The Midnight Run
When Teacher's Choose to Leave
teacher01
Posted on: Jul 30, 2025
Updated on: Oct 13, 2025
Teaching abroad is not for everyone and for those who find it unsuitable, they inevitably choose to leave. The slang term that I had heard used is Midnight Run (MR). This being a reference to the fact that a teacher will often leave during the night, when everyone is fast asleep, and before anyone realizes it, the teacher is on a plane back to their home country.1
I personally never needed to do a Midnight Run, but I've heard stories where I could easily understand why a teacher would -- in the most typical case a teacher is simply not being paid. Slip ups happen, especially depending on how the payments are being transacted,2 but in general if a teacher has gone without pay for more than 3 months, I would understand the desire to secretly leave -- or to loudly leave. Other common causes are being homesick or not adapting to the culture3 .
But this opens up an interesting morality can of worms, where different teachers will have a differing sensitivity to justifying doing an MR. In one egregious case, I heard a story of a woman who left South Korea simply because she "wasn't feeling it", with no word or announcement to anyone she was working with. It's tough because no one should be required to be somewhere they don't feel comfortable being, but at the same time they did sign their name on a contract -- they are expected to work for a specific amount of time.
In my own experience, when I first started teaching, I was super nervous and asked for a lot of training.4 I was thankfully given ample amounts of observation and I made a point to ask every teacher about their lesson plans, their goals in each class, what activities worked for them and why. With one of the teachers, I remember him telling me that he wished he had done the same thing.
A few months later, out of the blue I got the call that I was going to be moved to a different teaching center. I realized it was one of the centers I had done observations at, and when I got there I found out that one of their teachers had done an MR, and it was in fact the same teacher who I had previously spoken to and who had told me he wished had done more observations. When I assessed the state of his classes, I realized he had burned through all of the curriculum for ALL of his classes. In the worst case, one of his classes had only progressed 1/4 of the way through its term, but he had finished the textbook completely. He had waited for his last paycheck to clear, withdrawn it and disappeared over the weekend.
This was a gargantuan mess that fell to me to clean up, including smoothing things over with all of the parents, having to create a tremendous amount of supplemental activities, and also rebuild loyalty with the Chinese staff who felt understandably burned. One of the classes in particular loved this teacher, which caused all of the parents to storm into the classroom demanding to observe me, refusing to leave and telling the Chinese teacher they were going to complain to the school leadership, including asking for refunds if I wasn't up to "standard."5
The interesting thing about a MR is that it's an opportunity uniquely available to us as foreigners. The native staff often have less of a choice6 -- the situation they are in might make it extremely difficult to find another job. At one school, I had to go to the visa office and had a native assistant accompany me, and she was fairly aloof the whole time. I asked her how her situation was going and she revealed she had not been paid in over 3 months. In fact no one in her office had been paid in that time, but she didn't feel comfortable quitting and getting a bad reference.
The question remains of course, was the teacher right in committing the MR? When does an MR become justified if at all and when is it fundamentally irresponsible or completely justifiable?
Is there another interpretation of this phrase? This is what I was told, but honestly don't know if there is a better meaning or term.
One example is a school that pays into international accounts instead of the local currency. More generally, if a school is struggling, it's not correct or okay, but it makes sense when payments begin to falter.
This can range from simply not liking the food, the lack of general English understanding in the area they are living in, or the idea of being in a different place
I also covered this here
If you read the blog post from footnote #3, then you can imagine how I felt about that situation >_<
Depending on the country, current state of the job market and other factors, the staff may have no choice.