With the end of the school year insight I don’t like to waste a weekend with nothing to do. I have lots of locations and activities still on my bucket list, so when plans changed last minute and my friend was no longer able to come visit me in Taitung for the weekend I was looking at a weekend with nothing special to do. Waiting till last minute to get train tickets gets a little difficult now especially if you want to go to Taipei or for Sean to go to Taitung. However, meeting in the middle is a viable option which doesn’t take as much planning. Hualien city is such a place. Only a 2 hour long train ride, the city is a great escape when I want to get out of my county.
Sean and I met up Saturday night with just enough time to get a dinner of dumplings before the restaurants closed for the night. After a long week we slept in and got dinner at a new brunch spot during their “Grand Opening.” Sean chose the best thing on the menu, the closest dish to Chicken parmesan I have seen here. I, on the other hand, went with a mushroom omelet and was sadly disappointed by the fact the mushrooms must’ve come straight from the can because of their slight sour taste. Originally we planned to go hiking after breakfast in the Taroko Gorge, a mountain pass with multiple trails, but the weather had other plans. A typhoon was slightly hitting the east coast of Taiwan leaving on and off rain for most of the day in its wake. Hiking in that along with our overnight backpacks didn’t sound like fun. The weather was more akin to a good work day inside, so we looked up the “fancy” Starbucks which wasn’t too far away and caught a taxi.
Now what is a “fancy” Starbucks you may ask? Well, Hualien has a famous Starbucks made out of piled up train cars. Nothing else about it changes. The menu is the same, the seating is the same, but the building is a little different. I admit it didn’t look as picturesque as it seemed off of Instagram. When we arrived there was a little bit of a line going outside. Not wanting to stand in line long, Sean and I decided to check out the mall next door really quick to waste some time. Walking around it seemed like a regular mall until we rounded a corner. The mall opened up to a courtyard of games set with a ginormous slide. Of course we had to find out if we also could use the slide so we took all the escalators up five flights. I was a little nervous we would be viewed as the crazy foreign adults that wanted to go on a slide for kids, but the woman at the desk didn’t even bat an eye. She was surprised we even double checked to see if adults could go. The slide happens to hold a Guinness World Record for longest indoor slide, so maybe that’s the reason it’s so accepted for adults to also use it.
Now that we feel a little more comfortable talking with customer service we were able to actually talk our way into a discount. Instead of paying for each of us having one slide, the woman allowed us to buy a package meant for one person to have two slides and we would split it. After being handed a padded helmet and gloves I started questioning what we had gotten ourselves into. From the ticket stand we had to climb yet another set of stairs to the top of the slide. Laying down on a potato sack it took less than 10 seconds to reach the end of the slide. I was thoroughly surprised how much speed I picked up on the way down. The whole mall must’ve heard Sean when it was his turn because the first drop of the slide was met by a squeal equivalent to the pigs in the Gecko commercials. The slide managers also sent our backpacks down the slide following us. Now I can say that I have done something world record worthy or at least seen something that is.
On our way up from the basement where the slide ends, we saw yet another weird activity we never considered doing before, Virtual Reality games. I felt like a kid with all these fun games, but the only difference being I am an adult with the money that allows me to do such activities. I was like a kid in a candy shop. Sean knew that I was interested by the look on my face. I mean how often is it an option to play a VR game? The prices weren’t too expensive so we went for it opting for a zombie shooting game rather than a Call of Duty like game. What I hadn’t realized is that it’s not like laser tag where you are placed in a room and run around. Everything is based on the headset, so you are connected to the side of the wall with a cord allowing you to move a little bit as you change position. Sean probably understood more of the instructions than I did. I was focused more on the actions of the woman explaining how the game worked. We chose our guns and put on our headsets.
