Thanksgiving in Kaohsiung

Today wasn't Thanksgiving. It couldn't have been. I got up early, put on a t-shirt, skirt and sandals, bought an iced coffee, went to an RT competition (in which both of my schools competed), came home, took a nap, went to school again--oh, and then taught Thanksgiving, so I guess it must have been--but then I came home, went searching for turkey, and ended up eating steak at a Canadian restaurant.

And this is Thanksgiving? Really? You're serious? Huh. I didn't even consume any turkey.

I've already detailed many of my Thanksgiving teaching tactics; what I didn't mention is that, on Monday, after I finished my spiel about how the most important traditions of Thanksgiving are to eat a feast, spend time with family, and say what you are thankful for (spot the vocab words!), a student asked, through my co-teacher, "But, Teacher Bekah, why aren't YOU going home for Thanksgiving?"

...

It's times like these that I really wish someone had invented a teleportation device, already!

But they haven't and so my Thanksgiving was spent here, cheering on my students and taking a prohibited (and, as a result of its secrecy, terrible quality-ed) video of them, then describing what stuffing was to a class full of 6th graders, whose wrinkled faces at the idea of it cooking inside the turkey were priceless, not least of which because they closely mirrored my own face whenever I come into close contact with stinky tofu or pig intestines.

On my way into school today, I saw my commute friend Rob (he's an English teacher from New York who works across the street from my school; we met en route one day and we're perfecting the art of 40 second stoplight conversations), who was driving another English teacher, Debbie, and they informed me that they were spending Thanksgiving with a friend who had had the foresight to special order a turkey and plan a Thanksgiving dinner. They also told me that last year they had eaten turkey at a local American restaurant. They gave me the name, but I was on a scooter at a stop light--not exactly the time to write it down.

The search was on. A quick Google search for Western/American restaurants in Kaohsiung provided a decently long list--I'm going to need to keep exploring, I think--but only one which looked remotely like the name I thought they told me. I remembered that it was a pub & grill type place, and that it sounded like a last name.

My hypothesis? Foster Hewitt's.

I looked up directions, grabbed Analicia, who also didn't have dinner plans, and set off down one of Kaohsiung's busiest roads, down which apparently Foster Hewitt's lay. When we got there, one thing immediately struck me: a Canadian flag. Yep, it was Western all right, but decidedly Canadian; posters, hockey jerseys and other memorabilia from Ontario crowded the walls.

It was still a very nice place, but not exactly somewhere that would be serving turkey on American Thanksgiving.

Reconciled, I ordered a steak and fresh lime soda. Nothing even remotely related to Thanksgiving food, but at least it was high-quality Western food; in a lot of ways, it beat my back-up plan of a Subway turkey sandwich. And the bartender was Western, and it was oddly comforting to be able to be served by a native speaker of English, as weird as that sounds. At least a little something of home in a native accent.

Ah, Thanksgiving dinner.

My mom complained last week when I described how great the Thanksgiving dinner in Taipei was rather than talk about how much I miss her cooking. Well, last week wasn't Thanksgiving. Today was. And I do miss her cooking--hers, and Aunt Linda's, and Uncle Pat and Aunt Christy's, and Karen's, and Jillian's, and Diana's, and Rosa's, and Joshua's, and Heather's, and everyone else in my family who cooks's. I wish I were home, eating moist turkey and flavorful party potatoes and oddly delicious stuffing and the many, many pies. I wish I were hanging out with my family and watching the parade right now, feeling guilty about not being able to do more to help.

Because, as I told my kids, that's what Thanksgiving is about: eating a feast and spending time with family.

But there was a third thing: being thankful. And I am, of course, thankful first and foremost for my family. But I'm also thankful that I'm here. I love all my wonderful students, co-teachers, host family, fellow ETAs, and other friends here, and I am so thankful they're in my life, and that I have the opportunity to be in theirs. I'm thankful that I have been blessed with a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, which is itself the chance of a lifetime. I'm thankful that I even have this dilemma, that I have to want to be in two places at once, that I have two potential places to spend the holiday.

Because today was Thanksgiving, no matter how I spent it. And turkey, as it turns out, is optional.

Normalcy

I always find these posts to be the hardest to write: I know no one will really read them, given the excitement just a few paragraphs down the page, so really, what's the point? Blogging has become a discipline for me, or posts like this wouldn't happen--and no one would miss them.

But, in the absence of anything so exciting as meeting an MLB superstar to talk about--the most exciting moment of my day came when I got to see a group of 6th graders at Hanmin rehearsing the RT script I wrote for them--I'll offer up my daily laugh. Much as I did last time I had a major event to follow, actually.

So, without further ado, I give you: the Trailer for Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever.

If I had remembered to put my memory card back into my camera last night after uploading MLB pics, I would now insert videos from my day, which might have had some entertainment value to them, though admittedly much less than the one I just showed you: we learned body parts, and incorporated "Head and Shoulders, Knees & Toes," which got even 6th graders laughing as I out-sped them all on the singing and motions.

