In Australia, I spent my first job curriculum curving and tuning my ear into their accent.
Fights broke out regularly in our playground, and I was lucky if it didn’t happen in my classroom. My class was a sort of bike-crashed, cut-up and scabbed lot with teeth, and uniform going everywhere, suggesting that they were neither well supervised, nor cared for, at home.
Bar the geographical “Where is Canada?” lessons and the two-three embellished stories about bear chases and skidoo crashes, what did we learn? I used
oral story telling to engage my class–and not to great effect! (I apologise to the rest of the Canadians who now have to continue to make-up bear stories; I inherited it, too, and didn’t have the heart to stop it!)
Home-Sickness in Aus?
- Typical Australian Scene
Three months in Melbourne and I was still having trouble carrying on conversations with an adult. For the first time in my life, I was literally “Fez, the foreign kid”, except everyone knew where I was from, and kept trying to engage me. While I’ve always tried to be empathetic to this position, I really had no idea how lonely it actually was.
I was lost within a curriculum I didn’t understand and with no one to mentor me.
All-in-all, one Friday I found myself explaining the superior quality of Canadian Maple Syrup and getting teary-eyed.
The Danger of Applying for Jobs in Australia On Your Own
In Canada, I had been offered a job at nearly every interview (~9) I underwent. I had my pick of jobs first-year-out. The hardest part was getting past the paper work. Luckily, my partner, Vicky, was ace at that and we had it mastered, too.
In Australia, interviews and phone calls from principals were terrifying. I had no idea where anything was and found them wasting their time on telling me how to get to their school!
A confident person normally, I was intimidated to the point that I sweated making application calls to secretaries–my normally chatty and pleasant personality was not even ‘on-board’, let alone strapped in the backseat!
I could not fall back on reading their lips, as I tried in person. As a rule, whenever I spoke to an Australian–I had NO IDEA WHAT they were SAYING to me! And yet you can’t help but feel everything is on the line in every encounter.
There was no one in my corner, telling them to “pick me”.
Without any preparation for their accent during interviews, I am sure I lost jobs based on the necessity of having to re-ask the question over and over just so I could still misunderstand what the hell they were asking me and give them a different answer!
Without any preparation for their accent during interviews, I am sure I lost jobs based on the necessity of having to re-ask the question over and over just so I could still misunderstand what the hell they were asking me and give them a different answer!
All-in-all, my first few months in Australia, were not going that well.
