davidwees.com

The photo to the left is of me and my lovely wife hanging out in a restaurant in London.

My life since I graduated from teacher training in 2002 has been an never ending adventure.  I have lived in 3 different countries since then and have met the love of my life.  I wouldn't trade a moment of it, despite some of the difficulties I have faced.

First it was clear that getting a full time job in British Columbia was going to be a difficult task, so I packed up my bags and moved to Brooklyn, New York.  Here I learned classroom management and basic lesson planning and organizational skills in a difficult inner city school called The School for Legal Studies.  The experience was generally a good one, and the most serious issues in that school could have been fixed with better training for all of the people who worked there.  Nearly everyone I worked with was dedicated to the success of the students, but not everyone had the tools to cope with the stress of the position.

One of the highlights of living in New York was meeting Vasilia, the woman I plan on spending the rest of my life with.  She and I are a good match, since we complement each other's strengths well.

After three years there, I moved with my very new wife to London, England, and started a job in an international school called Southbank International School.  During our first year in London, Vasilia and I both worked very hard and spent a lot of time getting to know each other better.  We had to rush our wedding a bit because my visa to stay in the United States was about to... well anyway it's a long story.

We both really enjoyed our time together and I loved the school I worked at.  However we found London to be a rather busy place, and very impersonal.  We tried our best to have Londoners as friends, but it turned out that all of friendships ended up being with ex-pats or former ex-pats.

Our favorite moment in London was when our son Thanasi was born on September 11th, 2006.  It is a moment I will remember for the rest of my life, it was amazing.

The big problem with living in London was the cost, and when my son was born, we were stuck for a year in London living off of a single income.  I had to work extra hard and moonlight as a freelance web programmer in order to make ends meet.  After a year of this, we had enough and packed our bags after I accepted a job in Thailand at Ruamrudee International School.

Thailand is a beautiful place to visit.  It is warm all the time, and has gorgeous beaches and wonderful happy people.  We have met many very friendly people who have been very curious about our son.  We have been on quite a few trips in Thailand but unfortunately I have been very busy for the past year or so.

During our first year in Thailand, I wrote a textbook for the International Baccalaureate Mathematical Studies course.  Along with my co-author, Ron Carrell, I put many, many hours into the production of the textbook.

This year I have been busy with our website design business Vasilia and I have started.  I have also been taking my Master's degree in Educational Technology online through the University of British Columbia.  That combined with side projects like writing articles for the Bangkok Post, an English language newspaper, have kept me busier than I would like.  Fortunately I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and am looking forward to the December holidays when I should have very little extra work to do.  Whew.

This website I have created is intended to be a place to showcase my portfolio of projects I have been involved in.  I also intend to write articles about incorporating technology into teaching which is a major passion of mine.  As website creation is a never-ending process, there may be occasional glitches and problems as transistion my former collection of random stuff I've worked on into a coherent collection.

David Wees
November 2008