Colors slosh in white bowls: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, teal. A circle of white spins in a pool of purple; too fast, the waters lurch to one side and--oh! there it goes, over the shallow edge.
"Does anyone have a mop?"
Another casualty of adventuresome teaching.
In many ways, I'm like my dad: we both love coffee and almonds, we both value our down time, we both play the bass guitar, we think similarly about problems. But when it comes to teaching style, I am completely and totally, 100% my mother's daughter.
See, my mom's philosophy is that teaching should be fun, things will come together when they need to, and messes along the way are not only expected, but perfectly okay. As an example, earlier this year, my mom let every kid in her 4th grade class make their own apple pie; she's currently planning a unit on the Oregon Trail that features desk wagons that teams of kids will pilot through obstacles like a river crossing and food shortages. It's an absolutely stupendous way to teach, and it has resulted in, not just a great education for myself, my brothers, but for the hundreds of other kids she's taught over the years. And now, through me, her teaching legacy has reached a whole new group of kids here in Taiwan.
So what did I do today? I dyed eggs. With 5 groups of 30 5th graders. In the school multimedia room. For Easter.
Because, really, what could go wrong with giving a bunch of 10-year-olds bowls of colorful dye?
And, a few dozen spills, paper changes and calls for clean-up crews later, I can tell you the answer: actually, not that much! As my mom can attest, problems can be fixed when they need to be; new rules can be implemented at the last second, new papers can be found to cover the desks, broken eggs can still be dyed, worksheets can be handed out as needed for fast finishers or those who forgot to bring an egg.
And the kids loved it! I truly wish I could teach every lesson like this, full of fun and controlled in name only--though the school administrators might grow to hate me. But the kids wouldn't!
At the start: so clean! Though this was our third complete set-up of the day...
Some of the girls added adorable crayon designs!
And faces. ^_^
Of course, the boys got pretty creative, too--I wish you could see his whole egg! He drew rainbow stripes in crayon, then died the whole thing blue. Gorgeous!
Of course, we had a few casualties...(and undercooked eggs)..
...and a few premature snacks.
Hers was easily one of my favorites: yellow flowers on blue, and red flowers on purple. So pretty!
Cheesy grin! Proof that even the kids without eggs could decorate eggs. :)
...and eggs don't have to be perfect to be dyed...gaping hole? No problem!
Messes aside, it was a fabulous and fun teaching day. And yes--I will be doing it again tomorrow. So look out, multimedia room floor and countertops!
There are some things I've just had to accept about my experience here in Taiwan. For instance, that I will never be able to remember the names of every one of my students. And that those students will never be able to properly pronounce the letter "z."
Then today happened.
This first thing is embarrassing to admit, but a breakthrough nonetheless: today I realized, after 7 months of teaching them, that my 3rd class of 5th graders on Fridays at Qingshan has four twins from three pairs in it. I already knew that Bess and Kyle were in that class, while their respective twins were in other classes, but I had somehow missed up until today that this class also has Bruce and Chris in it--identical brothers whom I'd failed to notice were, in fact, twins.
I guess I just thought they were the same person or something? Weird.
Pictured here on the right: either Chris or Bruce. Chruce?
The letter "z" has been a major headache for me this year. It's an incredibly difficult sound for Chinese speakers learning English, yet for some unfathomable reason, it features pretty prominently in textbooks. Rachel's told me about her adventures trying to get kids to say the word "zebra," and I have had run-in after run-in with the word "zoo," which invariably comes out as "loo" or "lroo" or "roo."
To me, "l" and "r" bear almost no phonetic similarity to "z"--so why do they always resort to this? Why is this sound so hard? I honestly don't know. But I was thinking about it the other day, and realized that at least Chinese has the initial sound of "在" (tzai), which is admittedly not perfect, with the t sound before the z, but does at least feature a sound that, if said with "oo," would be recognizable as "zoo" (tzoo), not as "bathroom" (loo) or "regret" (roo/rue).
So I mentioned this breakthrough to Patty, who liked it and shared it with the classes via BoPoMoFo (Taiwanese phonetic system). The results? Whereas at the beginning of the class maybe 30% of the students could say their "zoo" correctly, towards the end I'd say about 75% could. Not bad! Now, just to retroactively teach this breakthrough to all of my students...
But it's pointless to "rue" the consequences of being slow on the uptake on this one. Just because I left my brain in the "loo" before doesn't mean its retrieval can't be meaningful--and it is, for Chris, Bruce, and the letter "z"!
Can I be honest? I don't really want to blog tonight. But here goes.
Today marks possibly the first time all year that I've gotten up on a Thursday morning with a specific purpose in mind: in this case, to climb Monkey Mountain with Kaitlin.
There were several problems with this plan, the most notable of which being that I had never before been to Monkey Mountain and thus had no idea where we should go to hike. Information gleaned from Rachel (who'd done it twice before but had never driven there) and the Internet (which had surprisingly little to say on the subject other than 'do it') taught me it should be easy enough if I just took Wufu and followed the signs for the zoo, and then the giant yellow banana signs. Of the latter, one oh-so-helpful blogger had this to say: "If you can't follow these, you're a moron."
