This was taken on 23 November, right after class had "started". It looked as if it was going to be a particularly difficult day (notice the person in the back standing out of her chair, and the ball about to be thrown in the lower right hand corner). After my pleas to sit down and at least talk less loudly were received and thrown back at me, I decided to change the pace and start taking pictures. This at least got their attention - whether I was able to hold it, I cannot recall.
It was around this time that I decided I would stop working there. I had kicked and punched and subdued and stimulated and caressed this idea in my head for a few weeks, but finally decided to go through with it. I let Steven, my boss and owner of the school, know my plans. I was pretty sure I could find work teaching adults, which I had convinced myself would be less tiring.
A couple days later, I - half persuaded, half with a change of heart - reneged on my commitment to leave. Let me take a moment to explain something about myself here. I despise being bad at things. If I am bad at something, I will either work very hard to be better at it, or I will avoid it as best I can. I suppose I had come to the conclusion that I was bad at teaching young children English. At first I tried very hard, but when that effort was met with... nothing, I decided to quit. Steven appealed to my desire to be good at everything I do and suggested I stick with it. This seemed like an amazing idea, albeit one that had been driving me (unconsciously) for months. I took his advice.
Before quitting, I created a list of reasons why I should leave, or in other words, why I was bad at teaching little children English. Most of these served to deflect the blame from myself - justly or not. But one large and, I feel, legitimate gripe I had was structural.
A handful of the kids' English is pretty good. I can communicate most things to them, with some over exaggerated facial expressions, pantomimes, and rephrasing, that I can communicate to any average 10 or 11 year old in the states. However, the others have trouble moving beyond "I am wearing a t-shirt and pants, and yellow socks and slippers," "Today is sunny and hot," "My name is Mandy," and "I like lemon." Furthermore, because of scheduling and financial limitations, a number of classes are composed of students with skill levels as disparate as anyone would not want them to be.
This is fine, actually. I can do my best to work around these problems: that is, in fact, my job. The problem is that the relationship that has developed between myself and several of my students is one marked by monotony, one-sidedness and shallowness. It is a relationship borne of directing, requesting, miscommunication, and ambiguity. If my students were my girlfriend this would be a prototypical example of psychological abuse.
To be fair, I'm probably exaggerating reality, and the relationship between teacher and student should not be compared to that of lovers. Still, I would prefer my students to have an expanded knowledge set of their teacher, me. Mavis, the native Taiwanese teacher, faces many of the same problems I do, but they are tempered by a deeper relationship borne of jokes, mutual understanding (to some degree) and pretty crystal clear communication.
Really, this all comes down to the fact that I do not know Chinese.
But, even if I did know it, I'm not "supposed" to use it in the classroom.
I recently pleaded with Mavis to let me watch her class. Usually our classes overlap and this is not possible. She finally obliged me, after assuring me that it wouldn't be any better and would probably be worse than my class. She did in fact miss some grammatical mistakes in the sentences the children wrote, but the environment of the class was very different. And she spoke Chinese about 60% of the time (and this was the "advanced" class).
A couple things have happened since then. Especially with the younger kids, I speak Chinese when I feel relatively confident, to explain things or even just to communicate. This I think is beneficial. Secondly, the holidays have rolled around.
So we have to put on a Christmas something or other. Mavis and I decided on a play. The younger kids will do The Three Little Pigs (really Christmasy, I know) and the older kids will do a tamed version of A Christmas Carol. Beginning this week we have had daily rehearsal. This means that I do not teach half the classes at all, and the other half have their time cut short. As luck would have it, the half of classes that I do not teach is completely composed of my most troublesome classes. I think this is putting a well deserved and well placed spacer between myself and those students, in the classroom environment at least.
The other effect of the play is to create an environment outside of the classroom within which we are able to interact. I think this will serve to better establish a bond less defined by "teacher-student", and subdue emotions that recently had been the source of utterances such as "you are a stranger," (not sure if the seven-year-olds actually know what this means) and "you do not like me."
