Bulgaria with Noodles

I seem to be getting more and more TES messages from teachers who want to teach in the ME. Well, this gives me an excuse for included some old photos of RAK. Dear Mr K, Yes, of course I will help you, as much as I possibly can. In fact, you could call me on SKYPE. You can also e-mail me. The Hilton Beach Club in RAK. No, I do not know anything about Al Yasmina. Generally speaking, I would want to avoid schools with Arabic names. I am sorry that if that sounds appallingly racist, but Arab-owned schools have a very poor reputation. H owever, let us be positive. The obvious place to start is the school's own website. That will give you some clues about what sort of school it is, how big it is and so on. My guess is that quite a few of your students will not have English as their first language, so obviously there might be some questions related to that. Then you could have a good old rummage around on the Internet, to see if you can find any reviews or anything that anyone has said ab...

The tower might be tall and thin, but I'm not. Here is part of a reply I wrote to yet another question on the TES about teaching in Dubai. The ISR has lots of reviews of the schools in Dubai. Many of the ISR reviews should be taken with a large pinch of salt, but at least you can compare reviews of the same school and see if there are common themes. Also you can compare and contrast the ISR reviews with the schools' websites. There are are, of course, lots of websites for expats in the UAE and on them you might find a few interesting little nuggets of information. Atlantis, famous for its fish tank DBS and GEMS are fairly well known. I had a lady colleague who taught at GEMS Wellington and she had some positive things to say.  In general, I would recommend the "shotgun method" and apply for anything and everything that looks vaguely suitable. The problem is, of course, that many schools these days have elaborate application forms and filling them...