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Kinuso principal to finish teaching career in China
Joe McWilliams
Lakeside Leader
Lots of people head overseas after college to do a bit of teaching and have some adventures. George Dashkewytch is doing it the other way – wrapping up his career as a schoolteacher and administrator by teaching in China.
More precisely, Dashkewytch – the principal at Kinuso School – is taking a teaching position in Macao, the former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong that is now a part of China. He heads there Aug. 9, for what looks to be a minimum two-year stint.
“I’ve always wanted to save a little time at the end,” Dashkewytch says. “I didn’t know if it would be teaching or something else.”
The Macao opportunity arose after he read an article in the Edmonton Journal about an Alberta man who is principal of the International School of Macao. The school offers the Alberta curriculum, and awards its high school graduates an Alberta diploma.
“So I started talking to this guy,” Dashkwytch says.
Dashkewytch has for the most part been a high school math teacher. He says he had a hand in initiating new technologies such as smart board and calculators in High Prairie School Division classrooms. He hasn’t been in the classroom for a couple of years, but he is familiar with those tools, and that was apparently a selling point with the man in Macao.
One thing led to another, and an offer of a job teaching math was made.
The school is a private one, with a student body split roughly 50/50 between Chinese people and expatriates.
The bonus, for Dashkewytch, is that he’ll only be 20 miles away from his son Travis, a pilot for Cathay Pacific Airlines who lives on Lantau Island. They plan to hook up for some apartment hunting.
“Travis and I will pound the pavement…. and play some golf,” says Dashkewytch.
It gets even better.
“Travis wanted to know if I’d give him a hand coaching his hockey team. I said okay.”
The team is the Discovery Bay ‘D Bees’, named for the town, or area of Lantau Island that Travis lives with his wife Carrie and their three children.
Golf? Hockey? Grandchildren? Alberta curriculum? It starts to sound a lot like home.
“It’s the same,” says Dashkewytch. “But it’s very different.”
One difference is he’ll be paid in a currency called ‘MOP’, which may or may not be an acronym for ‘Macau Pataca’. Dashkewytch says he’s not really sure how much he’ll be making, in Canadian terms, just that it ought to be enough to get by.
“It really doesn’t matter,” he says. “This is kind of a paid vacation.”
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