I really do like all my students, even the ones that are absolutely impossible, and when we do have the pleasure of interacting outside the classroom, the interactions are in fact pleasurable. I also know somewhere in their heart they like and look to me: whenever something goes wrong amongst them, they usually come to me to grab my arm and look up, teary eyed and quivery lipped.
Yes, this is a process. I think I knew that.
And these are my roommates from Panama. This was right after they performed traditional dance and song as part of a larger festival celebrating 成大 birthday (the University where I take classes).
Also, I went back to the coffee mountain (actually 東山), with Steven. This time we were without his family, but a large smattering of lawyers and judges from different areas of Taiwan. Recently there have been several arrests regarding fraudulent appointments as well as misuse of public funds, etc (you know, the kind of thing that goes on in Illinois), and apparently some of these guys were involved in prosecuting or defending people involved, and Stephen's wife was not on the same page as them, so she did not attend.
I also went to 高雄 (KaoSiung or GaoXiong depending on how you like to romanize pictographs) to see what I believe is the second largest city in Taiwan. It is a twenty to thirty minute trip by train, to the south of Tainan. What used to be a sewage dump turned river has been converted into the "Love River." Some may not consider it even as lovely as a sewage dump might be in, oh, say France. But it was highOKah (my very own romanization of 還OK阿).
Actually, the view is supposed to be better at night. City night views, with all the bright colored lights, I would say are one of Asia's highlights as far as modern architecture goes. Unless lots of tile and concrete really do it for you. This seems to stem from a general preference for strict practicality in recent years. I'm not sure when the transition was made (though - just speculating - it seems to have coincided with the Chinese Communist Party's rise to power), but it was swift and sweeping. I've been reading a recreated history of Zhang Dai, who lived during the late Ming dynasty, and it's apparent that practicality over aesthetics was not always the mode.
In some ways the change is probably good. For instance, a bathroom was being repaired or revamped or something at school. The place was a complete shit hole (please don't overlook the pun there), and upon peeking my head in, my initial reaction was to turn around and head upstairs. The floor was uprooted, pipes were strewn about, etc - the kind of thing that would shut down the entire floor of a building, if not the building itself, back home for fear of a lawsuit. But before fully turning around, I thought better of it and politely asked if I could use the urinal. The man said of course, just 小心 (lit., small heart - be careful :). I stepped over holes, ducked under pipes, pissed, ducked under pipes, stepped over holes, thanked the man and left.
But in other areas, perhaps this over obsession with practicality ought to be better balanced. I recently met a senior at school. We were with a group of friends, but he was talking to me about any number of things. Our topic fell upon his major, which was related to design. He seemed disheartened though, as if he should be ashamed, and I probed a bit. His friend, who graduated last year is working in Taipei, about 16 hours a day 6 days a week, and making NT$20-25,000 per month. I believe the average income in Taiwan is around NT$30,000 or between US$800-900. I make about NT$36,000, after relatively higher taxes, and work a lot less. Basically, he was hating it. I had a hard time believing this and double checked all the numbers to ensure I was not misunderstanding. Nope.
"Why?" was the obvious question. "Taiwanese don't care about design," was the obvious response. This is a generalization and is perhaps in the process of changing, but seemingly currently true on average. "If there are two comparable products and one is much better designed than the other, but more expensive, all Taiwanese will buy the cheaper one."
And so we have the "Love River."
If you are tired of reading I will inform you now that I have only two things left to write about.
The first is this photo.
It took a second to remember why I took this picture as I was reviewing my photos. If it's not apparent, you can e-mail me.
And lastly, I went karaokiing (that just will have to be spelled incorrectly) with my tea shop lady and family and friends.
Thanks for bearing with me this time around friends, family and folks. I'm headed to 九份 tomorrow, which is an old town leftover, relatively untouched, from Japanese days with lots of tea houses. Wish me luck.
'Till then!
