Some People Say We’re Crazy
It’s a small percentage of people who pick up and go to a foreign country to live and work as English teachers. It’s an even smaller percentage that decide to make the move permanent.
What kind of people are we?
I’ve met a lot of people who have come through Mexico to teach. I’ve met many more online teaching in just about every country on the planet. While everyone has their reasons for wanting to globetrot, there are some very common motivations.
I’d say the biggest group of people teaching abroad plan to do so for no more than one year. Fresh out of college or university, teaching abroad is seen as a good way to gain some world experience and earn money to pay off student debt. Korea and Japan seem to be the top locations for this, though Mexico gets its share too.
There’s also a large number of people in the 25-33 age range. That would have been me several years ago, arriving in Mexico. Curious group. Most seem not to have found the career they wanted. How can you drop off the career ladder during the most important years? I guess it depends on what you’ve studied. I meet a lot of journalists, social workers, ESL teachers, and academic drifters. Philosophy and psych majors…not much work in those fields I suppose.
A lot of people seem to be in transition. Finished a bachelor’s degree and unsure on what’s next. Many of the people I’ve met teaching spent their year or so here and then went back home to continue teaching or to study in another field.
The arts seems also to be a common entry point to teaching abroad. Some teachers in Mexico City are working, interning, or volunteering with museums and galleries and teaching on the side.
Oddballs…
Mexico – and China I hear – also gets a lot of kooks. While it’s not overly common (and perhaps no more common than in any other field back home), teaching abroad attracts its share of alcoholics, fugitives, and escape artists. I’ve had the misfortune to meet and work with two such interesting and bedeviled folk.
Some people, all guys of course, go abroad to teach to sleep with as many women as possible. I guess they understood ‘go a-broad’ differently. Funny…such TEFL cowboys as I like to call them seem the happiest. Perhaps it’s because they have only one goal and the easy means to accomplish it. More power to em.
Who am I missing?
Tags: General Mexico Info, Guy's Corner, people, teachers, tefl
guy
I used to have the same feelings about this. I’ve written lots about the economic forces involved in moving educated people across borders. As true as this is, there is a dynamic that creates a social definition of the people involved. I think this is what you’re getting at. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of early modern literature and one of things that strikes me about it is the way in which authors are described by jobs they have held. Poets in particular are often referred to as “having been” followed by a long list of occupations, as if this is somehow a qualification or equivalent of experience. I think there are increasing numbers of people, including employers, who don’t view life in these terms. There is a move toward interpreting people in terms of things they have done, which may include work but also other things. What set the Beats apart, even from other writers of that time, was their definition of themselves in these terms – having been to India, etc – rather than just having worked as a wide range of the new jobs that modernization and urbanization had created. I honestly don’t believe there are a greater number of kooks with us than among those with a more conventional definition of achievement. They may just be that it’s more visible because there are fewer of us.
You have a really nice blog here, just wondered where you got the theme.