While having to create my entire curriculum this semester from scratch has been frustrating at times (I must create and improvise all of my own teaching materials - both time consuming and a stretch for my creativity skills), the upside is that I have a lot of flexibility. At the beginning of the semester, I put together a series of week-by-week lessons, each focused on a different topic, for example sports, education, restaurant, movies etc. However, for the last two weeks of class, I decided that I would ditch my final lesson and do something completely different.
At the beginning of the month, AIT made a gift to all
of the Kaohsiung ETAs of the "Picturing America" teaching series. "Picturing America" is a series of 20 different paintings and portraits depicting America's history over the last 400 years, and comes with an amazing teacher's book with detailed lesson plans and project ideas. Most of it is way to complicated to use in an EFL classroom, but I liked the basic idea behind it.
I put up all of the pictures around my classroom, and then chose 8 to make up summaries and questions about. The desks in my classroom are arranged into six groups of students, so I had each group choose one of the paintings which they wanted to learn more about. While the book came with descriptions about
both the artwork and the artist as well as appropriate questions, I ended up having to rewrite everything in order to make it understandable for my students. Even so, I know it was a bit of a stretch for some of them... At any rate, they were supposed to read their summaries, study the picture, try to answer the questions and then present in front of class. Since I love American history, art and group projects (they rarely understand when I lecture anyways - I have discovered that success in teaching a foreign language is based in how little I have to talk and how much I can get them to talk), I thought this would be a fun activity for our last lesson. Most of the classes seemed to enjoy the lesson and really got into studying their picture (there were only a few classes which found the looseness of the lesson a good excuse for goofing off the whole time - oh middle schoolers...). I also had fun with it, finding it amusing to watch my Taiwanese eighth graders trying to discuss Lincoln's assassination, Native Americans or World War I victory celebrations on Fifth Avenue.
Another benefit of the lesson (at least I think it's a benefit) is that it gave some of my students the chance to show off random knowledge they had somehow picked up from somewhere. For instance, when I showed the picture of "Washington Crossing the Delaware," one student raised his hand and recited the entire story for me, replete with the hired Hussein soldiers (where did he learn this word?!) and the Christmas Day attack.
There are two points about the Taiwanese education system with which I strongly disagree. One is the heavy emphasis on memorization and testing (students are tested every day on the information they learned the previous day, building up to larger monthly and semester exams which culminate in the BCT test, the determining factor in which high school they get into, which later decides their college and career choices - thanks Mom and Dad for letting my attend Judah instead of shipping my off to a Taiwanese boarding school...), which encourages regurgitation and burn-out without nurturing creative thinking or thoughtful analysis. My second biggest issue with the system is that it does not allow tracking. Parents have effectively blocked the system from ever allowing tracking, arguing that they would never want their children relegated to the "dumb" class. While I see their point, I would much prefer to put my child into a class geared towards their appropriate learning level instead of a class either way over their head or so easy it is a bore. In either situation, my child would not be learning to their full potential (perhaps not learning at all), which ought to be my highest priority as a parent. In language classes particularly, I do not see how the current system is at all effective. Every single one of my classes is a mix of kids who are fully fluent (can carry on a conversation with me on just about any topic with decent fluency and a large vocabulary) down to an English level of zero (cannot even answer the question "how are you?"). All semester I have been plagued by this question. How do I make the class both useful and fun for every single student. Well, the answer is a I can't. However, moments where I can either allow a kid to use his superior English skills by telling me about Hussein soldiers or where I can get another kid to simply tell me the English words for colors he sees in a painting - I find both equally rewarding.
Being the end of the first semester and the end of my time at Minghua (I will be moving to Minzu Jr. High School in February), I find it a good time for reflection. All of us ETAs have spent a lot of time discussing our time here. Are we here to actually teach English or merely to inspire enthusiasm for English learning? From my experience, I would say the latter. This has been simultaneously frustrating and liberating for me all semester. Frustrating in the sense that I know I am being fairly ineffective as a teacher - I had no teaching experience prior to this so I am far from being a great teacher, and the fact that I cannot effectively communicate with half of my students does not help. Liberating in the realization that the program has few expectations of what we will accomplish so there is very little pressure. They want the kids to be exposed to foreigners, becoming comfortable with us and also understanding the usefulness of learning English (if a student wants to talk to me, they know they need to use English, meaning that they must either study hard or bring a friend, the latter being the preferred method lol). My students may not have learned much in my class this past semester, but I hope that they did come away with more confidence in themselves and an idea of how fun English can be (it is not just about repeated testing and complicated grammar structures). At the very least, I trust that they will no longer be that amazed Taiwanese person who gawks and giggles at the lone wai guo ren (foreigner) walking down the street haha. If not - I will just have to go back and beat them with my squeaky hammer again! 開玩笑 :)
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