist. But the ‘I think…’ bit of that sentence is likely to be a problem. I don’t really have a good understanding of what a journalist’s life is actually like: I come from a family of teachers and my friends’ parents do stuff in schools or universities or hospitals so media role models aren’t exactly thick on the ground. Even if I knew what to expect, if the gaping holes on my CV didn’t stop me from getting onto the course in the first place, I know that it’s a very competitive career, that you need to start at the bottom and work your way up and that you need to be very driven to succeed. I’m not sure that I have enough faith in myself to be able to hack all that.

The advantage of doing the MA is that I know I would find it really interesting, I’d be getting back onto the graduate opportunities ladder and keeping my career options open. The big disadvantage is that I could be just as clueless as to what I want to do with my life when I finish the course as I am now, which may lead to me fleeing the country again.

Hmmm, choices, choices. Well in all honesty, while I’m very passionate about both ideas now, and spend all my scooter travel time imagining myself in various student-life scenarios, or gaining insight into the highly successful-in-something thirty-year-old me, neither of these ideas are likely to last that long anyway.

As the long list of life-plan rejects can verify, I’m terribly flippant with my daydreams and all of my deliberating over which option to go for is probably going to lead me down a different path altogether anyway. Well, c’est la vie, as someone French once said.

Year of the dog and kitten

(22/2/06)

Let’s be honest, late January/early February is a fairly hideous time of year: the post-Christmas blues have struck, you’re skint, the weather’s awful, those well-meant New Year’s Resolutions have inevitably amounted to nothing, and the next holiday seems a long, long way off.

But while the Western world is wallowing in guilt, failure and Lemsip, Chinese communities around the world are having a ball as they welcome in their new year: As of January 29th 2006, the Rooster has been ousted by the Dog.

Chinese New Year is a beloved time of year for both the Taiwanese and Foreign community here in Taiwan. For the Taiwanese, it’s a very family-orientated holiday: there’s a mass exodus out of the cities to visit parents and grandparents, fire crackers line the streets and are set off throughout the day and night to ward away bad luck, the kids get red envelopes that contain lucky money, they also get treated to new clothes. For the foreigners, it means a chance to lie on a beach in Thailand or Vietnam, or finances failing, to get out of the city and visit the beach resorts or mountains in Taiwan.

Last Chinese New Year, I went to Kenting (a beach resort in the south of Taiwan) with my boyfriend and some friends. We were blessed with weather beautiful enough for me to get respectably burnt, we went out for meals and drinks, explored the spectacular scenery by scooter (I don’t do hiking) and basically had a fantastic time.

This Chinese New Year, I was to be found alone in my flat. Well, not entirely alone – I had my kitten for company. Yes, while everyone I know fled Taichung (including my boyfriend), I was left holding the kitten.

Not being one to wallow in self-pity all that often, I figured that some time alone was not such a bad thing. I could use up all those extra hours to come up with a viable life-plan - I could scour the internet for ideas, speak to my parents for advice, e-mail friends for a bit of inspiration. Or, alternatively, I could sit in front of the TV and watch shameful amounts of awful films (erm, The Family Man, The Parent Trap, Legally Blond 1 AND 2…). I could also take a few too many sneaky peaks at cat rescue websites in England and pick out imaginary feline friends for my Charlie. Hmmmmm, I wonder which option I took.

And now I’m back at work, the waste of that precious week off is beginning to haunt me. We don’t have another holiday due for five and a half months (not that I’m counting). My students are full to the brim with all the fun things they did with their families, they’re flashing their photos around and bouncing off the walls with happy memories. My work colleagues are looking radiant with their real tans from real beaches. They’re full of ‘Oh Thailand was so amazing blah blah blah’, while I just sit looking slightly orange in my San Tropez glow. I smile enthusiastically, bearing the hefty responsibility of pet-ownership with quiet nobility.

If you can't do

(8/2/06)

There’s a saying that goes: ‘If you can’t do, teach. If you can’t teach, teach EFL.’ Charming! How dare anyone suggest that the TEFL-ing world attracts the dregs of the working-age population. It’s simply not true!