At first, mine didn’t work. I was staring at a beautiful landscape of mountains with a floating box. Sean kept saying he could see me as a super buff guy, but I couldn’t see or hear anything. After letting the woman know, she restarted the game and the real visuals came to life. While I was a super buff guy that probably spent most of his time in the gym or on a beach, Sean was a blond girl wearing less clothes than you would expect when you are in a zombie apocalypse and working as part of a military clan. After getting used to my surroundings the zombies started coming. It was slow and slowly they started to pick up the pace coming from everywhere: down the hall, from inside the jail cells, and even from the sides of us. I definitely didn’t pick the right gun for the up close zombies. I had what I think was a shotgun so I had to reload every shot leaving me less time to aim. Sean had chosen the machine gun which worked perfectly until he forgot how the woman had explained how to reload.
As a team we lasted 10 minutes in the game. Only getting killed by the fire one of the zombies threw at us. I personally think we were hindered by our connection to the walls of the room we were playing because if it was real we wouldn’t have been able to just stand there and would’ve had an easier time looking around and getting away. After only 10 minutes my arms were sore from the weight of the gun. I hadn’t expected my adrenalin to sore that much during a fake game. There is something unnerving about games where you can see them getting closer and closer. It brought another dynamic to video games that I hadn’t even considered before. In the end, let it be known that during a zombie apocalypse you would want me on your team than Sean. My aim with a shotgun caused more damage than his machine gun.
Successfully defending against the impending zombie apocalypse leaves you a little tired, so we opted for finally returning to the fancy Starbucks for some drinks and work. We came at just the right time between crowds. Getting a seat by a large window we were able to watch the clouds and rain roll in while we drank our Mango and Passion Fruit Smoothies (a Starbucks drink that makes me miss Chai Tea Lattes a little less) and did our work.
For being a quick day trip, Hualien gave me a chance to feel rested and do something different. I hope this is one of my takeaways from my time in Taiwan, I want to take advantage of any chance I get to try something new. It isn’t just my ability to take a chance which I have mentioned in other posts, but I have learned the true meaning of stopping to smell the roses. I’ve heard the saying about a thousand times, but I truly think I am starting to understand a little more. It’s not just taking the time to look around you, but being willing to divert away from a plan or path you set yourself on. There is no one way to go about something. I may take a backway to get to a destination or partake in activities that may not add to my career, but bring happiness to my life. Nevertheless, each choice will add something to who I am.
Taiwan has made me reflective on my choices, but as a teacher I also am aware of the choices of my students. The 9th graders, freshmen, have a big choice ahead of them. One that will determine the job they get, their ability for socio-economic mobility, and their options in the future. They are taking the senior high entrance exam which will determine whether they can attend senior high, a vocational school, or if it's their choice not continue with their education. When discussing this with my co-teachers I was surprised that the students even get to choose. Outside of preparing them for this test for the most part of this year, the school administration have also had multiple presentations about senior high schools in the city and vocational schools available to them so they are aware of their options.
Working with junior high students this year I have become even more aware of my privilege. Not only am I American, but I come from a family that prioritized education. We didn’t take the vacations my friends did and didn’t like in a big house, but I was never at a school that didn’t challenge me. Never had to choose if I needed to get a job to support the family rather than continue studying in school. Most of all, I never needed to question myself if I could reach and achieve a college degree, it was second nature. Of course, I’d go to college. It just depended which one. My students here don’t have that.
It is a competitive process to get into senior high school in Taiwan. The test consists of science, math, history, Chinese, and English sections. Their section scores as well as overall scores determines their school options. I was surprised that their English scores were considered as seriously as their Chinese and math. Therein lies the challenge for my students. Overall, my students are not strong students. They are very bright outside of the classroom, but don’t test well in most subjects. Growing up outside of the city and without bushibans, tutoring services after school typically attended by people in cities or those with a lot of money, my students are at an even larger disadvantage for scoring high on their English sections. I have heard some of the students speaking at the city schools. Their English level is close to perfect once they get over their self-consciousness in speaking with a foreigner. I still have students that never got a good basic understanding of phonics and therefore have a hard, near impossible, time reading even after studying English since 3rd grade. As a result, these last few weeks I have kicked it in gear trying to build their confidence in my students English skills as they dread the upcoming test.
