The end of Winter break marked the beginning of my last semester as a teacher. I have to say that although I don’t think my calling is to be a teacher, that I actually have come to enjoy teaching and the relationship you can build with your students. It’s less a focus on students’ English skills and more a focus on improving their confidence in their own skills as a person. My work in Taiwan is similar to the work I hope to do when I return to production, help empower and build people’s confidence in their abilities.
One of the issues I face teaching at a junior high is that across the board the students do not have a big drive to attempt to attend college. Yes, many of my students try in their coursework and parents do invest in bushibans (after school group tutoring) if they can afford it. However, the students don’t have as much of a drive to accomplish more. There is an understanding that students in the cities albeit Taipei, Kaohsiung, even Taitung city (the biggest city in our county) are all better equipped for university study. I think at a young age they have cemented in their heads that they don’t have that as an option even with the large subsidies and scholarships available. I think one of the causes is the lack of representation in their own community of what a college education can do. There are plenty of hard workers, but many of the jobs don’t require higher-level education and they are doing just fine in supporting themselves. My LET, local English Teacher, has attempted to motivate students to consider college by sharing her own travels which were made possible by her job and hard work stemming from a college degree. The plan backfired as some students took her comments as an avenue for her to brag about her own wealth to the students.
I’ve decided to take a page out of my parents book in that every student needs to have a job in mind for the future. I don’t care what they want to be as long as they have a goal they are working towards. To broaden their mind I have tried to include topics in my solo classes that encourage travel or addresses different jobs. I used sporting events such as the Australian Open and March Madness to increase interest in traveling and participating in the events through positions like a ball kid to interest my students in other countries. My International Communication Course has helped as well this semester. The curriculum for 7th and 8th graders is to teach festivals and holidays around the world. The 8th grade course introduces festivals from all countries whereas the 7th graders are focusing only on American and Taiwanese holidays.
The 8th grade class has been a great stepping stone for students’ interest. The first lesson addressed yuan xiao jie, Lantern Festival. We learned about the history of the festival and how it is celebrated in Taiwan and Taitung specifically. The class is primarily taught in Mandarin for the 8th graders so it has been a great opportunity to practice my listening skills. I brought English into the lesson by introducing different English riddles, an activity common during the Lantern Festival. To encourage students to take leadership in their own learning we had them break into groups to research other festivals in other countries that include lanterns in their celebration. It was exciting as a teacher to see their enthusiasm to choose what festival they would want to present to the class.
International Communication also isn’t a course that requires any tests which gives my LET and I a time to make learning fun and encourage creativity in the classroom. To surprise the students this semester we have taken them outside the classroom on two different occasions. Once we took the students to the kitchen to make tang yuan together, a dessert of rice flour that is eaten during the Lantern Festival. I thoroughly enjoy classes like these in which the students can talk amongst themselves while still learning. I feel like I really get to know them and their personality when observing them in this environment. The tangyuan was also a great success as they tasted delicious and surprisingly, I didn’t mess up the recipe as I helped show each step to take.
The success of the tangyuan class encouraged my LET and I to think outside the box a little more in how to make our class more interactive. The students’ interest in a Korean dance performed at their Lotus Lantern Festival, a festival that was presented as being similar to Taiwan’s Lantern Festival, gave us an idea to teach a dance in class. Now what dance to teach was the question. In an effort I think to include me more, my LET asked me to teach square dancing to the students. I admit, I learned in school and even would square dance on the occasional horseback riding weekend vacations I had as a horse-obsessed child, but neither of those experiences really prepared me to teach 30, 8th graders how to dance. Despite square dancing still being taught in many state’s elementary schools, the resources for teachers are severely lacking. I pieced together the basics and by the time class began was directing students to do-si-do, swing their partner, and “make a right hand star.” The students had a blast and I almost lost my voice as I called out the different moves we learned over the music. It’s these classes that I can bring something different where I feel like I am making a difference. Even though square dancing isn’t a skill my students will need in the future, they might remember with fondness a class that encouraged them to try new things and embrace laughter and learning.
The success of sharing different cultures and encouraging students to take a leadership role in their own learning in the 8th grade International Communication Class isn’t felt the same in the 7th grade version. Teaching only in English about American and Taiwanese holidays is limiting. Why do they need another 4 weeks spent learning about Christmas and Thanksgiving, two holidays already taught last semester? I did take it as a challenge to come up with new methods to review the holidays such as applying their newfound cursive skills to writing letters to Santa. We also made Thanksgiving picture books and a compliment turkey. Now the Thanksgiving picture books turned out well. The students had to match the sentences to the correct picture and then write their own sentences using the simple sentence structure “I will bring…. to the Thanksgiving feast.” I got some interesting Thanksgiving additions to the table such as barbeque, beef noodle soup, curry, and my personal favorite McDonald’s. Seeing as we had two days of Thanksgiving, I was hard pressed to design a new activity on Thanksgiving that we hadn’t done last semester.
Just a robot girlfriend and a car for a 7th grader, is that too much to ask for?
