“Burada dil farklı çünkü Amerika’dayım,” is the favorite quote of one of the Upper School’s newest faculty members — US Math Teacher Paul McInerney. Turkish for “The language is different here because I’m in America,” McInerney — Mr. Mac to students — learned this sentence during his nine years teaching abroad in both Turkey and China.
Like his travels, McInerney’s teaching story is one of great variety. In 2009, he was teaching in Colorado when he heard of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program and acquired a scholarship to teach in England.

“You basically swap lives for a year…I’m talking everything from your car, they drive your car, they have your pets, they teach your classes. They have your life. You have their life,” he said. But at the age of 26, only five weeks before he was set to leave, he had a medical emergency and was no longer able to attend.
“That just stuck with me for a lot of years. You know, I was going to live overseas, and it didn’t happen,” McInerney said. “I never really forgot about it but wasn’t sure how and when I was going to get around [to] that again.”
Surprisingly, a vacation to Hawai’i in 2010 was how he got around to that again. That trip reignited his dreams to teach abroad, and after months of interviews, he landed a two-year contract for a job in Turkey at Darüşşafaka (pronounced Dah-ROOSH-shah-FAH-kah) High School, which translates to “Home of Compassion.” During his time there, he met his wife, a physics teacher at the same school.
When the contract ended, his parents and twin brother were happy to see him return to the States. “They did not want to see me disappear for a decade,” McInerney said. “But when I got back to us, it was kind of like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz when she gets back…And I fell into a bit of a depression about that. I think my family could see that.”
Once his family realized this, they encouraged him to teach abroad again. His previous position was filled, so after more interviews, he got a job as a math teacher in Suzhou, which is a seven-million-suburb in Shanghai, China. After a year of teaching in China, he returned to Turkey to finish six more years of education.
Reflecting on his first few weeks at Shorecrest, McInerney said, “I see students who are just very unique and special. It’s more of a feeling than it is anything else. It’s the kind of energy that they’ve brought that was very telling to me and had a lot to do with why I’ve decided to come here.”