Update

Through the magic of Facebook memories, this delightfully hilarious blog appeared on my newsfeed this afternoon and I was drenched in nostalgia as I remembered some of these stories from my first year of teaching. So much has changed since then! A few months after my last post I was offered a full time position teaching Kindergarten and twelve months after that I applied for a permanent position and was successful. I jumped through a million hoops to get the position, which I will have to detail in another post but the bottom line was that it was all completely mad and stressful. At the same time, I went through an enormous personal upheaval that saw my ten year relationship with my fiancee come to an end. More madness and more stress.

I decided to be crazy, brave, wild and/or spontaneous, sell everything I owned and move to Thailand. I felt compelled to finish up 2014 with my lovely Grade 1 kids and so moved to Bangkok just before Christmas. I arrived with no job, no apartment and a whole lotta devil-may-care attitude. I found a job within a month at a great family-style International Preschool in the heart of Bangkok city and signed an 18 month contract. I will have to share some memories of this school and the kids that I taught; I learnt so much about myself as a teacher and was introduced to a completely new breed of parent - the expats!

Although I loved this school, with my experience and qualifications I knew that I could be earning a lot more at a big International school and financial security had become a priority since I had fallen pregnant. I waddled into an interview while 38 weeks pregnant and what could have potentially been a 10 minute interview went for nearly 90 minutes as my boss and I discussed all facets of education and learning, my previous teaching experiences and living life abroad. I was offered a job on the spot.

I'm now 6 weeks into my new contract at Berkeley International School in Bangkok, Thailand!

This is my 5th year teaching and I really feel that this is the first year that I truly feel on top of my work. I'm finally able to repeat successful lessons (rather than inventing everything from scratch) and I have to commend my new school for having excellent communication and organisation procedure, so as long as I can click around on my google account each day, I can stay abreast of everything that is going on.

Here's to cracking open the old blog again!