Well, I am not a moron. But the signs, while large and easy to see, are themselves quite moronic. In essence, they led us on a wild goose chase around the mountain. We first followed them up the mountain and parked somewhere, wandered around and found nothing. So, we returned to a huge grouping of giant yellow banana signs--pointing in two different directions, and with the places they were pointing to written solely in Chinese.
We picked one to follow and ended up at the zoo where, according to some Internet denizens, you can also take a little hike. Except there were no trails in sight. So we headed back to our sign beachhead and went the other way, which eventually led us to a temple--another place where, according to my research, there should be trails. Indeed, inside the complex, there was even a portion marked "hiking trail."
We walked to the back of the temple (so far so good) and found a little trail, which we climbed, and where I did manage to see my first Taiwanese monkeys, lounging on the temple roof. "Great," I thought, "Now let's hike!"
Then the trail ended. We spent a while looking for others, but to no avail--that was destined to be the extent of our hiking experience.
On the plus side, though, that then gave us time to visit the always gorgeous British Consulate Residence, Wu Pao Chen bakery, and try to find a Starbucks selling a Kaohsiung mug (fail).
Then it was time for me to go to school, while Kaitlin got some rest. Highlights at school:
Patty suggesting I take a little nap because I wasn't feeling well;
Remedial class begins again--love love LOVE getting to teach a class of 6! Back to being able to say "Howard, what's this word? Teddy, what letter comes next? Jenny, what sound does 'k' make?" Judy, what's this word? Leo, what is this? Evan, what's this word?" It always makes me jealous of those in the county schools with tiny classes....*coughKarinacough*
Great day overall, though! Despite minor geographical failings.
9:05--how is it 9:05? I'm five minutes behind already...but that's okay, I guess, I can make up that time on my commute if I need to--wait, why isn't my scooter starting? Come on, come on! I do not want to waste money on a cab, and there's no way the MRT would get me there on time. Come on...finally! 9:10? Ah! Now--wait, why is my gas gauge not moving? SHOOT I'm completely empty. Going to have to stop on the way, and...wait, is it raining? And why are all these lights red?
It was Monday at its worst. By the time I speed-walked past my cheery students and colleagues' questions into the subject teachers' office, just 3 minutes ahead of the bell, my mind was everywhere and nowhere, and certainly not centered on the class of 5th graders I would be teaching in a few short minutes.
Maggie and I walked into class 5-10 and I flipped open my notebook (discovering along the way that one of the pictures I applied to the cover yesterday had already fallen off) to refresh my memory on what we were supposed to be teaching--ah, phonics. I love teaching phonics. "a_e," "ai," and "ay." Nice and simple.
I launched straight into the read-and-repeat phonics words, forgetting momentarily the importance of rehearsing sounds repeatedly first. "Kate"--"Kate"; "cake"--"cake"; "lake"--"lake"; "Gail"--"Gail"; "mail"--"沒有".
Wait, what?
That's right, "沒有," pronounced "mei-yo," which means, roughly translated, "no" or "don't have." And my entire class of 5th graders said it, without missing a beat, in perfect unison. And just like that, my day was made.
Monday mornings suck: this fact is universal. But, with a class like 5-10 first thing to keep me on my toes, I can't help but think that I'll be able to face them pretty easily, 沒有問題--no problem.
Technically, I don't have any kids. I'm not a mom; I'm not even an aunt or anything. But over the last four or five years, I've taken care of, and cared deeply about, numerous kids and, as I've observed pretty much my whole life, seeing my mom in her role as a teacher, when you spend enough time and care enough about the kids you work with, you can't help but think of them as 'yours.'
So really, I've had quite a few kids. In the parks program, there was a whole posse of them, and I thought I got the whole 'my kids' thing. Then I started college and began nannying, and realized I had been wrong.
'My kids' in Seattle are Ian and Sam, who I watched grow up from ages 6 and 4 when I started college to 11 and 9 when I finished, and Sophia and Isabel, who I watched grow up from ages 9 and 7 to 13 and 11. Being involved in these kids lives was fantastic; I loved getting to hear about their most recent sports exploits, drive them to music practice, play with them on the playground, and generally just get to be a presence in their lives. Having the privilege to hang out with them always outweighed whatever else I had going on; we always had so much fun together, and I felt like a part of their families. Just thinking about them makes me smile. I love those kids a lot, and I really miss them this year.
And that's not to mention the kids I watched in Seattle for shorter periods of time, and who I also cared, and care, a lot about--Matthew and Kaitlin, Scotty and Erin, Allie and Gigi, Finn and Devin, Janie and Meg, Johanna and Philip. (Incidentally, two is undoubtedly the number of choice in Seattle!) They're all, in a way, 'my kids.'
Now I'm a teacher in Taiwan. And that, of course, comes with its own whole group of 'my kids,' on a whole different scale--550-some of them, now. And, like a parent, I want to show them off. Therefore, I give you--long-lost (eh, a few months old...) videos.