So what if half the TEFL-ers in Taiwan have bought their degree certificates from markets in Bangkok – that doesn’t mean anything! What use is a teaching qualification when you can quite easily bluff your way into a decent job based purely on your highly-prized passport? Of course we deserve to be paid double what our very experienced Taiwanese co-teachers receive – we’re native speakers, for God’s sake!

Well, I may not spend my days working my ass off in an office, my version of networking may be sharing song lyrics with a friend of a friend of a friend, I might not have a work-mobile or even a nice pair of flexible-use black trousers. But, I certainly ‘do’. In fact, all I ever do is do and do and do.

A day in the life...

By 7am my kitten Charlie has been chewing my hair and nibbling my nose for about an hour. So, I finally accept that I’m not asleep anymore and haul myself out of bed. I’m tired and I feel like hell.

I spend the next hour or so chasing Charlie around the flat whilst eating toast, splattering a bit of make-up on my pasty face, digging around for some fairly clean clothes and all the rest of it. I leave my flat at around 8.20, hop onto my little red scooter and weave my way through the mayhem of Taiwanese traffic. I feel like hell.

I get to school about 8.40. There are five foreign teachers at my school, and before we go to class, we all sit round our table, silently guzzling our coffees, teas, diet cokes or red bulls. We murmur variations of the following three comments: ‘Only three days ’til the weekend’, ‘I don’t think I can get through this day’, ‘Do you have any headache tablets?’ I’m comforted by the knowledge that we all feel like hell.

At work

I get to my morning class at about 9.10, and suddenly everything changes. I’m bombarded by 25 kindergarten kids vying for my attention, wanting to show me a picture they’ve drawn, or their new shoes, or to sing me a song, or give me a hug and while I would love to be grumpy for the rest of the day, it’s impossible with all of these teeny little happy people surrounding me. And before I know it, I’m buzzing with adrenalin and endorphins.

OK, OK, that picture was a little too rosy! I’m not always buzzing with adrenalin and endorphins. Sometimes I still feel like hell – in which case I fake happiness: the kids can smell bad moods like grizzly bears can smell fear, and they’ll play up horrendously if they catch so much as a whiff of moodiness.

In my morning class, I do some teaching from text books and we have song, story and show and tell time. All of this, once you’ve got the hang of it, is fairly easy to teach. My school has what they term as a ‘whole-English’ approach to teaching, by which they mean that they don’t just want the kids to be able to produce formulaic sentences out of text books, but to learn to think critically and discover new things in English. Therefore, we also have to teach theme classes, which is basically a project-based approach. We start a new topic every three months (such as food, family, folk toys, water etc). During the first month we follow a curriculum and the last two months, we follow the kids’ interests.

My two co-teachers and I have a meeting every week to discuss what we will do the following week: what vocabulary and sentence patterns the kids will learn, what experiments we can do with them, any suitable art projects they can complete and any field trips we can take them on. We make all the resources from scratch, and needless to say, the theme classes are by far the most challenging and time-consuming aspect of my teaching.

After noon

Come 12 o’clock and I’m driving back to my flat to, um, play with my kitten (well, what can I say? She needs a lot of attention). I’ve got to be teaching again at two, so before I know it, I’m making the twenty-minute suicidal journey back to school.

My afternoons are far more chaotic than my mornings as I teach several different kindergarten classes for half an hour at a time, and I also teach a grade one class. However, we don’t do theme with any of our afternoon classes, so they’re also easier to teach.

I also have some extra prep time in the afternoons, which is spent making flashcards and charts and posters and games and writing reports and marking homework and making homework sheets and millions and millions of other little chores.

By 5.30, I have taught over a hundred kids, sang a gazillion songs, said ‘Wow, look how beautifully so-and-so is sitting/singing/speaking! That’s just fantastic! Well done!’ at least a thousand times (oh yes, Dr. Tanya Byron would be proud of me – I’ve got positive reinforcement coming out of my ears) and I feel totally drained. If I have managed to get everything done, I hop back onto my little red scooter, face the monstrous traffic yet again and head home.

