My wife and I spend about 25-30KD a week on groceries, and we eat out once or twice. It can be as cheap or expensive as you want it. We get Iranian bread from a place down the street to go with our Indian food and it costs about 80fils for 3 huge pieces. Cheap.

The school I am at has its problems, but the admin will almost always go to bat for you regarding discipline or grades. Our school has a mix of Bedouin and Kuwaitis, and that can cause tension. Unfortunately, many parents are absent from their child's education and that has a noticeable effect.

Kuwait isn't somewhere we would want to stay for longer than our two years (heading out after this year). We have our own reasons for leaving, but many people we work with enjoy it here and are planning on staying for at least another year. Some of them have been here for 10+ years.

37,000$ USD is very good. Most first contract salaries range from $28,000-34,000

Dependants go for free at some of the better schools (AIS and ASK) I believe anyway. Most of the schools are for profit, so they tend to charge a slightly reduced tuition(30% maybe)

I would be wary about a brand new school. To get much done in Kuwait you need wasta, and unless the school is owned by a group with serious pull many problems can crop up.

CIS is a for profit school. I think what shadowjack might be saying, is that the 50% might be an indicator of other profit motivated decisions on their part.

Kuwait doesn't have a lack of private schools, so a new one opening isn't really news. Name?

Thanks!

Shadowjack - we are both very excited to start there!

Contact me...or give me an e-mail for my blog link.

Too many weird spam problems when I posted it here.

Pippa -

I use blogger, and so does my wife. There is a huge teaching community out there using blogger specifically. It makes it slightly easier to follow websites. I know that is why my wife switched from Wordpress to blogger.

Having said that, Lopaka is right. Wordpress offers up a lot more customization options.

We didn't follow any specific examples, but we made them based on some info we found on here. My wife is very creative, and she makes a lot of stuff for her classroom herself (and she sells or gives away a lot of it on teacherspayteachers and teaches notebook too). If you leave me an email I can send you a PDF example of what we used. I might put it up on my teaching blog too, so if I do that I'll just post the link here.

I'll add my two cents...

My wife and I created double-sided "ichiros" on thick card stock (1 side for her and 1 side for me) that gave brief highlights of our educational philosophies, education, certification, and several pictures of us in the classroom or things our students have done.

These were invaluable for us at the fair in London. We had more than a few recruiters say something like , "Oh, I remember you." And that's the point of it isn't it? We lined up at least 3 interviews, because someone recognized us...we stood out. Out of those three interviews we had two job offers and the third interview we cancelled when we got the dream offer. Not a bad average. Also, we were contacted by a top school in a bar after they saw our ichiro with another recruiter (we didnt apply, because there wasnt a position for both of us). They sought us out, and recognized us, because of that flashy piece of paper.

We didn't bring portfolios, but we did direct recruiters to our blogs and we mentioned them in our interviews. Whether or not they visited them, I don't know. Our ichiros may have been sufficient portfolio-wise.

I would avoid chennai if possible. I haven't lived there, but I travelled around India pretty extensively, and it was the worst city I visited. There is little to do, and less to see.

Fantastic!

It was an anxiety inducing experience for us too, but one that is totally worth it.

I don't want to get into too many specifics, but it is a compound school in Saudi. If your looking to apply or make contact - leave an email address.

I have two years of experience going into London, and they were in primarily English (8-10). Mrs. CDN and I just accepted positions at one of the IASAS schools, and my new posting isn't entirely related to the experience I have had already. They want to see the enthusiasm and interest you can bring to the school over other experience-related factors. That's alla in my relatively new set of rose-tinted glasses, though. Grain of salt.

I don't know much about that school specifically, as it wasn't on my radar. They didn't have a lot of positions, so it would be unreasonable to assume that they couldn't fill them all if they wanted. There was a lot of competition in London, so they may have walked away without certain positions filled. I'm new to all of this too, so take it all with a grain of salt.

As Psyguy said, you should probably be applying as you are reading this...start....now...go!

It is very nice to have it all over and done with, and now the trouble is getting back into the swing of semester two at our current school!