So...yes. This was, in fact, the longest, sappiest introduction of YouTube clips ever written. But it also all happens to be true. :)
This first clip is from when I was just observing, before I even began teaching; it's the kids doing phonics--and sounding like a room full of crickets in the mean time!
And, in this one, we were playing a game where I would say "'I'm going to the..." and they had to run to the right flashcard/item. At the end, the kids in the front row trick their classmate into going to the wrong item--hence the laughter. :)
Finally, here's the special class of dancers learning an English chant and attempting to keep a beat with various musical instruments--to a chant which, really, was never that rhythmic to begin with.
I love all my kids--hope you enjoy the little snippets of them that I can give you here!
Just a few musings today is all I can really muster; I have no big heart-stopping events to tell, no pictures of my escapades, or even funny videos to show. I've just been skipping around the internet, from Cracked.com to YouTube to random parenting sites I found linked from my cousin's wife's Facebook page. (Hi, Diana!)
And this mishmash of input, together with my daily life here, has prompted some musings. They're simple, stupid even, but here goes nothing.
One of the big markers and privileges of becoming an adult is that you gain the ability and prerogative to make your own choices. Which is the great and glorious culmination of a childhood-long journey towards independence. You don't want to do something? Fine--don't. You want to do something else instead? Go for it.
The uncomfortable part of this arrangement comes when you don't want to do something, know that you should do it anyway, and have nothing to force you to do it anyway other than your own will power. By crossing this gap, you go from being an adult to being a responsible adult.
To be honest, I'm struggling with making the choice to be a responsible adult these days. For starters, I missed the intermediate stage most of my peers got in college. My college experience was strictly structured, not so much by an outside power but by my intrinsic need to achieve; to do that, I knew, I had to do X, Y, and Z. So I did. My college years, which so many people treat as the one time in your life when you can be stupid and recover from afterwards, were for me one heavily-scheduled day after the next, as I checked everything off my list like a responsible adult, so that I could achieve in life.
And it worked. I did well in school, was able to pay my bills, and I applied for and got a Fulbright grant.
Which takes us to now. I know what I want to achieve going forward: I want to get a fulfilling job in the writing/editing world and, hopefully as a result of said job, be able to pay off my remaining student loans. But what about now? Now I'm working as a teacher, which is fantastic, and I love it, but it's hard to see how time put into this pursuit can get me a job as an editor. Beyond that, I'm in a foreign city and foreign country where I will stay for one year, with a small group of people with whom I can communicate. Not exactly the sort of situation in which you can put down real roots.
My life is in flux: while I'm here, the only thing that does matter, or rather can matter, is the here and now. I can't do much of anything now to impact my future; what is, is, and that's just about all there is to it. I know this is a very good thing for me, a chance for me to learn to live here and now rather than in the future as I have done for, if I'm honest, the past eight years. But still, it makes it incredibly difficult to make the jump from being a self-indulgent adult living on and for momentary impulses to being a responsible adult, doing things because you should. As it turns out, my will-power is enormously achievement-based; when there is no attainable achievement to be gained, I have a hard time motivating myself to do much that I don't want to do.
So that's what I'm working on: filling the gap between adulthood and responsible adulthood with a mortar of self-discipline, shifting my motivation from mere achievement to principle, something infinitely less changeable. You have to start with something. And, though it has yet to motivate me into a steady workout schedule, it has at least locked me into a daily recounting of my thoughts, whether I feel like it or not--and whether they're worth reading, or just a few simple, stupid musings.
I had Chinese class again tonight, and while the hours I put in studying after last week's fiasco definitely paid off, my overwhelming though at the end of class was still one of being overwhelmed. Near the end, Tiffiany began singing this song, and I thought it apt, so I couldn't help but replicate it here:
Congratulations, you will now all have Avril Lavigne stuck in your head for weeks. (Of course, if you're like me and had a younger brother who was obsessed with Weird Al for a while, you may know it better in this form:)
In any case, on the drive home I had both versions playing through my head and alternating between lyrics--with very odd results, I might add. (Though, in my defense, I had forgotten the gross-out lyrics and skipped to the cousin stanza.)
Anyway, back to Chinese. It's complicated! But you know, even its complications are complicated; to be honest, I can't just say it's complicated and leave it at that, because every thing that makes Chinese hard also makes it easy, and vice versa. Check it out:
Hey look, a pros and cons list for learning Chinese!
PRO #1:
Chinese has a limited, and definitive, set of sounds--21 initials, 35 finals. All Chinese words consist of a combination of these, meaning there are really on 411 sound-combinations available in Chinese--infinitely fewer than English, if you think about all the different ways you can combine our 26 little letters (I'm not a mathematician; if anyone wants to tell me how many sound combinations there are in English, feel free. I found my Chinese stats online :) Alternately, of course, you can just pick up a dictionary and see how many unique words you can find in there, but I'm guessing theoretical math is easier in this case..). But 411 sound combinations is puny--anyone should be able to knock through those in no time flat! Which leads us to...
