Two weeks before the school year started, Jordi Mora was still in Barcelona, waiting on a visa that arrived only 10 days before his flight, a flight that was then canceled. He rebooked, arrived in Monmouth with almost no runway before training began, and started teaching ELA at Monmouth-Roseville, having never before set foot in the United States.

He arrived through a visiting teacher exchange program between the U.S. and Spain, something a colleague at his school back home had done the year before and encouraged him to try. "You have the profile perfect for this job," she told him. He decided to go.

What could have been a chaotic landing turned out otherwise, largely because of the people already here. Ms. Miller and others helped him get settled quickly, and Mario, the Spanish teacher he was replacing, gave him his contact information, walked him through what he needed to know, and gave him his car. Within days, Jordi had housing, transportation, and a five-minute commute to school.

"It will be special in my life forever," he said.

Jordi's path to that moment was not a straight line. In Spain, he worked for years as a substitute teacher, covering math, religion, social studies, and whatever else a school needed, never able to count on steady hours. About 12 years ago, frustrated by that uncertainty, he left the country entirely and spent three years in Australia, where he arrived barely speaking English and left fluent, having learned much of it while coaching a youth soccer team that, at first, could not understand a word he said. Later, came Thailand, where he taught in exchange for room and food. This was his first real experience in front of a classroom. Only after all of that did he apply for the program that brought him to Illinois.

He has arrived without family and traveling alone, which he says made the decision considerably easier to make. He has also arrived with opinionsformed by watching how differently the world handles the same basic work of raising and teaching children.

Coaching youth soccer, he saw parents and coaches lose themselves in winning, more concerned with dominance than decency. That experience shaped something he believes strongly enough to say plainly: "We are people first." He wants that principle present in whatever room he's teaching in, whether it holds a soccer ball or a textbook.

He has also noticed something about discipline in American schools that he finds encouraging, a consistency he says students respond to, but he resists the idea that it comes down to national character.

"Kids are the same everywhere," he said. "It's how adults guide them, how they model it for them."

That belief has made him an eager student of his new colleagues. Co-teaching alongside other Monmouth-Roseville teachers, he watches how they explain a concept, structure an exercise,  and reach a distracted kid. He treats nearly everything he sees as something worth learning. It is, he says, a habit built from years of moving between countries: notice what people are doing well, and borrow it.

In his classroom, students call him Mr. Mora, a choice he made deliberately. He tried the same thing once at a school in Spain after growing frustrated that students addressed teachers by first name and treated them without much formality. The shift, he found, changed more than vocabulary.

"They didn't do jokes," he said. "They talked with respect."

Building real trust with a new group of students takes time regardless of what they call him, and Jordi is patient about it, comparing the early weeks of any school year to the slow work of learning who another person actually is. He has already started sharing pieces of his own story with them, telling one class recently about the first time he tried spicy Thai food and how much he has come to love it since.

Asked whether it takes courage to keep restarting life in a new country, Jordi pushes back gently on the word. He doesn't experience it as bravery, he says, so much as an unwillingness to live with regret.

"You have to value your skills and say, I can do it," he said. "If not, you will feel bad."

By that measure, Jordi Mora has spent more than a decade refusing to feel bad, one country, one classroom and one language at a time. Now, that restlessness has landed, at least for a while, in a small Illinois town where a car, a house and a welcome were already waiting for him.