One of the key aspects of Thanksgiving is expressing what you are grateful for. Going off this idea, I thought a compliment turkey in which you write a compliment for another student on a turkey feather would fit the holiday nicely. I expected there to be some class favorites and to combat that, the first 5 compliments students wrote were to the person I assigned, whether it was the person to their left or right. After writing 5 feathers, the students could then write one for anyone else in the class that they hadn’t yet while they glued their feathers on their turkeys. Even leaving the students with 5 minutes of extra writing time resulted in a big disparity in feathers of turkeys. Some students ended with 8 or 9 feathers and others just the original 5. This activity gave me a better idea of the classroom dynamic. That being said, I will avoid other activities similar to “popularity contests” in the future.
With more successful English lessons than bad, I have enjoyed teaching more and more. Outside of school I have taken it a step further, tutoring the son of my director last year as well as teaching a Senior High School group. I don’t feel as pressured or worried before teaching as I used to. Now it doesn’t feel like I am about to go on stage to perform a sonnet without practicing. I can roll with the punches and react to the student. When I was reviewing the script of Easy, the son of my director last year, for his English competition I was able to actually get him to enjoy spending a Sunday afternoon practicing English. We were playing tic-tac-toe any time he remembered a line without looking. Occasionally we would shout our lines or whisper them to add some diversity to repeating the same story over and over. In the end, our reward was playing a pretty good game of Chess. Chess is not that popular in Taiwan. Easy has only been playing for around 4 months. I was all ready to go easy on him, losing good pieces in the beginning because he is a young kid. A little too late I realized that he actually was a good player and that I didn’t have to go easy on him. I had a blast and am looking forward to future matches.
The Senior High School class was very similar in that I didn’t actually have the time to prepare that much. Two days before an hour and a half class, I was offered to teach a group of high school girls about anything I wanted. I went with cultural differences of the US versus Taiwan. Although the students didn’t talk as much in English, they did understand everything I was saying down to obscure words like twin and commercial that aren’t addressed in textbooks. I found myself laughing, able to share my own embarrassing experiences so far in Taiwan. I also introduced the game would you rather leading to the group running across the room between the two potential answers of questions such as “would you rather meet BTS or Beyonce” or “Would you rather go to 7/11 or family mart.” I didn’t think anyone would get as passionate about chocolate versus chips, but the discussions that it sparked made me feel a part of something as I observed the students getting more comfortable around me. Obviously, we ended class with a much needed photoshoot which also involved individual pictures with me. I am already planning the next class I can teach in which I plan to talk about the behind the scenes of production!
In an effort to continue to build my relationship with the community, I have reached out to more of my friends from last year. I have been able to have coffee with my old LET which lasted 2 hours longer than I thought, good thing we chose a coffee shop that was open till 9pm. I even made plans to go out to dinner with the nurse I used to tutor in English. What started as just me and one other person grew to include my LET. This addition made sense as the nurse, Kate, was a little nervous about her own English and had wanted to practice with me, yet liked the security of another fluent Mandarin speaker just in case. So I arrive at the restaurant assuming it's just the nurse, Irene (my old LET), and myself. I find almost all the teachers from my old school, Dainguang elementary school, that live in Taitung city sitting around the table. It was a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t had that good of a night in a while. Despite being out till almost 9 pm on a school night, I could’ve stayed longer. We didn’t even default to English as a group. I talked about current events in Mandarin with the group, my future plans for LA, and discussed my old co-worker’s daughter getting accepted to college. It felt good to slowly be getting the connection with my old coworkers that I wished I had all year last year. I am thankful to have this year to get to that level in which I could use Mandarin to keep up with the conversation and even be sarcastic and joking in my second language. Dinner marked a milestone in my time in Taiwan.
Outside of the classroom and Taitung I have taken a giant step to a new frontier, the ocean. As a gift I have begun my scuba lessons. First portion was an online class that was surprisingly long that covered all the terminology, hand signs, warnings, and math involved in scuba diving. I can handle a class and taking notes. However, when it came to putting to use everything I learned it was a different story. There were two other people in my class, a Swedish woman who came to Taiwan in November and the head diplomat of Australia. Both were unbelievably nice and friendly. It was fun chatting with them about our jobs and our experiences in Taiwan as we drove to the pool for the practical portion of our scuba class. I scored a 100% on the review test, but I did have difficulty once we got in the water. Both of the other students had scuba dived before as parts of vacations and were familiar with the skills early on. Leaving me to struggle with the skills, but also rush myself in trying to get comfortable under the water.
The first skills sound easy on paper. They require you to practice and learn how to clear your mask of water should it fill while under water and then moves on to skills such as being able to swim without a mask if something happens during a dive. I didn’t even consider that I would be a person that would somewhat freak out when water was on my face and I still needed to breathe. It went against everything my body has learned, that my face being wet meant I can’t or shouldn’t breathe. After a brief freak out, I was able to calm down and remember what we had been told to empty the water from my mask. Over the hours spent in the pool this first skill did grow easier and by the end I was doing it without having to think as much.
The skills I did catch on to pretty fast were swimming with neutral buoyancy and practicing a CESA, a way to reach the surface if you run out of air with no one around that requires you to use one breath to breathe bubbles at least for 10 meters while swimming slowly. The skills that require more athleticism in executing I got down; the ones that are more mental like clearing a mask, finding your respirator if lost, and correctly completing the steps to share air with a buddy are a little harder.
Despite my challenges in the pool, I look forward to completing my transition into a mermaid next week on my visit to Turtle island.