CON #1:
INFINITE HOMONYMS. For the non-grammar-minded among us, a homonym is a word which sounds exactly like another word, but which means something entirely different. In English, these are usually spelled differently, as well; some examples would be heir and air, wood and would, eight and ate--I'm sure you can think of more if you want to. In English, you pick up which homonym is being used by the context--if someone says they're going to give their gold ring to their heir, for instance, you can pretty well guess they mean their next of kin, not the oxygen which happens to be floating past their face. Homonyms are confusing, to be sure, but at least in English, they're a fairly limited set.
Not so in Chinese. As Pro #1 pointed out, in Chinese there are only. 411. Sounds. Possible. Just try listening for context when almost every word is the same. As a result of this homogeneity, in my most recent Chinese unit, for instance, we learned "zai" twice--with the same tone (I'll get to tones in a second--for now, just realize that they're usually what's used to make 411 sounds stretch to fit a language full of words.) So, in the simple question-and-answer of "Where is the post office located?" "Go straight, then turn right," you use "zai" twice, once to mean "located" (郵局在哪裡?) and then to mean "then" (直走, 再右轉.) Even typing those two sentences was difficult--I have pinyin input installed on my computer, so I type each word phonetically and indicate tone by number, yet even so I had to scroll through several pages of choices to find the right characters to use--and not just for zai!
As you can see, the characters for each "zai," 4th tone are different, but that just leads us into our 2nd con...
CON #2: So. Many. Characters. As part of solving the whole every-word-sounds-the-same problem, maybe, Chinese has more than 80,000 characters; you need to memorize at least a few thousand to be considered literate in the language. According to Wikipedia, educated Chinese-speakers know 4,000. Wait, 4,000? Out of 80,000? And these are the educated people??? Annnd here we run into how very very difficult and--wait for it--COMPLICATED the Chinese language truly is. It's not unimaginable at all for a very well educated Chinese-speaking person to run across completely unknown characters while reading something slightly more obscure. Sure, this happens to English-speakers, too, but at least with a phonetic language and a basic knowledge of linguistic etymology (such as the educated person in our scenario would have), you would have a pretty good shot at pronouncing it at least in the ballpark of correctly. Not so in Chinese-- from what I can tell, at least, a new character is a new character: you may be able to derive the meaning from the radicals (patterns based on meaning which get repeated across characters), but there's absolutely no guarantee that you could pronounce it. Maybe that's just my flawed understanding of the language, but so far as I can tell, that's it: a new character is absolutely unknowable, even for a very educated person. So good luck when you run into those lesser-used 76,000 words, I guess.
But at least you know to expect them. Which brings us to...
PRO #2: You can't change the characters. No, really, you can't change them. So, you know that whole irregularity thing you get in most languages, things like verb conjugations, pluralizations, all that crap? Throw it out the window. A word is a word is a word. "I go" is the same as "He goes" is the same as "She goes" is the same as "They went." (Man, where did English come up with those screwy changes, anyway? "Go" to "went"? Almost as bad as Spanish's "voy" to "fuí," from a verb called "ir." Almost.)
It's kind of refreshing in Chinese, coming from a language chock full of verb- and tense-confusion and irregularities: suddenly, "I go to the beach;" "Yesterday I go to the beach;" and "Tomorrow, he and I go to the beach" are all perfectly correct. Lovely for a new learner, especially when there are so many/so few words to work with all of a sudden. Just add a modifier like "de" (的) to most anything and it's possessive/adjectival (我 is "me/I," 我的 is "mine;" 中山路 is "ZhongShan Road," 中山路的 is "on ZhongShan Road"); add "le" (了), or just specify a time like yesterday, and you've made it past tense. And that's glorious.
And another glorious fact brought about by unchanging characters is...
PRO #3: They started combining words to make more words--and their compound words actually make SENSE. This is actually probably the single best thing about Chinese: if you know what each of the characters in a compound word means, you can probably figure out what the word means as a whole. Conversely, if you have absolutely no idea what the word you're searching for is, you can talk your way around the unknown word and, chances are, you might actually hit on the right one. As an example, the other day Rachel and I went out looking for a helmet store; on the way there, Rachel (who actually knows Chinese, unlike me) told me she didn't know the word for helmet, but she knew the words for head, scooter, safety, and thing. So, the plan was to ask if they had any "scooter head safety things." And sure, that strategy might also work in English, but the likelihood of actually guessing the word in English is infinitely smaller than in Chinese.
I mean, come on, just look at English compound words. There's neither "pine" nor "apple" in a pineapple, for instance. Chinese is much more sensical: the word for "school," for instance, "學校," is literally "study school;" an elementary school is "小學校," or "small study school;" and college is "大學," or "big study." As a language learner, there's no way not to love how literal it can be.
BUT...
PRO/CON #4: It's ironic that this is my fourth and last pro/con--and odd for me that I even have a fourth point--because what I'm going to talk about here is TONES, and there are four regular tones in Chinese (technically 5, but the 5th is a non-tone). And I don't quite know where to stick them.
On the one hand, tones are great--they provide a great non-context way out of the sticky homonym situation, and they make you sound super animated all the time.
