We Call It Australia
This is an excerpt from the essay "We Call It Australia" from the book Fraud published by Doubleday 2001.
New York City has the nation's largest public school system, with some 65,000 teachers serving 1.1 million students. There is a dearth of qualified math and science teachers here. Coincidentally, there is a surplus in Austria, with a years-long waiting list for positions. In what seemed like the perfect solution to both problems, the New York City Board of Education put up flyers at teachers colleges in Vienna. "If you can read this," they said in English, "have we got a job for you!" Today in the first of a projected two days of interviews of about fifty candidates for public high school teaching jobs in New York's five boroughs.
New York's unorthodox plan to look for teachers so far afield has attracted a great deal of attention. In addition to myself, there are reporters from the major dailies and, most glamorous of all, a TV crew and reporter from ABC News in Washington. Two young men are busily sticking up a purple "City College" banner with brown packing tape for the news cameras' benefit.
Any job interview is an awkward affair. Any job interview with a panel of five interviewers even more so. Everyone is nervous on both sides of the ocean. Questions are repeated, slowed down. It makes for some halting progress and the occasional awkward moment of cultural preconception. When asked what previous knowledge they have of New York schools, for example, one woman answers that she heard "the kids were having guns and using drugs."
But, for the most part, the Austrian teachers are hoping to come to New York out of just such a sense of adventure; to experience another culture firsthand and to improve their English, although for the most part they speak quite well. One fellow openly hungers for New York's legendary multiethnic society: "I want to see the blacks. Where I am from, there is only one black people a year," he says.
"Oh," one of the African American principals whispers. "Vermont."
Read the complete essay and the rest of this wonderful book in the bookFraud.
Subscribe to TravelBlogs
Posted by David Rakoff on January 4th, 2002 in Articles.
