This is it.

A few significant things have happened in the last week. Last Tuesday I had a phone interview with Barry from the St. Louis school in Taegu, South Korea (It is sometimes spelled as Daegu). He called me at 9:20pm Tuesday my time, which was 1:20 pm Wednesday for him. He asked me several questions regarding my resume, experience with children, my views on discipline, how I handle stress and what my thoughts were on culture shock. While it was a very formal interview, I was still at home sitting on my bed, so it was kind of weird.

There were a few questions that I felt like I stumbled though, searching for the perfect words. The hardest one was "Do you think a teacher ever knows more about a child than the parent does?" This is a loaded question. I don't have any formal teaching experience, so I had no idea how to answer. My final response was some combination of "a teacher sees a child in a focused environment so they may know more about their strengths and weaknesses"...I figured I was done after that.

After the formal questions were over with, I asked Barry a few questions which he had plenty of answers to. It ended and he said he would be in touch, but I was feeling like they weren't going to be interested in me without any teaching experience. I went over some of the questions with Corinne and she reassured me that I probably did well, I was still doubtful. So we talked about the next steps, like if one of us was offered the job or if neither of us were. We had decided that we would be willing to work at different schools as long as we were in the same city.

Well, it turns out that all of our "worst-case-scenario" planning wasn't necessary. Today, we received emails offering the positions to us in Taegu with contracts attached. I could hardly believe it. So, the next step is to review the contract, ask questions, and see if there are any changes we would like to make. Hopefully, we can accept the contract by the end of the week. Once that is signed, the process really shifts gears and a whole slew of new paperwork and documentation will have to be worked through. So this is it. The first and also a sort of last step in my little plan to see the world and turn everything I know upside down. Hooray!!