But on the other hand, they're terrible--for English-speakers who are used to infusing our daily speech with tone to convey emotion, not meaning, the prospect of accidentally putting that question-mark tone (the 2nd tone in Chinese sounds like us asking a question in English) on a word accidentally, AND CHANGING THE ENTIRE MEANING OF THE WORD, is terrifying. Take the seemingly innocent and wonderful word "love"--in Chinese, pronounced "ai" (as in "eye;" 愛), with the fourth tone (which goes down from high to low, and sounds like a very serious definitive--not very loving in English). BUT the 4th tone is absolutely crucial here. Say "ai" with a first tone (like singing) and it means "sorrow;" with a second tone (question mark) and it means "cancer;" with a third tone (dropping and rising) and it means "low."
And that's just one example--and, for that matter, just one set of what each of those tones can mean, because, as I mentioned earlier, the same sounds and the same tones can have different meanings. Just, you know, for fun.
Maybe I do know where to stick tones--in the "cons" category. Because no one wants to accidentally tell someone that they "sorrow" them.
So yeah, that's my pros and cons list. I'll likely add more as I learn more, but now I'm still at an extremely low level of study. How low, you ask? Well, today during my breaks at Han-Min I was studying the words 圖書館 (library), 花店 (flower shop), and 銀行 (bank), amongst others, at my desk--and all three of those words were in our lesson for the 6th graders today. What's more, most of them were able to volunteer other locations when prompted, places like the swimming pool or the department store. I don't know how to say swimming pool.
But I'll learn! Because, for all its complications, Chinese is worth it, and I'm loving growing in my knowledge of it daily, however slowly.
I started teaching today! And I absolutely love it--today was my 'long day' of 5 periods of 6th graders, but even so, it was fantastic! I got there at 9:30, left at 3:00, and had a delightfully short and apparently short 5 and a half hours in between.
I was teaching with Alison at Han-Min today, and the next lesson in the textbook was, conveniently, "Where are you from?" It was the perfect tie-in from me to the lesson and back again. The first thing Alison and I did when we entered the classroom was introduce ourselves (mostly me introducing myself, since they've had Alison for a week now), and then Alison asked them if they had any questions for me.
And, at least three times out of the five, they did: "Where are you from?"
Bingo.
We taught them the six vocabulary words in the book, "the UK," "the USA," "Japan," "Taiwan," "Taipei," and "Kaohsiung"--all of which they pretty much knew (go figure with the last three)--and tried to explain the joyous complications of the US and the UK. (Do you know what the USA stands for? The United States of America! Did you know you can say "the USA" or "the US" or "the United States" or "America," too? Then came the part where Alison and I were baffled trying to explain how England relates to the UK, other than to say it is a part of it and not a country on its own. Oh, geography and politics.)
Then we plunged into asking them for other places they knew in English. Without fail, they produced Canada, Australia, China, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, and a handful of other countries and cities around the world (of which there were dozens, ranging from Canberra (Australia) to Madagascar to Chicago, depending on the class), and we used those to challenge them. The ultimate challenge for the final game of hangman, which I stumped them with every time, was the word "Oregon," which they of course had never heard before. But it was a nice way to end each class, with a new fun fact about where the new teacher was from and a new vocabulary word!
So here's a lovely cultural difference between America and Taiwan: in Taiwan, the teachers get treated like celebrities and/or royalty. And not just me as the foreigner--Alison seems to consider it as a given that the only things she ever carries away from class are her water bottle and maybe a book (despite carrying a portable microphone and book full of teaching aids from room to room), and that the class (or at least, most of the classes) will stand and bow when we walk in, and again when we leave.
And this is 6th graders! Sure, they still do some of the standard 6th grade stuff like whisper and laugh with their friends during class, but they aren't blatantly disrespectful or rude to their teachers or, that I've observed so far, even to each other. In the hallways, they greet every teacher with "Laoshi hao," which is more or less "Good afternoon, teacher." Amazing! Granted, it's early in the year yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing.
Recess happens in the hallways here...
...as well as on the track.
And is still pretty orderly!
And Alison and Maggie are beyond sweet! We all share an office, together with the other subject teachers (science and English), and they have gone out of their way to make me feel at home. They are constantly telling me to make myself, at home, sit down, use the computer, and offering that I use their things. Today at lunch, they BOTH got me coffee, unbeknownst to each other until Alison came back from the store and saw the coffee already sitting on my desk. Alison even made me a bag decoration out of native Taiwanese-style beads. And gifts aside, I can't imagine more supportive LETs--I feel so blessed to have them in my life; I hope I can be as much of a blessing to them as they are to me!
Getting to and from Han-Min today was actually kind of fun--I knew where I was, and how long I had to be there, and despite the stares I still get, I feel like I belong in Kaohsiung. When I run across other white people here, I'm tempted to ask them if I can help them find anything--but then don't because, truth be told, I probably wouldn't know how to find what they're looking for, my sense of belonging aside. The MRT ride was infinitely better than last week, since I'm riding at off-peak hours, meaning I can actually sit down and relax (what a difference that makes) and, as I did this afternoon, write.
