You'll never guess what happened to me....

Soooooo....

I'm not dead! (Point in my favor.)

In the last week I have been actively recruited for a full-time position by not one but two different schools here in Brno. After weeks of running around here and Krakow just trying to get people to talk with me, coupled with the perma-temping feel of the schools I've hooked up with down here, this is freaking awesome.

The options basically boiled down to this: A) work for an indie school run by very nice Czech woman, who actually impressed me with her attitude and knowledge of her clients (as opposed to some of the 'we think they're about intermediate, and they're probably just working from magazine articles'), which would have paid me more per hour for fewer hours per week with an easier class load. Or B) work for a giant, globe-spanning, very respected school, which was only talking to me through a fluke of networking. (They normally don't even bother giving an interview to people who were certified through my program.) Which demands about 50% more time on the clock for about $1500 less per year, not even counting all the extra homework and lesson planning I have to deal with. Bigger classes, too.

I kinda freaked out. The decision felt like a very serious Robert Frost “Path Less Traveled By” kinda moment. For one thing 10 months contract (for either of these places) is pretty intimidating. I haven't actually planned my future that far ahead since I was in college. (This adventure doesn't count, I had originally planned to be out of the country in 9 months.) Another is that I really wasn't planning to work really hard while I was over here, but then again I also wanted to do this to rehab the ol' college application image. I mean I had to bust my keister for six months to just hop the Atlantic, do I really wanna keep that schedule? Option A is easy and puts plenty of money in my pocket. Option B requires a ton of work, think 'English teacher boot camp' mixed in with 25 hours/week of actual classes, and looks really good on a resume. Did you know they call those things CVs out here?

Mom and Dad seemed to think it was a no brainer. I wasn't so sure, but after running some numbers and doing the comparison, which wasn't as far apart as I had feared, I had a better picture. Even though an extra $100 dollars/month would allow me to live very comfortably and put some money away, it wasn't enough to outweigh the benefits the other school would offer, the skills I'd pick up, and the possibility of going anywhere in the world, both with the school and on my own.

So I went with Option B: International House – Brno.

The training starts next Thursday. I'm still pretty scared about all this. Filled with trepidation I guess you could say. See I have no problem punching above my weight in a corporate environment, where the worst I could do would be break the copier, wipe an important hard drive, or inadvertently commit some sort of malfeasance. This worries me for two reasons. I'm on stage all the time I'm in class, sort of me vs. a bunch of funny talking foreigners, only I'm actually the funny talking foreigner. The other is that I'm really worried about screwing up because the students will either ask for a different teacher or come away not really able to speak English. I don't any problem failing for a corporate boss, or even for the school; I would feel really lousy failing students who'd paid a large chunk of cash to learn from me.

Sooooo, into the fray, eh?