Every Filipino who leaves home carries a private arithmetic: what the years away will cost, and what they might eventually buy back. For two of those years, the sum that kept coming up wrong for Rosette Marquez was the distance between a mother in Abu Dhabi and a small daughter still in the Philippines. She had spent her whole career teaching students that a hard problem is not an impossible one — you just have to stay with it long enough. Then life handed her a problem she couldn’t check on a whiteboard.
Today, she is Head of the Mathematics Department at Al Qeyam Charter School under Taaleem, one of the very few Filipinos to hold that title anywhere in the charter schools community. But the road to that office ran through a long-distance separation, a chorus of doubters, and seven years of proving — to students, to colleagues, and occasionally to herself — that competence eventually speaks louder than accent or passport.
From a public school classroom to a charter school corner office
Long before the UAE, there was the Philippine public school system, where she taught Mathematics for seven years and, for three of those, simultaneously lectured college-level courses as a university instructor. It was a demanding apprenticeship in a subject most students arrive at already braced to dislike. By the time she moved abroad in 2019, she had roughly fifteen years of teaching behind her and a clear conviction about what she wanted the work to feel like.
“I chose teaching because I am passionate about helping young people reach their full potential and developing a genuine appreciation for Mathematics by making it simple, meaningful, and relevant to everyday life,” she shares with TGFM.
Her first overseas posting was as a Mathematics Teacher at a private international school in Dubai. After two years, she crossed to Abu Dhabi and joined the charter school where she has now spent five years. The climb was steady rather than sudden — from teacher to Deputy Head of the Mathematics Department, and then to Head. Along the way she kept her hands in the parts of school life that rarely make a job description: curriculum development, student interventions, enrichment programs, Math Week celebrations, and the small campaigns that make a subject feel less like a wall and more like a door.
The advisory role mattered to her as much as the leadership one. She has consistently taught Mathematics while supporting students both academically and personally — a reminder that a department head is still, first, someone a struggling teenager can talk to.
The two years that tested everything
The professional story is tidy. The personal one is not, and she does not pretend otherwise.
When she first moved abroad, the sacrifice was not abstract. It had a face. For two years she and her husband lived apart from their young daughter, betting that a period of separation now would buy a more secure family later. It is the quiet math of overseas work that recruitment brochures never print.
“It was a difficult sacrifice that my husband and I made to build a more secure future for our family,” she recalls. “Through perseverance, careful planning, and faith, we were eventually able to bring her to live with us, making the sacrifices worthwhile.”
There were doubters, too — the kind of low background noise that follows anyone who reaches beyond what others expect of them. Rather than argue with it, she used it. “I used them as motivation to work harder and prove that dedication, integrity, and perseverance lead to success,” she says. Her anchors through it were specific and named: her faith, her husband, her daughter and her son, the people whose support kept her, in her word, resilient.
What the first Filipino head of department knows
Being appointed the first Filipino Head of the Mathematics Department in her school is a milestone she returns to carefully, because of what she thinks it represents. Not a personal trophy, but a data point about trust — evidence that, given the chance, a Filipino educator can lead in a diverse international environment and be followed there.
“Being appointed as the first Filipino Head of the Mathematics Department in my school is a milestone I value deeply, as it reflects the importance of competence, integrity, and consistent performance in building trust across cultures,” she says.
The work itself still delivers its plainer rewards. Ask her what she finds most satisfying and she does not reach for the leadership title. “Nothing is more satisfying than seeing students grow in confidence, achieve beyond their expectations, and realize that they are capable of succeeding in Mathematics,” she says. It is the same sentence she might have spoken fifteen years ago in a public school classroom in the Philippines — proof that the ambition changed shape but never subject.
The compensation abroad has done what she hoped, giving her family greater financial stability through what she describes as a rewarding package. But she is quick to widen the frame beyond salary. Working alongside colleagues and students from many cultural backgrounds, she says, has strengthened her patience, adaptability, and communication in ways that made her “a more effective teacher, a more empathetic leader, and a lifelong learner.”
The long game, and the advice that comes with it
She and her husband are not treating the UAE as an endpoint. They are deliberately building and strengthening family businesses back home so those ventures can carry the household once the overseas chapter closes. The plan is to eventually return to the Philippines for a peaceful, financially secure life — while staying tethered to education through mentoring or community work, and giving their children the chance to study abroad in turn.
For fellow Filipinos still deep in the difficult middle of the journey, her counsel is unadorned and rooted in faith. “The sacrifices you make for your family do not go unnoticed, and I firmly believe that God sees every hardship and, in His perfect time, rewards those who remain faithful, honest, and kind,” she says. Work with integrity, manage your money wisely, keep helping others — that, she argues, is what carries a person through the lean stretches.
If there is a single line that gathers up the whole arc, it is the one she offers almost as an afterthought. “Growth begins with taking the first step — if you never try, nothing changes.” She aimed high, sat with the hard problem long enough, and solved it. The former public school teacher would tell any doubter the same thing she tells a student staring down an equation that looks impossible: start.