This afternoon was pretty much amazing. I got out of Han-Min at 3:00 after a great afternoon teaching great kids, boarded the MRT, sat down and drafted my application essay. Just, you know, pumped it out. To be fair, I'd started it during nap time (ah, nap time! We get an hour and a half for lunch and/or napping--it's brilliant), but still, I wrote the bulk of my essay on the train; I wasn't quite finished when I got off, though, and the creative juices were still flowing, so I meandered off to the Starbucks two blocks from my apartment--today was first time I've visited, though, for the record--and plopped down to finish it. When I got home, a full day of work and an application draft down, I shot off a few important emails before dinner--I love being this productive in a single day!
Tomorrow I will be presented to the entire student body at Han-Min at 8:00am--hence the early posting on here. Hopefully I'll be sawing logs by the time my normal (late) posting time comes around.
A lot of firsts today, beginning of course with it being both the first of September and my first day in the schools. Fortuitous, I thought.
This morning I awoke to my alarm, turned over, turned it off, and laid back down to let the fog clear. *Ugh, 6:40am is way too early. Hold on...SIX forty?!?! I have to be gone by 7!*
So yeah, that happened. After all my careful planning and all the attention I paid to get to bed early, have food and gifts ready to go, set the alarm to allow for a full twenty minutes earlier than I usually do, just so I wouldn't make Maggie wait for me--I screwed up by a FULL HOUR. So I scrambled to get dressed, get my teeth brushed, makeup on (introduced in a big meeting to all the teachers and principals from both schools today!), shoved a piece of bread down my throat, gulped some OJ and coffee (still a necessity), and headed out the door 5 minutes after I should have.
Try as I did, those five minutes would not be retrieved. I sped-walked across the Cultural Center to the MRT station, remembered that I had to buy a ticket (my MRT card went missing about a week ago), and then had to deal with the machine spitting my money out repeatedly like the Pepsi machine I would have kicked back in middle school. When I finally got my ticket, I found out that I had missed the earlier train and would have to wait another couple of minutes before I could get on. Perfect.
So, long story short, Maggie had to wait about 7 minutes for me, which just so happens to be roughly the amount of time we were late to the all-teacher, all-administrator meeting she was taking me to. Shoot.
Anyway, they introduced me, then had me tell a little about myself (Hi, my name is Bekah Graham; I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is on the West side of America, and I went to school at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington, where I studied English. I don't know Chinese yet, so if I make a mistake, please correct me. I'm so excited to be here and meet all of you!), I shook the principal's hand, and then Maggie whisked me out the door to where Alison was waiting with a helmet for me; we walked straight down to her scooter and she drove me from Han-Min to Cing-Shan (also written Qing-Shan; pronounced Ching-Shan).
Once there, the routine was roughly the same to start out--Patty rushed me up to the conference room where the presentation of new teachers was already underway, and soon I was on stage. This was a little different, though, because Patty had translated the short self-introduction I had written for her earlier (I understood bits and pieces), and the principal read it out. So there went my spiel, all of my most important personal information already laid out for the watching crowd. Then they handed me the microphone. I basically recapped my name, that I was learning Chinese, and that I was excited to be there, and we moved on to the long meeting, which was of course all in Chinese. So I sat in the back next to Patty glancing through the pamphlet she had given me about the school and my weekly planner.
Somewhere along my rushed trip between my three LETs I had managed to give Maggie and Alison the gifts I brought for them, delicious jam from Detering Orchards and Theo chocolate with hazelnuts, but in the rush, I realized then, I hadn't gotten a chance to give the principal at Han-Min his gift. So, to be safe, I asked Patty at the end of the meeting if I could give my gift to her principal. He graciously accepted, and Patty and I moved on to talk to the other English teacher at the school (though it was mostly them talking, in Chinese, about curriculum), and then she took me to her classroom (she has and English classroom--yay! Alison and Maggie have to move around to the home rooms), where I was able to give her her gift, too.
Here's the classroom at Cing-Shan!
From the back of the classroom, where our desks are--it's huge!
Patty (R) and the other English teacher trying to fix the SMART board
The principal came in and gave me a spectacular gift of a complete lunch set--stainless steel lidded dish, chopsticks, spoon, carrying case, a water/tea bottle, and a coffee/tea mug. It was fantastic--and I was glad I gave him his present already!
And then, after all that rush, it slowed down for a while then. Patty didn't have any classes until after lunch, in fact, so she and I lesson-planned for next week (moon festival--woo!) and then just sat around chatting for a while while she shared her breakfast with me (by the way, almond milk: chalk another one up for drinks I love in Taiwan. I think I'm going to buy some to add to my coffee in the morning to make it more filling...and tasty :) ).
