Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

why were you a high school biology teacher in semi-rural new zealand, and was it worth your time? what is there to do there?

Ok so. front half of 2017, I was wrapping up my final year of living in Japan and getting ready to come home to New Zealand. I had Depression and Anxiety and also the Genders so first thing I did once I got back to NZ was have a really good nap. Then after some thinking and chatting to family friends, I figured while I was pretty lukewarm about teaching English to Japanese folks, I did actually quite like teaching. So 2018 I went to teachers' college, got a graduate diploma, and outside of the still-undiagnosed ADHD making anything relating to staying organised a Hell Time I did get through it alright (one thing I've re-learned about myself the past month and a half, attending a course to study German, is I actually really love organised learning) and had myself a job lined up for the coming year.

That first teaching job in 2019 was not in semi-rural new zealand. That happened because I got cold-called while wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington looking at takahe.

That's this absolute unit of a rail, in case you were wondering:


I was wandering round a wildlife reserve in Wellington because it was a long weekend and I'd been tabling at Wellington Zinefest, where I debuted Horses which is still one of my best zines I've ever made. I got cold-called because I gave my CV to a guy I'm gonna call Dan a year prior. Dan was the principal of a high school in a town of what'll probably be 10,000 people within the next decade or so. I met Dan because the teachers' college runs an open day each year where trainee teachers can meet principals from all over New Zealand, principals can line up graduates in hard-to-staff subjects like Technology, and all the Canadian exchange students on my course could piss about in queues waiting to talk to the principals of the three biggest high schools in the city we were in. I guess because they were just soooooo keeeeeeen to continue life in New Zealand but lacked the imagination to think about working anywhere except this one city they were already parked in. Lmao.

Anyway. Dan calls me because a year ago I couldn't be assed waiting in queues, and ended up talking to various principals with far fewer educational acolytes vying for their time. The principal of the Correspondence School for instance was pretty cool, it makes sense but I didn't realise of course they'd hire actual teachers for that. Dan meanwhile had the good fortune of living three hours drive and zero major bodies of water away from my hometown, so I figured I'd try him out for a vibe check as to how the school community might handle a genderqueer menace like myself.

Dan's got a biology teacher off next year on parental leave, a stack of allegedly-underwhelming CVs from applicants, and also my CV from when we had a yarn a year ago. I'm offered an interview. I accept the interview. I drive three hours and over a small mountain range, still one of my favorite drives in the whole world probably, and let Dan and the HOD know I'm not taking the job if it's a one-year fixed-term position. They have a chat, crunch some numbers or something I guess, and provisionally offer me a permanent position.

A couple weeks later I accept the position. I let my current school know that I'm wrapping up with them at the year's end, I tell my shithead flatmates who told me they were lending their room out to friends when actually they were putting it up on AirBnB that I'm moving out, and Mirdini comes and visits over the Christmas/Summer holidays. Because I get removal fees covered as a side perk of moving to a hard-to-staff school, I leave my furniture and the bulk of my effects to the truck-having guys and load up my car with one suitcase, a futon, a sleeping bag, and a metric fuckton of houseplants.

I drive the three hours over the hill with minimal potting mixhaps, get the keys to the house I'm renting, meet the neighbors, find the bathroom light was left on and the bath is full of moths, and as of a couple days prior to my arrival the power had been cut off and is going to take a couple business days for some wires-having guy to hook it back up again. Luckily my neighbors take pity on my electrically-challenged ass and let me have a shower at their place and crash in their spare room. I vaguely recall the rest of my furniture coming in before the school term proper started, so I was sleeping in a proper bed by the time I actually had to look presentable and non-sleep-deprived in front of all my new kids.

The first month and a half or so at the new job went pretty smoothly... then some shit kind of went down.