An Unexpected Relocation

Or, How We Ended Up in Africa

It’s been a while since our last update. Partly that was the result of a long (and utterly enjoyable) disconnection from the Internet during most of our summer travels. And partly—mostly, even—it was the sudden need for me (Tom) to find a new job at a different school. Why?

Those who are familiar with the iconically 90s Ethan Hawke/Winona Ryder slacker film Reality Bites might recognize this, which neatly explains the gist of it:

Tom dares to ask the question: Are employee visa renewals subsized?

The answer, tragically: no.

For those who don’t know the film:

I’ll admit to a perhaps not entirely appropriate burst of schadenfreude when, 3 weeks after my May 30 termination, the results from the annual IGCSE Checkpoint Exam (an externally graded assessment at the end of grade 8) arrived: Students received an average score of “Outstanding” (42/50) in English. Not only was that the highest score in the school’s history, it was also 16% higher than the average score for international schools worldwide. And just a few weeks after that, in the Polish National Exams, students received an average score of 97% in English—which the school eagerly shared on their Facebook page.

It’s obvious to any good teacher that exam results are a very limited measure of student growth, and are no kind of reliable measure of how effective the teacher has been. But still… I know that. You know that. Every teacher who belongs in any classroom anywhere knows that. But test scores matter A LOT to my boss, who (like most schools) uses them as a marketing tool to attract parents, who quite understandably equate good exam scores with good education. So I wasn’t entirely sad that the school’s owner would just maybe have to answer questions from parents about why the English teacher who had helped students achieve such excellent results wasn’t going to be teaching there next year…

OK, so after our May 30 meeting I was suddenly launched on a new job search. NOT the ideal time to find a new teaching job, so I was in a flurry of updating my CV, contacting references, and renewing my subscriptions to various international teacher job websites—here are some good ones if you’re a teacher and want to try international teaching for yourself: Schrole, ISS, TIE, and Teacher Horizons—all while continuing to plan and teach my lessons. And, I’ll admit, binge-watching the new “All Creatures Great and Small” series, all 3 seasons—a nice preview of what we’d see during our Coast to Coast Walk (more on that later) when we passed through the Yorkshire Dales—while Cathy was in the U.S. for much of May-June.

A further complicating factor was that Cathy and I had booked our summer travel plans way back in February—extensive travel plans. A quick preview: Cathy would be joined by two good friends for a 10-day tour of central Europe while I travelled home for my mom’s 87th birthday, and a week-long sailing trip to Canada. Then I’d return to Poland where we’d fly together to the UK for the next few weeks—a 6-day rowing/camping trip in a traditional wooden Thames skiff from (near) Oxford to (near) London on the River Thames, from where we’d meet my youngest sister (but still older than me, let’s remember!), Mary, for a two-week walk across England, from the Irish Sea in the west to the North Sea in the east, along the Wainright Coast to Coast Path.

A quick preview of our time in the UK—rowing the Thames:

You might be forgiven for thinking Cathy is simply lounging around in the passenger seat while I do all the work. But in reality, she is steering the boat with a couple of lines attached to the tiller. AND lounging around while I do MOST of the work.

Not just rowing, but camping aboard out little boat as well—just my thing, but perhaps pushing Cathy a little bit beyond her comfort zone. To her great credit, she was completely uncomplaining about it all, and even showed traces of enthusiasm from time to time.

And then the walk across northern England, from the Irish Sea:

To the North Sea:

So, I had to find a way to fit that all in, working around what I hoped would be a long string of job interviews with all the wonderful schools eager to hire me.

Plan A: Get a job teaching at one of the other international schools in Wrocław, allowing us to stay in our apartment, causing minimal disruption. This looked like a real possibility after a promising first interview.

Plan B: Get a job teaching in Berlin, taking a 1-year maternity cover. Great interview—they offered me the job, and then realized that they’d be unable to get me a work permit/visa with only a temporary position.

Plan C: Get a job teaching elsewhere in Germany. Again, great interview. But, they weren’t able to finalize an offer before I had to set off on my sailing trip.

Plan D: Get a job teaching in Chile. Invited to interviews at 2 schools there. Same problem as Plan C. Apparently, schools do a LOT more late hiring than I expected. And their “late” is MUCH later than I thought it would be.

Plan E (are we really on E already?): Get a job teaching in Wisconsin. I had an interview at Southern Door County—and (a real stroke of luck) met a retired teacher and his wife (while conducting a Zoom interview with my Plan F school at the library in Sturgeon Bay) who wanted to rent us their house while they wintered in Arizona. The school went so far as to offer me the job, but we really preferred to stay abroad a little longer.

So, Plan F: Casablanca.

Now, it’s not “Plan F” because it’s the worst option! It’s just the timing of things. I was actually pursuing Plans A-F simultaneously, and I think we’d have been happy with any of them. But as it turns out, the school I interviewed with in Casablanca was able to present me with a contract in early July, before I went off sailing. That was crucial, because we had to know whether we’d have to empty our apartment and move on, or not—Cathy would have very limited time to do all that, while I would have to rush off to start my new job and wait for her to catch up later. A very unfair division of labor, but there didn’t seem to be any way around putting Cathy in charge of handling the bulk of our relocation tasks.

And in a predictably ironic twist, a week or two after accepting the job in Casablanca, I got offered a teaching position at a different school in Wrocław after all… Too late, as it turned out. But it would have saved Cathy a LOT of trouble in packing up our entire apartment and somehow transporting about 8 huge suitcases to either our new place in Casablanca, or back to the U.S. to take over yet more of our family’s basements and attics. (Thanks, Christine! Thanks, Mary!)

Thanks, too, for our friends in Wrocław who helped lug multiple trips of luggage to the Wrocław Port Lotniczny (Port Lot-NEETCH-nih)—airport—and even stowed some of it for a while in their homes, and delivered it to Cathy when she returned to Wrocław for a second luggage-schlepping trip. Thanks, Kasia, Jeremy, and Alex!

And so, here we are. We might need a new title for our blog…