How I Returned to Sanity After a Long Detour

This blog is primarily for all of my friends back in New York, and my family all over the United States. I have created it to serve as a record of my time teaching English as a Second Language in Taiwan, which will begin in a litte over a week! For anyone else who has stumbled upon my page, you are more than welcome to read it.

For those of you who may be strangers to me, a little about me: I am 26, male, of medium height and more than medium weight (never mind how much more than medium precisely), and have had more than my share of professional ups and downs (well, more downs than ups) in recent years. Those facts are well known to all of my friends and family. Oh, that, and I call myself J.R. Just so you know.

I decided to teach English in Taiwan for a number of reasons, the most pressing being that, through no fault of my own, I have been out of work since April of last year. I won't detail here everything that has happened in the past year, except to say that I was dealing with major depression during that time and so made some foolish decisions about what to pursue. That said, I encountered no end of unprofessional people in my quest to find work in New York, first in field of financial advising, then in public relations, all resulting in nothing.

In April, after having been laid off from a part-time position I was hired for just five weeks previous, I was doing some odd writing gigs I found through Craigslist, which involved some library research. During this research, I stumbled upon an ad for one of the various schools that train people to go teach English abroad. Now, a friend of mine, currently in Korea, has been doing this since graduation and had nothing but good things to say about it.

When I first heard through the grapevine that this is what she had chosen to do, I was gobsmacked and thought she had gone mad. But as my own career travails unfolded over the next three years, I realized she had made the sanest decision of anyone I knew. She was not putting in 60-hour weeks in order to make rich people she had never met even richer. She was not giving up her soul for the sake of an asinine boss who barely remembered her name. She was not struggling to pay $800 a month in rent on a room in New York City. She came to visit me in late 2005, happier than I could ever have imagined being in what I was doing then.

So...having stumbled upon this ad, recollecting my friend's good fortune in securing a position in Korea, and realizing I had nothing better on the table, I decided that teaching English abroad was worth seriously looking into. I found out about a course called CELTA, the most widely recognized certificate program in ESL teaching, applied to the local CELTA course here in New York, and was accepted. Thus my adventure began.

The next step was figuring out where I wanted to go. I was initially attracted to Hong Kong, for two main reasons: first, that it was a large city, a world city, much like New York; and second, that wages there were high. But as I investigated further, I realized that finding a position there would be a lot harder than finding one in Taiwan, which had similarly high demand for ESL teachers. So I started looking into Taiwan.