A teacher’s job isn’t just limited to test taking as I have seen in my coworkers. They go above and beyond to help my students in their family lives as well as give them all the information on their next steps following graduation from junior high. I wanted to help give back if only to help encourage students to view education not as a chore, but as an opportunity for more. I have spoken about how my LET has tried to talk about her travels abroad that are an option because of her college education and position as a teacher. At that time the students took her stories as her showing off her wealth to them, not exactly what she was going for. In trying to avoid that interpretation, I bought two Game of Life board games. If you aren’t familiar with this game it’s actually somewhat of a go-to sleepover game growing up. Each player starts off with a car and a choice. On their first spin of the wheel they can decide whether to start on the college track or the career track. I don’t think the students thought much of the first choice, choosing quickly and looking at the paydays on each path. The paths then meet after the “graduation” stop. The big differences between career and college was that although career starts to get paid on their first role, the occupations they choose from make less money. The college track requires the player to pay the bank half of their beginning money before even rolling, a 100k straight out of their hands. The prospect of the cost kept most of the 9th graders from choosing college even with fake money.
The students who had taken the career path were laughing at the money they made and jobs they had from athlete and singer to construction worker. However, after three turns the few that chose the college path were given job choices like lawyer and doctor, making two times the amount of the other people in just one pay day.
I was pleasantly surprised how much fun the students had playing the game. Interjecting English when they could, they played till “retirement”, the finish of the game and put the houses for sale and counted their savings. Having played this as a girl I remember always wanting to add pets and getting excited to pick a big house with lots of rooms for potential kids. Watching the students play now, they had the same idea. Buying lavish houses and filling their cars with twins and pets. Only when they landed on spaces that required them to fix their house, pay for their children’s schooling, and other mundane life expenses did they comprehend the cost of living that life. This game belongs in the classroom, not just in the hands of elementary school slumber parties.
While the 9th graders hopefully learned a thing or two about decision making, the 8th graders learned about bigger picture problems, water scarcity. Taiwan is facing one of its worst droughts in more than a decade. The west coast has been forced to close swimming pools, car washes, and limit water usage to 5 days a week. Even with these precautions the water reserves are close to depletion. With this in mind my LET and I used our International Communication class to discuss how we use water and water use around the world. The students raced to come up with creative ways we use water daily. Everything from washing our hands to making ramen were included in lists on the board.
After filling the board with all our water activities we then compared it to the water available. The students couldn’t believe with how much water is on the planet that only some of it is usable or consumable. Sharing the stories of different countries and the impact of walking miles for water everyday and the subsequent inequality of education from the girls being responsible for bringing home water. In comparing the water needed to grow certain foods like almonds and eggs I helped the students conceptualize our global water needs.
Next step, applying it to our lives. Upon addressing global water and Taiwan’s own water shortage we looked to our own use with a worksheet titled insert name here’s water use. The worksheet concept was that they had one water bottle to last them a day. Students had to prioritize what they would use it for based on percentages. Would hand washing during COVID take precedence over clean clothes or maybe you wouldn't grow rice and switch to another plant? Despite most of this water unit being taught in Chinese, I think the students took a lot away from the content. Now that my time here is almost done, I want to focus on the hard skills to take away. English skills are good (as I said earlier they play a large role in determining what senior high students attend if any), but so is critical thinking. When we first introduced the activity there were a few students that wrote it off just labeling their whole bottle for drinking. That was until we reminded them without water to wash fruit and vegetables, there would be no safe fruit to eat. No water allocated to cooking means no prepared foods. The bare minimum was pointing out if you drink a full bottle of water, did they still plan to use the restroom because that would also require more water. I enjoyed being able to apply my environmental science background to create questions about statistics and push my students to think about their own consumption in a critical manner.
