Five Reasons to Quit your Job and Teach Abroad

As anyone who has met me knows, in 2014 I quit my job in Chicago, convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to do the same, and moved to Italy to teach English. It was a leap of faith, for sure, but it was never as scary as friends and family feared it would be. It was everything I dreamed it would be and then some; the stories of which have been peppered throughout this blog over the past two years. So today, I simply give five reasons to quit your job and teach abroad.

1. It's surprisingly easy to get started. I used a company called International TEFL Academy to get licensed, but there are countless accredited "schools" that do the same thing. Major cities - both in the US and abroad - offer month-long in-person classes to get certified, but I did the online class. It was not difficult. Anyone who has been licensed and taught will immediately forget what they're taught at the exact moment they're thrown into a classroom, so there's only so much need for preparation anyway. Finding a job was a matter of fliers, unsolicited emails, and a lot of Googling.
2. Living on a shoestring is good for you. My wife and I had saved up some money while living in Chicago, but when we first arrived in Italy (Milan), we were immediately going the wrong direction with our savings. We had an apartment rented for a month, no jobs, no prospects for jobs (other than a list, given to us by the company we took classes with), and no real way of knowing what would happen. Buying groceries, train passes, and more while having $0 in guaranteed income is nerve-wracking, but it sure teaches you about budgeting. We kept track of our meal-prices and tried to have each meal come under $1.50 per person: Corn flakes for breakfast, vegetable soup or a PBJ for lunch, and pasta with pesto & vegetables for dinner. Some of those habits carry over for when you're making more money later.
3. Get out of your comfort zone and realize people are just people. How do you communicate with someone when neither of you know the other's language? You improvise, you use gestures, and best of all, you laugh. Neither of you know what's going on and you will both, eventually, laugh. Regardless of where you are when that moment happens to you, your shared confusion can be a moment that will stick with you forever. For me it was a small BnB owner. We ordered dinner...and I was pretty sure I knew what I'd ordered. Then a block of fried cheese with green garnish showed up in front of me. Delicious. I thought I was getting a chicken & cheese meal.
4. Home will still be here when you get back. Pick up and go, because you don't know if you'll be able to later. After finding jobs in a country where you don't speak the language, returning to your homeland will be easy - if you have to walk into an office and solicit a stranger for a job, at least you know they understand your words. Furthermore, some people think it's impossible to do this when you have a job/kids/family commitments, but that's just not true. A family of four stayed with me once (we host on AirBnB). They had two children under the age of 6 and were about to move to the Republic of the Congo so the mother could teach English for two years at a school in the capital city. She figured "why not?" because her family in Ohio would still be there when the contract finished, and what an incredible opportunity for her kids to learn about other cultures. With or without kids, what an incredible opportunity for you, or anyone, to learn about other cultures. And you can bring that knowledge with you back to the USA.
5. It's really really fun. Quitting your job can be therapeutic, and knowing that you're helping kids get ahead is rewarding, but there's nothing like watching a 3-year-old stomp around the house saying "Yes! Yes!" as you're tutoring his older brothers because that's the only word in English that he knows. Or what about that time when you walked in and were immediately given Nutella and pretzels because last week you mentioned how great Nutella is? Or how about the fact that you got paid to speak English while playing 1-on-1 soccer against a child in his palatial apartment? It's really...really fun.

So there are five reasons to quit your job and teach abroad. There are a million more. I'll probably write again soon, mentioning things like "adults want to learn, so they're really easy to work with and can be very generous," or "kids don't realize they're learning, so they're sometimes easy to work with," or "I spent a night at a student's family estate over Spring Break, for free."

If you want to see photos from my time spent teaching (and traveling, because we traveled a lot) or read other stories/recaps of our time, click around the previous posts on this blog. Or check some photos on my instagram page, if you're into that.