Then she took me on a tour of her school, which I wish I had taken pictures of--there's a super lush green courtyard between the "old building" and the "new building" (we're in the new building), and a big double-layered cover for the central part of the courtyard. It's to ward off the sun, which I think is funny because we have similar structures in the Northwest to ward off the rain. She also introduced me to most of the classes and their teachers--sometimes during recess, and sometimes in the middle of class. Either way, the response was uniform: dropped jaws and stares, while whispers of "Meiguoren, Meiguoren!" Ta shi Yingwen laoshi?" ("American, American!" "She's an English teacher?") circled around me. Also, almost without fail, one of the students or teachers would say I was beautiful--this is, by the way, probably one of the most awkward things to respond to when happening in quick succession and you are pretty certain they're just saying that because you look different, and just so happen to have blue eyes and lighter hair. My standard response was a little laugh and "Thank you?"
One adorable kid, I think he was a first grader, literally just stood and stared at me, eyes huge, mouth hanging open. It was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen, even if he was looking at me like I had a third eyeball. I didn't even care. Made me wish I got to teach younger grades.
So after lunch, which the school is graciously paying for for me, and which I ate together with Patty and several of the administrators, none of whom really speak English but all of whom were anxious to give me more food, Patty and I went back up to her classroom to prepare for the 6th graders. I asked her what she was teaching (today was strictly observation for me), and she said she was just going to arrange their seats and get their English names, and that should take most of the time. If there was extra time, she had a worksheet for homework that they could start filling out to introduce themselves.I'll be honest, I thought there was no way arranging a seating chart could take 40 minutes.
Which just goes to show you, I've never taught 6th graders before.
Our first class was CRAZY! Patty did finally get them all into their correct seats and get their English names written down on the seating chart, but it did take the whole class period. As for me, I got to deal with the entirely new experience of being hit on by 6th grade boys; one of the more rambunctious one, whose English name is Jack, was continuously leaving his seat and coming to where I was sitting, where he would ask me, in English and Chinese, if I had a boyfriend. Ohhhhh joy.
The only really productive thing I did in that class and the following was help adjust names--and boy, did we have some great English names come through. In that first class, we still have a Howard, Betty, Wilson and Wendy; one boy wrote ADDP on the board, though, and Patty asked for my help to find a boy's name that started with C. So ADDP became Cory, and I became inspired: how many normal English names could I come up with?
The second class just kept 'em coming, with Henna, Bel, Doris and Cosby all in attendance. I thought one kid but down "Kiln," but I was happily proven wrong--her name was "Kim." But it was in this class that I met----Box. And he was determined to keep his name that way! I don't know why, and neither does Patty (apparently his name back in 3rd grade was Bob), but eventually I persuaded him to change it to Max, which is infinitely better, and still has the cool "x" factor (sorry, bad pun). Here again, Patty asked for a boy's name that started with "E," and so a boy became Evan. I was liking the whole naming thing.
The next class brought even weirder names, but because Patty had taught them already this week, I didn't get to see a list--she just told me later that their ranks included Monkey, Bear, Red Bean and AKA. So I spent the majority of that class period compiling a list of normal English names that should (hopefully) be fairly easy to use--I'm going to try to persuade some of the more unusually-monikered kids to change with my big *American* list. Patty also informed me that she is going to give the 1st graders their English names on Monday, so I'll be giving her a copy of my list, and hopefully preventing another generation of Taiwanese kids with laughable English names! Hoorah!
After school we did a few projects, and then Patty drove me to the nearest MRT station at Kaohsiung International Airport, which would be a bit of a walk, I think. It also earns the dubious distinction of being the first subway stop I've seen since I got here that *looks* like a subway--that is, somewhat dirty and sketchy. The ride itself confirmed it for me: if possible, I'm getting a scooter. 45 minutes on a train crammed full of giggly high schoolers after a long day is just too much, especially when you top it off with having to walk another 10 minutes once you get 'home.'
So yeah, that was my day! And it starts again tomorrow at 7:50 back at Kaohsiung airport, so I'd better go to bed now. Bedtime moving up every night, it seems! Yet another first.
Something tells me this every day thing is only going to get more difficult as the year wears on. So really, this post is mostly just a quick update on my mostly uneventful day.
We did more co-teaching today, and it went MUCH better than yesterday. My co-teacher, Patty, is pretty quiet one-on-one, but I discovered today that she absolutely blossoms in front of a group of kids! It was great! We started out with a little interactive dialogue about us riding bikes/scooters, and she took off "on her scooter" to pretend to ram into the front row of students! It got them laughing and engaged, which is NOT easy to do.
Our time management was a little better, too--we got through all the vocabulary several times, played a game, and learned and practiced our sentence patterns (How do you go to school? I go to school by ________.); though we didn't quite make it to our last two activities, due in part to a time-eating magnet malfunctioning, it was a massive improvement over yesterday.
And now our co-teaching practice is over! Later this week we visit our own schools; next week, school starts. Time to actually prove ourselves, not just practice on hand-selected summer camp kids who know everything already.
I got my schedule today for Han-Min and Qing-Shan; it looks pretty sweet. My longest day is Monday, 9:30-3:00; Tuesday I only work 9:30-noon; Wednesday I have flag raising at 8:00 (early, but at least only once a week!), then teach 9:30-noon; Thursday I start late and work 11-4, and Friday is 8:40-noon. I officially love a (part-time teaching assistant) teacher's schedule!
