Trouble on the Eastern Front

I toyed with the idea of calling this post "Revolt," or "Mayhem." Karina suggested "Jury Duty." All are apt for describing the situation, and the day: we are having major issues with the county schools, and they go way beyond people just not wanting to go. Tensions abound.

Today we focused on co-teaching for most of the day; in the morning Professor Lee gave a presentation on what to do and what not to do in co-teaching (key point she made: IT IS ILLEGAL for ETAs to teach on their own in Taiwan--we're not certified!), and we watched a video the ETAs from a couple of years ago made called "The Art of Co-teaching," and discussed the best method in numerically assigned small groups.

But of course, the small groups weren't exactly impartial--we were supposed to number off, but somehow my group, group 4 of 12, ended up with 3 LETs, while another group had 6, and most had at least 4. Suspicious. When we snagged someone from the group of 6, it turned out she was from the same school as another LET in my group, and they took it upon themselves to turn our discussion, in part, into a time to pitch their school. They were very nice, but it felt a bit like I was being manipulated.

And oh, what a glorious segue that is into our number one concern with the LETs today: we felt, and in many cases were correct in feeling, like we were being lied to and manipulated.

As I mentioned before, several of the county schools yesterday sent school representatives, rather than the actual LETs like they were supposed to; yesterday, Alex made it a point to tell the group once again that they MUST send their LET to the orientation, as a requirement of their participation. So, today, all the same people showed up, but now they were magically transformed into LETs, when we asked. Beyond that, on probing several of them during our afternoon "speed dating" with all the schools, we discovered that some of the schools still hadn't sent anyone at all, and that a couple people couldn't speak English at all--one of the supposed English teachers could barely say his own English name, which was, incidentally, "Aware." Irony of ironies.

All of these shady practices made us, as ETAs, nervous. Leaving all thoughts about city versus county aside, these schools are lying about having LETs for us to teach with. When we get there, we know exactly what we will find: big joyous crowds come to welcome the English teacher, and an empty classroom set aside for us, and only us. Which is illegal.

And, even supposing that the "LETs" we met are there, we have too much of a language barrier to work together effectively! It would inevitably end up being either just them teaching the class in Mandarin, or just us teaching the class in English--which, again, is illegal. (You see, I told you that was a key point of the morning presentation.) And it's also ineffective! We are not (most of us) trained teachers; what we bring to the classroom is enthusiasm, an embodiment of why kids should care about English, and a native command of the language. What we do not bring is a knowledge of Mandarin good enough to manage a classroom, talk to administrators, and avoid miscommunications.

So, after the day was over, in our group meeting with Fonda, the ETAs essentially staged a verbal coup. Not against Fonda, not against Alex, not against anyone in Fulbright, but against the situation: we are terrified of it, and, I believe, justifiably so. We do not want to be sent to the county schools, only a couple of which actually have LETs so far, to discover that we are expected to do what we are not trained for and cannot legally do. We feel disrespected by the schools by their inability to prepare for our arrival and their total disregard for the hard-and-fast rules set down by the local government--we all went through a stringent screening to get to come here, and the city schools also took part in a major competition. But, due to political pressures, the same is not true of the county, and we don't feel that they are holding up their end of the bargain. In sum, we can't imagine a good situation coming from a partnership based in lies or, worse yet, from the absence of a partner.

So for now, we wait. We wait to see what the Education Bureau will do about those who break the rules; to see if they will enforce their own restrictions and fulfill our contracts to be assistant teachers. We wait to see if practicality will beat out political difficulties to benefit everyone involved.

I certainly hope so.