The first part of today involved teaching American traditions to the kiddos; the second part involved whole-heartedly embracing Taiwanese traditions and injecting them with a bit of playful Americanness.
Our lesson today (and yesterday) was pretty simple and fun: an introduction to sports around the world. The book included bowling, badminton and dodgeball, but neglected to add soccer or American football. I quickly remedied that, and re-discovered that, no matter where they're from, boys love the idea of a sport that involves hitting each other and making the other person fall over.
Seriously. I played about a minute from this clip of the last Super Bowl, and at the end of many classes, both yesterday and today, I had boys trying to figure out where they could find more of this "football" craziness. To which all I can add is a Scott-themed "aMERica!"
After school, our apartment got together with Katy (an American teacher at Sanmin), Fonda, and Chialing to celebrate Rachel's birthday today in the most Taiwanese fashion ever: KTV.
And this was, hands down, the most fun I've ever had at KTV. The English songs available at this particular place were not particularly plentiful, and consisted primarily in popular songs from the 90s or earlier, but that led to fantastic, no-holds-barred singing contests of the Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Avril Lavigne etc, plus songs like "Barbie Girl," amongst others.
Because, really, when you're doing KTV, you've already kissed your dignity goodbye; it's more fun if you take it all the way and go for flat-out ridiculous! Once Chialing and Fonda arrived, we incorporated some Taiwanese songs too, of course, leading to several rousing rounds of our old favorite 我的寶貝,
as well as several songs by 五月天(Mayday) and others that I recognized but can't yet sing. (To do list: learn to sing more Taiwanese songs for KTV purposes.)
It was a lovely way to spend the evening, and a lovely way to wish a happy birthday to the wonderful Rachel! By the time we ended, the whole group was belting out "My Heart Will Go On," confirming American stereotypes and thoroughly celebrating our past four hours in the best way possible.
So, in light of such a bi-cultural day, there's really only one way to end this post: to say Happy Birthday, Rachel, and 生日快樂,池蕊!
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. The food, the family, the contemplative mood--and, in my family at least, the desserts--are all great reminders of what makes life so special.
Which is why I was overjoyed that all of my LETs wanted me to teach the holiday at their schools. This is, according to other ETAs, a bit of a rarity; Thanksgiving is, after all, a uniquely American holiday (when celebrated at this time and for these reasons, anyway) with few real-world applications outside of the US. But then again, I am the resident American teacher, so it's my job to teach my culture, right?
So that's what I set out to do. I had had some ideas about how to do it last week while lesson-planning, which I enthusiastically shared with my LETs, and which they agreed to with few issues. It wasn't until Friday, as I sat on the train headed for Taipei, that I realized I had volunteered myself to create and teach the entire lesson by myself.
I went to work, and crafted a PowerPoint presentation in pretty Fall (well, American Fall, anyway) colors, including a brief account of the first Thanksgiving, discussion about when it is, and, most importantly, a description of Thanksgiving traditions and foods. I made myself drool as I uploaded photos of turkeys and stuffing and cranberry sauce and picked out our vocabulary words for the day--thankful, feast, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie--wrote out instructions for hand turkeys, complete with a sentence pattern they were to write in the palm area ("I am thankful for______"), and found and linked to several YouTube videos.
But when I arrived at school today, I discovered that we had a problem. Several, in fact.
At Hanmin, we don't have an English classroom, and so go from home room to home room teaching English; only one or maybe two of these is equipped with a computer-overhead set-up. We knew this ahead of time, of course, and Alison had booked us for the audio-lingual room upstairs. But when I got to school, I discovered that my beautiful PowerPoint's formatting had been severely mangled in the transition from .pptx to .ppt and, what was worse, that the "audio-lingual room" was entirely lacking in the audio, thanks to a blown amplifier.
What followed was several periods of awkwardly silent YouTube clips drawn from disordered PowerPoints (I did my best to fix them over breaks), as I tried to explain what was going on:
"See, that's Squanto, and he's helping the children plant corn with fish to make it grow better...See, Lucy is telling Charlie Brown that football is a Thanksgiving tradition, so this time she won't yank the ball away...See, the Thanksgiving Day parade..."
To make matters worse, the large, echoey room's microphones were also not working, and I quickly discovered that, out from under the eyes of their home room teachers, the kids at Hanmin are much MUCH more prone to talking. By lunch time, my throat was beginning to ache.
Fortunately, though, just before lunchtime we scored another room with a projector, and this time one with functioning audio--but still no microphone, and this room was larger than the last. We finally rigged a mic to work for the last period of the day, but by that time there was no going back. My throat was irrevocably sore.
On the plus side, though, I think the kids enjoyed the presentation, for the most part, and I was able to teach them many things about Thanksgiving that even my LETs had not heard about, foods like candied yams and stuffing, and activities like Black Friday and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
I'm pretty sure that this clip was their favorite part of the whole day, though, so here it is for your enjoyment:
Snoopy is a big hit here; he was also their favorite part of the Macy's parade clip I showed them.
After classes, I took my malfunctioning throat home with me, a persistent technical difficulty from a day strewn with them. But it didn't matter much as I got to enjoy the wonderful company of Emily, Lydia, Fonda and Chialing on Chialing's birthday, sitting outside her shop, drinking tasty drinks and eating delicious food and ice cream with her homemade mulberry-cranberry-strawberry jam on top.
I can't think of a better way to end a day that was all about Thanksgiving than that: eating great food with great friends and reflecting on how great life is.