Tomorrow we have a later start at Sanmin, which is good since I'm pretty sure we don't have much to do. Like I said, we finished co-teaching; we also finished, in my mind, talking about co-teaching: each 20-minute class was followed by a 20-minute discussion time, and we had a big-group discussion each afternoon, too. I don't really know what else there is to say, but I guess we'll find out!
In other news, there's still some drama going on in the ranks...hopefully it will all be happily settled soon. Also, we're going to take our scooter driver's license tests this week. Also, I'm going to the States this weekend. Yeah, just for the weekend. So that should be interesting!
Teaching, for me, is a mixed bag. On the one hand it comes naturally--what is there to complicate standing up before a group of kids and spouting off information?--but on the other hand it's a massive shot in the dark, something over which I have absolutely no control over, and the outcome of which may or may not be a direct result of what I do.
So I co-taught today. Maggie (one of my co-teachers from Hanmin) and I planned out a beautiful lesson on farm animals; I wrote up a story that incorporated the vocabulary--pig, goat, horse, cow, hen, duck; she printed and cut out pictures of each animal times 10 for learning sentence patterns (How many _____ are there? There is one _____. OR There are (#) ________s.); we set out a couple games and a couple exercises; we drew out the difficult words from my story on the board; we gathered the students. It looked to go great.
But it wasn't the right lesson.
Last week I taught a group of exuberant 4th graders; today, when we entered the room, we found a room full of stony-faced 6th graders. True, in Taiwan 6th grade is still primary school, but 6th graders are 6th graders across the globe and arbitrary educational divides: too cool for you, and definitely too cool for whatever you planned for them. You may pique their interest at first by being a foreigner, but good luck holding it once you start trying to teach them!
"What's my name?"
Last week, that question would rouse a huge roar in response: "TEACHER BEKAH!" This week, I could hear maybe three or four voices above the general murmur. To top it off, my 4th graders from last week were next door, and I could hear their excited screams throughout the day, and during my lesson itself. Several of them waved and said 'hi' to me in the hallway. But where were Vincent and Johnny and Victor and Tina and Coco when I needed them? Back in their own classroom, of course, enjoying themselves, while my new students sat in silent contemplation.
The contrast is enough to make me wish I was teaching lower grades, rather than the 5th- and 6th-graders I actually will be teaching.
But, despite my lesson's inability to excite the students, my story's too-complicated plotline and cast of characters, and our miscalculation of what we could do in our short (20 minute!) class period which resulted in our not even making it to the sentence patterns, let alone the most fun games, the day went pretty well.
We had story time in the morning, which I greatly enjoyed; I read them Bill Peet's "Zella, Zack and Zodiac," and the wonderful "My Life With the Wave," which they seemed to like, though the words were over their heads. And I enjoyed it! Here are some pictures Maggie took of story time:
With some fun effects, of course :)
ENTHUSIASM! Trying to pass it on...
Other key points of today...our kitchen/dining room area is clean! I can't even begin to take credit for it--Brittany and Rachel worked on it for hours while I was gone today, at scooter practice and then getting food. But I did at least manage to sweep and mop (by the old foot-and-rag-and-ammonia method--not the best in an ill-ventilated kitchen) the kitchen floor, and make the long journey down to the trash can with arm-fulls of stuff.
And that's about it! Hopefully tomorrow my learning will help my students' learning, and their enjoyment of the lesson, to improve.
It's official: I've been placed in League G! I will work with three great LETs--Maggie, Alison, and Patty--at two schools, Qin-shan and Han-min. Here's a map for reference.
If you can't tell from the map, I'm in the city! Which is great! I am very excited to work with Maggie, Alison and Patty--their schools are very focused on the arts, which will be lots of fun for a writer like me; I'm sure I'll be putting together some epic Reader's Theater projects for them!
But the drama is far from over: both my dear friend and apartment-mate Karina, and the wonderful Lydia, were unexpectedly placed in the more remote schools, and housing arrangements, as well as a few other things, are still sticky.
We co-taught again today, and it was great! Tracy and I taught animals, which went REALLY well--I had written a story which we read to the kids twice, once with them listening to answer questions (What was the monkey's name? How many animals were there? What kinds?), and then once where they got to act out each animal as I said its name. Really fun; they loved it, and the race/vocabulary game we played later. Even Rebecca's daughter joined in! Here's the story.
Here's a video from yesterday of Andrew's co-teacher Rebecca leading the group in a game/exercise:
Also worth noting is that the kids in my (temporary) class were freaking adorable. Here, I have proof!
L-R: Julian, Max, Coco, Candy
In line for pizza...some things are universal. :)
Teacher, me, me! I know! Also, L-R seated: Candy, Coco, Tina, Jenny, Frannie, Judy, Victor. Sammie is on the floor.
Twins in our class! The boys are Johnny and Victor; the girl (not a twin) is Teenie
So there you have it! And now I'm EXHAUSTED and going to bed. It's been quite the week.
