Transition – moving on

Urban Red by Mike Gabelmann CC BY NC

Are you happy in your workplace?  Recent data from Forbes suggests and a staggering number of people are unhappy in their workplace.  I cannot imagine being unhappy in my workplace, it makes up almost all of my sunlight hours and I can’t imagine investing so much of myself in a space that is where I am not happy.  How could I give any happiness to my students in a space where I am not??

This year my husband and I sat down and talked over our lives here in Yokohama, Japan and we started writing lists.  Lists can be dangerous – but I like to think of this process as a Visible Thinking routine – we listed all our ideas/thoughts about living and working in Yokohama and then we sorted them out into the different contexts – our family, our work, our children and our personal lives.  What about our finances, our ability to love living in Japan to keep up our personal learning journeys and being near our families – I could go on and on but you get the idea.

We have a wonderful life and have chosen on such an amazing life journey to travel and live and work in different countries, to see our children grow up as third culture kids in different cities and houses but always to ground them to our families in our home countries.  We have lived in Japan for 2.5 years and after tooing and froing and sorting out our ideas, we made the decision to apply for new jobs in Beijing at the International School of Beijing.  This wasn’t easy – we didn’t want to resign our positions here and have nothing to move to – three kids and a cat don’t move easily!  We were excited to approach ISB and discuss with them the openings they had for August 2016 and after long interviews and conversations, we were fortunate to be offered jobs and will move to Beijing for 2016.

I am incredibly happy at YIS, I am working with the most amazing calibre of staff where professional conversations and learning is central to the philosophy of the school.  The students are a wonderful community of learners and I strive to meet their interests and  needs’ as best I can.  But it is time to take my learning and my aging family (we have no babies anymore!) and move to something new.  I am looking forward to finding out what my new challenges will be and to connect to new colleagues and ideas in a new city and new campus.

I look forward to working with PE people in Beijing.  If you are in Beijing and teach PE – give me a shout, it will be awesome to learn with you.   A big thank you to the incredible people I am fortunate to work with at Yokohama.