Reading Tea Leaves

Yesterday, I started my stint as a cover teacher in Taipei, which I hope will eventually lead to a more permanent position as a "floating" or "DTE' teacher--in Shane parlance, teachers who work in Taipei for schools that are not franchises but rather directly owned and operated by Shane. I had two classes--a kindergarten class and a 14-year-old private student to whom I had the chance to explain the third conditional ("if you had...I would have", etc).

Oh...and my turn as Santa Claus went about as I expected. My main duty was to draw names out of a box for a raffle and let the winners be photographed sitting on me knee. Most of these kids were really too old for sitting on a grown-up's knee, but I played along.

It's weird being in this sort of limbo state with Shane. The one thing I hate the most about job hunting is the way that it so often forces you to try to read tea leaves. What does this statement mean? Are they interested or giving me the brush-off?

In this case, I think it's clear Shane wants to do the right thing by me, one way or another. But I know this only because my recruiter, Mitch Gordon, has told me so, from conversations he has had with Shane management that they would not have with me. But it's not so clear to me what that means, to their way of thinking.

It's also unclear to me how long they are willing to let this situation go on. I will try not to be impatient--something I've never been especially good at--but this kind of temporary cover situation can't go on forever, and I think both they and I know it. I have to fly out again by January 8th, so I should definitely talk to Jay about this tomorrow when I go back for my second day of cover work. I would be willing to let them have until February to decide, but sooner or later, I need to make other plans and try to cover my bases.

At least in this field, there is no shortage of opportunities. Dave's ESL Cafe, the biggest clearinghouse of ESL-related information on the Web, has no end of jobs available all over the world, with especially large job boards for China and Korea. I see advertisements all the time for Russia and Brazil that are tempting. Wages are not that high in Brazil, and from what I gather, Brazil's visa system is even more convoluted than Taiwan's. Russia does not pay especially well, but the ads I see all mention a large housing allowance on top of the wages, which might make the situation almost as good as Taiwan. And I think I would be more interested in Russia.

We'll see where all of this goes.