While I have brought new games and been able to address deeper issues in the 9th grade and 8th grade classes, 7th grade still seems to be a little out of reach. My LET and I attempted to encourage our students to research a holiday on their own. Being the first time they may have researched on their own we allowed them the choice of any festival celebrated in Taiwan. I didn’t think it was an impossible task because it’s a holiday they are already familiar with. I can’t tell whether the lack of complete worksheets following a 45 minute period on the computer where I made sure they didn’t go on Youtube or gaming sites was a result of it asking too much or the fact that the 7th graders have checked out. With less than 10 more weeks left I somewhat understand. However, my understanding comes with a teensy little bit of impatience as I attempt to bring new ideas and projects that their “too cool for school” attitudes don’t seem to find interesting. I have now taken a step away from being the cool teacher. Instead, in some classes I have begun what I have termed Rubix Cube Jail, a drawer at the front of the class for any Rubix Cube that is taken out during class. It is surprising how they try to rationalize how their cube relates to English or festivals.
While 7th graders may not want to be in class, my English class of grandmothers sure does. Word spread since last semester and slowly my class is getting larger and larger. It is a little more difficult to balance the different levels, but it’s good practice for differentiating a lesson. Now Lily, Debra, Sarah, and Ann join the ranks of my English class. We have even begun being able to compose our own sentences rather than just memorizing questions and responses like How are you.
Some other School Activities:
Fire Fighting 101
Students practiced using fire extinguishers, a fire hose, and even crawled through a classroom they filled with smoke.
Leather Wallet Making:
My wallet was supposed to have the outline of Taitung on it, but the stamp didn't come out and instead there was just a dark imprint of a undefined spot. In covering it up, I just made it worse. My choices just snowballed as I lost hope it what it would turn out looking like. My coworkers kept saying it looked "special" which I interpreted as being weird.
As much as I love my school, a change of pace is always much appreciated. Getting selected as an ETA for the Fulbright Remote Service Trip to Green Island offered me such an experience. Along with teaching under Fulbright we are asked to perform community service and one of the Fulbright opportunities are these remote service camps. ETAs travel to areas in Taiwan without ETAs and run English camps for the day with elementary school students. I applied for all of them last year, thinking that at least my background in Environmental Science would make me a shoe in for the camps themed around being green. That was not the case. I was never selected last year and nor was I able to do any camps last semester either. Green Island changed that. Thanks to Ina, our coordinator, she was able to change the amount of people who could go from 2 second year ETAs to 3. When it came time to choose names out of a hat I was chosen along with Kendra and Amanda!
With 9 of us chosen altogether for the Green Island camp, we set to work. For a month we have been planning the classes and activities. Despite me really hoping we would choose the theme of “Going Green on Green Island”, our theme was food around the world. All the work culminated into taking Friday off of school to ferry to the island for the weekend. I think as a result of our large group and potentially because of foreigner privilege we were led to the VIP section of the ferry. The top level with comfy leather seats. I could not tell you a single thing about the ride other than it was comfortable, having plugged in my headphones and closing my eyes for the entire trip.
*disclaimer: not all pictures from Green Island are those I took
The ferry trip only takes an hour, but that hour meant we had to commute the day before the camp instead of the day of. Arriving on Green Island, we had no work to complete. Ray, our coordinator, planned a guide for “The Secret Blue Hole.” We weren’t given much explanation for what it was. I tried my best to research the activity on blogs and found some that described it as being a gorgeous open swimming hole filled with blue water. I think I may have been the only one in the group to research it because I kept getting questions like I knew everything about the activity in question whereas in reality I was finding out things as we went just like everyone else.
As a group we were led to a stand and all given scuba boots, life vests, and masks with snorkels. If we were given these for an activity in the US I would think it was dangerous or hard, but in Taiwan it means the exact opposite. There are a lot of water activities for tourists that people do who aren’t comfortable in water. You can go snorkeling here without even being able to swim doggie-paddle. Instead, tourists will wear life vests and be connected to a rope as they follow in a line after their guide. This is not the kind of activity I would enjoy. I was a little apprehensive that was what we walked into. After leaving the stand with our gear we scootered ten minutes to the other coast. Parking alongside a lot of many other scooters (a bad sign), we started “hiking”, more like walking to our destination. The destination was a pretty pool next to the ocean of clear, blue water. The guide told us we could safely jump in if we wanted. We took turns jumping. It was fun to jump because I had never had the opportunity to jump in that way into salt water before and despite all the force down, you bob right back to the surface, but it was nothing special, just a pool that you could sit around. As a group we were having a lot o fun just floating around, but out of nowhere our guide told us we needed to start moving to the next stop like we have a stopwatch going. I think he really did have a stopwatch because the next stop and the real Blue Hole was swarmed with tourists. After waiting ten minutes to get the green light from our guide we bobbed along with him through the cave, being sure not to touch the sharp walls. There wasn’t even a need to swim because of the current and salt. Entering the cave you could see anything, but the guide’s flashlight. In the pitch dark he told us about the cave and the water dripping through the cracks. In just ten minutes we were back to floating out of the cave.
