take a chance, take a chance...

I signed a contract today. I'm going to be staying in HK for the next year at least, and working at an international school teaching ESL to students in Gr. 1-3. I realize that's not much information, but I prefer not to go into too much work-related detail on my blog. If you want more details, email me, and I'll be happy to divulge more information!

Many of you know that I just finished up a degree in teaching science, so this decision might seem a bit surprising (trust me, this is something I asked myself, and was asked about in my interview), but I do have a degree and some experience in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and I realized in the past year or so (through tutorials mainly), that I really enjoy working with kids in this age group. And the icing on the cake, so to speak, is the fact that I'll have some pretty cool colleagues (one in particular comes to mind!;)), not to mention that I'll get to go back to a more normal work schedule (how will I spend my Friday evenings? Not to mention my Saturdays?!). There are other reasons why I'm looking forward to this job as well, but won't list them all here. But one more thing that I will say is that I feel like the school's administration has been willing to take a bit of a risk in hiring me (I say "risk" because of my lack of official elementary experience), and I'm having a hard time not finding that fact extremely touching. I guess at least part of the reason why I'm feeling this way is because over the past few months I've experienced more than my average number of disappointments -- some small, some big, some work-related, some not -- and it just feels great to have someone (to steal a line from a great ABBA karaoke song!) "take a chance on me."