My day starts early, at 5am. I teach at an international school in West Jakarta, and lessons start at 7.15. Being up before the sun is something you get used to in Indonesia.

I spent four months here during my gap year before I started university and fell in love with the country. As soon as I graduated, I headed straight back and have been here ever since. Indonesia is a melting pot of vibrant cultures and is home to the friendliest people in the world.

After a quick cold shower, my partner and I are out of our house and on the road by 6am. The Jakarta traffic is notorious for a reason, and if we leave 10 minutes later, it can add an extra hour onto our journey.

After a brief car ride, I complete my journey on an ojek, a kind of taxi where you hitch a ride on the back of someone else’s bike. It can be problematic in the rainy season, but it is undoubtedly the quickest way to travel in Indonesia.

I arrive at school by 6.30, grab a quick coffee at a nearby 7-Eleven, and head into my school. The humidity and heat is oppressive, even at this early time, and I am glad to get into the air-conditioning of the building. The teachers at my school are a mix of expatriates, mostly from the Philippines, China, India, Singapore, Australia and America, but there are also local Indonesian teachers here too. As a result, the staffroom is colourful blend of languages and cultures.

My school uses the CIE curriculum, and I teach English and history IGCSE. English is the first language used in school, although students also learn Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia (the official language of Indonesia). I have around 35 teaching periods of 30 minutes each per week, as well as other projects and co-curricular activities. Class sizes at our school range from around 20 to as low as 4; we are a small school by international standards, with only about 70 secondary students. We also have a primary and pre-primary division in our campus, meaning that shouts of excitement coming from the younger years are a constant background noise to my lessons.

Many students go on to university abroad

Most of our students are from middle-class families, and they pay around 80 million IDR (£4,000) per year in tuition fees to attend our school. Many will go to university abroad, in the US or Australia.

Indonesian students are polite and diligent, and classroom management is rarely an issue. Most are highly motivated and academic, and many go on to achieve excellent IGCSE and A-level results. We are encouraged to use student-based teaching pedagogies, but when exams are looming, we are often forced into exam drilling. The high tuition fee puts real pressure on us to get results.

For lunch, I usually go to a nearby warung (cafe) and have something like nasi campur (rice, chicken, tofu, a fried egg and vegetables). Lessons end at 3.30pm, but it is rare that I leave the school then; on a good day, I am home by 6pm.

In the run-up to the IGCSEs we have classes from 4-6pm, and on Saturday mornings as well. It can be a gruelling stretch of lessons and marking, but the lengthy holidays (one month in the summer, and one month at Christmas) is more than ample reimbursement.

On Fridays, I play futsal (a game similar to football) with colleagues after school, before heading to one of Jakarta’s many drinking establishments. But most nights, I head straight home, exhausted, and am in bed by 9pm.

Stuart Ratcliffe is subject head of humanities and English language at an international school in West Jakarta, Indonesia