I would also have recorded the RT rehearsal of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which funnily enough had all the kids saying "cloth-ess" whenever the word "clothes" appeared--which, not surprisingly, was often. Other than that, though, the kids are fantastic!

I'm realizing I'm in a bit of a bind: both of my schools are doing RT; at Qing-Shan I helped provide story and edits, and am helping with rehearsals, and at Han-Min, I wrote the script and am (now) getting to help a bit with fine-tuning. What if these two schools go up against each other? Rachel's doing RT at one of her schools, too--what if we end up competing against each other?

Any of these scenarios would be cool, but odd at the same time, for the schools and for me.

So that's it for my obligatory post-of-the-day: hope it left you at least mildly entertained! And if you made it this far, congratulations--you proved me wrong.

This is a blog post

In which I explain that Danny and Dan, friends from school back in the States, are in town, and that as a result, I haven't had time to write a proper blog post today.

So, in a nutshell, today I:

• Hosted AIT's Storytelling event at the library, reading "Silly Sally"--and a host of other books, to somewhat disastrous results. Turns out, an hour is a freakishly long time when your only instructions are to read story books and color, youhave preschoolers and prepared for grade schoolers, and you are in an exposed area of the library being observed by a bunch of young Americans who showed up at the last minute for no apparent reason.
• Wrote my weekly report in record time;
• Met up with Karina for a milk tea/doughnut at Zuoying;
• Picked up Dan and Danny from the HSR station and took them home;
• Got delicious food with Dan, Danny, and Rachel;
• Wrote a draft of Han-Min's RT script.

Which is why this blog is so insubstantial. But at least I explain why.

Small Groups

...are the best. I noted on here (I think) that I began Readers Theater practices a few weeks ago, and loved it. I figured that was a gimme: in addition to being acting, it was a group of students with an extremely high English level, meaning it was infinitely easier for me to communicate with them and vice versa.

But this week--yesterday, in fact--my theory was disproved, at least partially. Yesterday marked the first remedial class that I actually helped teach (we began the class last week, but that was just a placement test). And it was fantastic! We're teaching really basic stuff--A-H, accompanying words; several students couldn't even remember their English names--but it is so much fun.

So I think I've cracked the code: small classes. In the US, you hear about small classes as the hallmarks of a flourishing school where students can learn well, and you hear about how miserable the alternative (overcrowding) is for teachers. What you don't hear about, though, is how rewarding a small class can be for the teachers.

By my numbers, I have roughly 530 students between my two schools, each of whom I see a grand total of once a week. The individual classes range in size from 24 to 34, and those numbers never seem truly daunting individually, but when you are trying to learn students' names, for instance, 'daunting' would be a weak way to describe it. And you just can't be as effective in class without knowing names--"hey, you, in the blue shirt" is never as effective as "hey, Jerry"; when you have the ability to call individual students out, both for behavioral issues and for individual learning, class and individual respect instantly skyrockets.

I remember this from being a student, and it's only reinforced itself in my experience now as a teacher: students can't respect teachers who can't even be bothered to know their names.

So small classes are fantastic. It's great to be able to ask "What sound does 'b' make," have them all say it, and then say "Judy, what sound does 'b' make?" "Evan, what sound does 'b' make?" They learn better and pay better attention; I feel more engaged as a teacher, and so do my job better.

It's a funny fact of the education system here that the smaller schools--often those in Kaohsiung county areas--are looked down on, rather than extolled. When we learned about all the schools, we heard that ETAs would be teaching all grades and freaked, without considering the fact that each grade would have maybe 6 or 7 kids in it. In retrospect, and after seeing videos of fellow ETAs classes, it sounds perfect.

Don't get me wrong: I am absolutely in love with my schools, students, and LETs. They are fabulous, and I feel so blessed to be where I am. But, nonetheless, I'm always grateful for the smaller group interactions when I can get them.

The Elephant Song and Henny Penny

Just another day of Fulbright training. We did lots of mock lesson planning, and learned to teach around a theme/storybook. This process involved, for us, about an hour and a half talking about the children's story Henny Penny, involving us splitting into two groups and doing Reader's Theater, and being subjected to this man...

...for a good fifteen minutes, as he laboriously introduced all the characters, read the story, and broke randomly into song throughout. (And yes, that IS a man.)

We had some great practice with planning lessons around storybooks, and then around various holidays--my group had some pretty great ideas about April Fool's Day--and learned some games from a former LET, including an apparently-popular mafia-like game featuring, well, you can see...

Yes, that says "Bin Laden: I kill people everyday."

We also got to watch the quite-wonderful Elephant Song!

On another note, scooter practice was a bit easier today; I think it helped being on the back of Joy's yesterday. It's easier to feel how you should be sitting to maneuver when you've been behind someone who actually knows how.

And now it's pouring rain, together with an enormous thunder-and-lightning storm while my roomies and I sit around watching TV/YouTube videos and messing around on our computers. So, you know, just another day in typhoon season.