Teacher Exchange milesmac Our Teacher Exchange Blog Teacher Exchange - Our international teacher exchange experience
After crunching numbers, playing with the budget, and discussing the enormity of the undertaking, we (my wife, son and I) have applied for a teacher exchange to Australia for the 2014 calendar year as we were not matched for our 2013 application. This means swapping jobs and homes with a teacher overseas: I work at his/her school, in his/her teaching position, and we live in his/her house. S/he does likewise here in Canada.While our paperwork is submitted and our school board has approved the application, there is still some uncertainty and a wait ahead. The local teacher exchange coordinator compiles applications from here and sends them to her international counterparts. There, they are matched (hopefully) with a teacher seeking an exchange to Canada who has a similar workload and suitable accommodations.
This blog, for us, serves a few purposes:
- a venue for recording our experiences; whether anyone actually reads it or not, journaling is a good way to process stuff that needs processing
- communicating to friends and family some general updates
- a resource for others considering an international teaching exchange – we have appreciated reading other exchange teacher blogs and gained a broader understanding of the experience to come; this is our contribution to that bank of knowledge
Over the next year, as we continue to prepare, and as news comes in, we’ll share the details here. With any luck, this time next year, we’ll be sharing news about our last minute preparations and travel plans heading off for a year “down under”!