Leaving the cave was even prettier as you could see the water get touched by the light seeping into the cave and turning the water a deep blue. Altogether though the five minutes to exit the cave was definitely not worth the entire trip. If the location hadn’t become such a big tourist attraction with people booking time slots the natural wonder would’ve been worth it. I am happy to continue avoiding large touristy attractions such as this.
Saturday was the real work. Showing up at 9am to start setting up we were greeted with the surprising on time arrival of our 40 or so students. The weather was breathtaking and hot making outside activities both scenic and sweltering. I tried my best to let the first year ETAs lead the activities, but couldn’t help myself from taking a leadership role at times. As much as kids can overwhelm me I do enjoy teaching new games like duck, duck, goose and What’s your name freeze tag to the students. In no time the students transformed from shy kids to smiling students running around shouting their names.
Over the course of the day my group taught sweet, salty, bitter, bland, spicy, and sour. The classes went alright. They weren’t my best run classes. Even with 3 of us as teachers, keeping the students on topic was a challenge. The first and second graders were the hardest. Following lunch I would’ve expected tired children and what we got were kids bouncing off the walls. The original plan to teach the different fruits and have the kids listen to us read The Hungry Caterpillar was obviously not an option. On the fly I developed a race Pictionary game which went over well, but still would’ve loved the chance to read The Hungry Caterpillar.
The ending activity was the creation of us second years. The three of us had mostly planned the day and then divided the responsibility up between the first years. For the last activity we had the students make pb&j sandwiches. In Taiwan, sandwiches are a breakfast food and usually are three layers of meat, eggs, and lettuce. Occasionally students will have jelly sandwiches, but never pb&j. I think it’s because the peanut butter here is a little less savory/salty and more sweet and who would want two sweet things combined on a sandwich? The students were a little apprehensive to try the combination, having me spread only a little peanut butter or sometimes not even adding peanut butter to their bread. However, once one of the students tried it the rest followed.
Following camps we usually get together to talk about the activities and what we could change to improve the structure of events. Green Island was a little different. Ina, one of our coordinators, needed to return home and two ETAs ran off to try to get a cake for Camilla’s birthday, so we never had a final discussion and instead opted for shaved ice, a Taiwanese sweet treat. The Green Island specialty adds seaweed to it, but I happily did not order that. In my view, it went well. The students may not have known everything, but they definitely walked away associating English learning with fun and that’s the true takeaway.
With work done I was more exhausted than I’d like to admit. The rest of the trip was a flurry of activity with little time to sit and rest to try and make the most out of being on the island. I went to the Green Island Hot Spring which butts up right to the ocean. Kendra, Amanda, and I rode our scooters around the island and stopped at any of the side roads to look at the views. We caught an amazing sunset and saw the Green Island goats. Thanks to Kendra’s planning I went on my first boat dive and went deeper than I have been before (almost two times my previous depth). I was pretty nervous because I had a bit of a head cold on top of never boat diving, so the guide was my buddy and I stuck to her like glue. After a while I admit I enjoyed looking at the fish and regretted leaving the gopro on the boat because I didn’t want to slow the more experienced divers in my group. *I still think Xiao Liu Qiu was a prettier dive site even after seeing two turtles in Green Island*
Hanging Around Green Island Pics
Two more weeks down and only a few left.