Typhoons and English Village

I love experiencing new "firsts", and yesterday I lived through my first typhoon. While I was initially very excited, I can now say that typhoons are not all that interesting. They are basically a heavy rainstorm with lots of wind, the effect being to cancel all activity in the city and to trap everyone indoors. Snowstorms are way more fun, because you get to go outside and play in it. Here, you just get very wet. The funniest part is that the Taiwanese seem to be fairly unphased by it. While work is canceled and official offices are closed most places, stores stay open and scooters continue to roam the streets. A few of us did venture out grocery shopping to a department store (Fonda drove us in her car), but I cannot imagine scootering through town in the midst of a typhoon... Earlier this morning, the wind was still fairly strong, but by now, it just looks like an average torrential downpour. According to the news, we did not even see the worst of it, as the eye of the storm passed over Taipei. Since Kaohsiung is on the western side of the island, storms from the Pacific are less violent.

This week has been very busy with group outings - setting up accounts and making official visits around the city. The first few days we bought our mobile phones, applied for our ARC cards (alien resident certificate - like a green card) and opened bank accounts. On Tuesday, we went to meet the local Kaohsiung City Government. The educational bureau was very excited to meet us, having set up a special welcome ceremony for us. We marched into a small auditorium holding the hands of local elementary school children, and then watched the children perform a drum dance replete with brightly colored costumes. This was followed by several speeches made by the district superintendent and finished off with a profusion of official photographs. My personal favorite of the posed pictures was the one of all of us ETAs shaking hands with the school children while grinning up at the camera. By the end of it all, I honestly could not smile anymore. One girl thought it would be good practice for wedding pictures.

On Thursday, we began visiting the English Villages, which are located at four different elementary schools around town (as we were to visit the fourth EV yesterday, typhoon day postponed our plans, so we will see that one Monday). The schools put a lot of effort into welcoming us and showing us their facilities, showering gifts and food upon us. They had prepared slide-show presentations and took great pride in giving us tours of the offices and classrooms. I was very impressed with the level of technology in the classrooms, which was much more on par with a college classroom than a public elementary school in the US. Futong, my favorite school so far, greeted us outside with about 40 school children on the school steps waving pompoms and singing. Then the children presented each ETA with a rose - very sweet. Below is a picture of one of the schools. Notice how all of the classrooms open onto an outdoors hallway encircling an inner courtyard. From what we have seen, this appears to be a common architectural style for the schools.


So far, what I know of our schedule is that we will spend 16 hours a week working with a co-teacher in the classroom, and an additional 4 hours working at the English Villages. Each of us will be teaching at different schools, but we will all rotate through working at all of the four English Villages. The English Village is a relatively new idea which the education department here has been implementing. It is a place where students from all over Kaohsiung come to practice using English in a simulated environment (restaurant, hotel, clothing store, airport etc). The villages are set up to look exactly like their real-life counterparts to make the experience as true-to-life as possible. We were all very impressed by the scale and detail put into the rooms, as shown by the pictures below.











It is quite obvious that the city has invested a lot of resources into the program. While the downside to the program is that each class will only visit an English Village once a semester in order for the villages to accommodate every student, teachers told us that the prospect of visiting the villages makes learning English in the classroom more enjoyable and exciting. A trip to the English Village is a lot of fun for them, teaching them that learning English is more than rote memorization in the classroom. According to Fonda and Alex, some of the ETAs last year really enjoyed working at the English Villages, whereas others were less impressed by their usefulness, seeing them as a waste of time. It will be interesting to see what we all think of them after working there for a few months.