This Month

So I have reached the conclusion that I am not a good blogger (what do I mean "reached"? I knew that already...). In order to have time to write, I would have to slow down from everything else that I am doing long enough to reflect and document. Somehow, I often see this as meaning that I will miss out on some other crazy new adventure. Alas, there are just not enough hours in the day. This month has been extremely busy, though of course, only in good ways. As I say, never invest your time in doing things which you do not thoroughly enjoy and always do everything you are doing to your utmost ability. Unfortunately, I enjoy too many things in life, and am therefore always over-committed and crazy busy, because I am giving my all to too many things simultaneously. While I love every minute of it and am extremely happy, there are certain things which fall by the wayside, such as blogs... My mother has now sent me multiple kindly-phrased emails asking when the next blog entry will be. I am afraid that if I postpone the inevitable writing too much longer, these messages will no longer be quite as nicely worded... So just for my mother, and anyone else who is interested, I will attempt to catch up with my life in writing. Since teaching is the main thing which I am doing over here, I will start with that.

School is endlessly amusing. I love teaching middle school. The kids are so adorable. They see me as some sort of super role model. Everywhere I go at school, I walk down the halls to shouts of "hello, Teacher!" or "Teacher, you are so beautiful!" Hilarious and endearing at first, but after a few months of this, when it happens multiple times every day, it gets a bit annoying. I often plan my trips around the school to not land between classes, so that there are fewer students in the hallway. Or I will try to plan my route from one side of the school to the other so as to avoid the highest number of students possible. Unlike American middle schools where the kids have passing period and all switch classes chaotically within a ten minute period, kids here stay with the same class throughout the entire day, and will move to different classrooms (such as art, music or PE) collectively. This means that I often run into an entire sea of students, where 40 13-year-olds are simultaneously shouting (yes, shouting) "hello, Teacher!" "Teacher, you are so beautiful!" Sometimes I make a game out of it. How far can I make it down the hallway before I break down and have to say hello to a student. It's all about eye contact. If I can seem preoccupied with something I am holding and not look up - but no - that never works, because children are still shouting at me from across the courtyard up on balconies.

I also seem to have turned into my school's mascot. They like to have me appear at random events, make speeches (oftentimes in Chinese - you can guess how well that goes...), greet students, take photos, be in photos... you get the general idea. So in the past week, I have made appearances at a special assembly for all of the 8th graders (Studio Classroom, an English-teaching drama group from Taipei, visited our school to give a presentation), the city-wide science fair for elementary and middle schools held at the Kaohsiung Science and Technology Museum, and a festival at Lotus Lake where over 30,000 Kaohsiung middle and high school students (300 went from Minghua) gathered to sing and dance simultaneously. The Studio Classroom was actually really fun. They used drama, dancing, singing, games, audience participation and a lot of Chinglish to teach the students English in a fun, engaging manner. I had a great time watching someone else stand on their heads to get through to my students. The best part was that the kids all seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Afterwards, I was introduced to the four troup members, three of whom were American. They were all very surprised and very impressed to find a bonafide American teaching at a school in the middle of southern Taiwan. Apparently, I was the first foreign teacher which they had ever found in a public school here (there are a good number of foreign teachers, but they all teach English in cram schools - the Fulbright program is the first program to bring foreign teachers into the public school system).

The science fair on Saturday was another amusing experience. I went, thinking that I was just going to take pictures for the newspaper and to bring one of my students (Lika - grew up in Australia, and only moved here to Taiwan a few years ago, so she has excellent English) to interview the science fair kids in order to write her article. Somehow though, Lika and I got roped into actually participating in the fair, going from one exhibit to the next, conducting science experiements. Picture me drawing Chinese characters upside down so that they reflect right-side up in a mirror (light refraction) or listening to a Chinese explanation for why magnetism works. And of course, I was the only foreigner in the entire museum, making me a great object of curiosity (why is the stray white girl at the science fair?). Every school wanted pictures of me testing out their science projects, which really weirded Lika. She asked me if this was a common occurrence, and I was like, "welcome to my world." At any rate, we did get pictures of the Minghua kids with their experiements, though I might be in more of those than not...

On Sunday, I met up at school with 300 Minghua seventh graders to be bussed over to Lotus Lake. Once again, I thought they would let me get away with just being present and taking pictures, but alas, I was roped into the dancing and was myself the object of much photography. The dancing bit was fun, but the multiple hours of lining up and waiting for the dancing to begin was not so much. It was incredibly hot (yes, it is nearly November and still near 100 degrees), and the process of assembling 30,000 students is not an easy one. Plus we had to wait for the mayor to ride out in a boat, circumferencing the entire lake so that she could wave to all of the various school groups, which took over 45 minutes. I spent most of the time by following my principal around. She is quite a character and very sweet. She knew the entire dance (which the students attempted to teach me in under five minutes once we arrived at the lake - I think I needed a bit more practice...) and danced it with great enthusiasm, or as the Taiwanese like to say - she was a "bright and passionate dancer!" ("passionate" is a favorite adjective here, though I am not sure why; it gets applied to just about everything).

Other notes of interest related to my school life, I have been working to start an English student newspaper entirely written and edited by my club students (of which the first issue will finally be published next week!!), organizing weekly English broadcasts, selecting poems for the eighth grade English poetry competition, leading a class to help teachers improve their English and initiating a pen-pal program between my two resource classes and an ESL class (for Latinos) in LA, California (therefore, both groups of students get to communicate in a foreign language with other kids their age halfway across the world - kind of cool, I think). It's all been a bit stressful, but also fun and rewarding.