What do I do in the evenings? Play with my kitten of course!

After years abroad, it could be time to take some decisions...

(21/1/06)

1. Leaving uni

University was, for me, like millions of other students, a glorious bubble. A time when my days started with Trisha Goddard and a very leisurely cup of tea, when eleven o’clock lectures seemed immeasurably cruel, when there was always, always someone I could coerce to put down their books (or at least the remote control) and come clothes shopping to, erm, Primark.

Well, at some point in my third year at the University of Manchester, the bubble started to leak and the real world began seeping in and threatened to drown me unless I made some moves to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. So I dutifully traipsed around recruitment fairs, trawled the brochures in the careers library and I even completed a Careers Development course.

I considered my options: train to be a teacher … attempt to get on a graduate recruitment scheme… or, if all else failed, I thought, chuckling to myself at the absolute absurdity of the idea, I could always get a job in a call centre.

2. Sunnier climes: Brighton

In the end, however, I decided I wasn’t quite ready for the grown-up world yet, and set my sights on sunnier climes. So in June 2002 I completed the four-week CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) course at International House Newcastle, with the intention of heading out to Spain the following September. The course was fairly hellish, but I made it out more or less in one piece.

Now, the story should have been fairly straightforward from here on – go to Spain (along with my boyfriend who had also done a CELTA course), get a fab teaching job, have the time of my life, return to the UK a year or so later, get a proper job and carry on with the rest of my life. Well, after spending the remainder of the summer teaching teenagers at an English Summer Camp in Brighton, I stumbled upon a major problem – money. There was no way we would be able to set up in Spain without at least a few hundred in the bank. So, predictably, I ended up eating my words and working in that faithful graduate hell hole – the call centre … for a full nine months.

3. Catching the plane

Somewhere during those long, long months, the Spain plan was side-tracked and my boyfriend and I bought plane tickets to Cambodia. We left the UK in March 2003. The country is crying out for English teachers, so we found jobs pretty much as soon as we were off the plane as and spent the next ten months out there teaching English to adults and teenagers.

It was the most amazing and bizarre experience of my life. The students were generally fantastic, as they really wanted to learn English for their jobs. The pay was surprisingly high, because of the demand for teachers. This high pay set up a weird paradox between the lives of the English teachers and pretty much the rest of the population – while we were able to eat out every night, go to bars on the weekends and pretty much live the high life, we were surrounded by the most horrendous poverty. It was pretty hard to deal with at first, but even harder to deal with was the fact that we actually got used to seeing street kids begging for money or food.

Cambodia is filled with western NGO workers. While I was over there, I seriously considered the option of returning to England, applying for an International Development course and climbing on the NGO ladder. But the fear of committing to anything resembling a career got the better of me, so by the time my ten months were up, I was in pretty much the same position as I had been when I first set off to Cambodia.

4. Back in the UK (briefly)

Well, four months temping in Middlesbrough while living with my mum and dad was enough to get my feet itching again. This time, my boyfriend and I decided on Taiwan.

I had some vague idea that we could go over there for a year to teach kids, save up loads of money and then when I got back, I’d definitely start down that elusive career path in, well, in something interesting and rewarding and well-paid etc etc etc. But by the time we’d bought the tickets, found jobs and paid for a deposit on a flat we’d maxed out the credit cards again, and one year inevitably turned into 18 months.

I’ve been here now for almost two years and I’m not planning on leaving until the summer. I’m really enjoying my life here: I teach English to kids ranging from four years old to eight years old, my school is great, the kids are just fantastic most of the time and the good pay means I can live very comfortably. But I know that I can’t stay in Taiwan forever, and over the next few months I really do need to get myself a plan of action so that when I return to England I don’t end up temping or working in a call centre again.

The next blog will probably be about the joys of teaching the kids how to fold their clothes or wipe their bums or whatever, but soon after that I'll start on the long hard slog of making some decisions and sticking to them. Maybe.

Send your comments, views and experiences to editorial@prospects.ac.uk