Happy Halloween

This week we got to bring one of the famous holidays of western culture to the Taiwanese children: Halloween.  Halloween is not highly celebrated in Taiwan, but many children become familiar with it through their English schools.  Included in the festivities for my students were Halloween-themed classes, a haunted house (with games and challenges), a costume contest, and trick-or-treating.  My Halloween lessons were primarily with my youngest class (CEI02) and focused on using 'monster vocabulary' like ghost, vampire, skeleton, etc..  Each teacher was also responsible for adding a Halloween-themed craft to their lesson, so my children decorated paper pumpkins.  As for the haunted house, one of the most impressive aspects of the week, our TA's decorated an entire classroom into a maze, and stationed the teachers in booths within the maze.  Each teacher was responsible for creating a game for their booth which children would play for prizes (the games included: pin the tail on the monster, bean bag toss (that was my booth, complete with Angry Birds bean bags, and a cut-out pumpkin target), mystery box (where children would stick their hands inside and be startled by a bowl of cold noodles which felt like intestines), apple bobbing, and a heaven/hell challenges (students sit on one of two boxes, one is a seat and will hold them, one is a balloon and will pop when sat upon).  Approximately 150 students showed up to the haunted house (which is a great turn-out for our tiny school).

Overall I would say the biggest complication with Halloween in Taiwan is finding pumpkins to carve.  I have heard multiple stories about the lack of pumpkins, one of which being that pumpkins are not native to Taiwan and therefore need to be imported (however I know there are pumpkin farms because I've just learned Hsinchu county has one), and the other being that pumpkin season is in the spring rather than the fall (I'll have to wait half a year to confirm that).

Happy Halloween from the CEI02 and CEI08 classes

This weekend I went on my first trip to Taipei since training week.  We left Saturday morning and caught a bus to Taiwan's capital city (the trip took about 2.5).  The activities yesterday were devoted mainly to Taipei gay pride, starting with gate-crashing the parade (yes, much like we did in Kaohsiung) and ending with a night of visiting the oldest (and most famous) gay bar in Taiwan: Funky.  Today was primarily dedicated to a scenic view of Taipei from the Maokong gondolas, my first teppanyaki dinner (here), and the bus ride home (which, after the scare of racing through the Taipei metro stations because we were late to the bus was very relaxing).  It may sound like there weren't many noteable moments from this weekend, but that is just due to the difficulty of separating individual memories.  The entire weekend was somewhat of a blur, caused by the constant movement (buses, trains, walking, running, etc.) and seemed to fly by. 

Gate-crashing the Taipei gay pride parade.

This week's interesting facts play into my main interest: language/linguistics.  While I am still struggling with the acquisition of Mandarin, at least I can learn more about language itself.  As I mentioned in my previous post, the Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning that it uses a symbol to represent an entire word or concept, but the character does not indicate its pronunciation (except the tone marker).  This system is called hanzi (and is a complete mystery for me, aside from the characters for numbers(which are similar enough to Japanese that I already knew them), and the character ren  人 which means person).  One of the ways to 'simplify' Chinese for pronunciation and typing purposes is through the use of Pinyin which uses the Roman alphabet (the characters of English) to show a more phonetic pronunciation of the word.  The Pinyin alphabet isn't perfect however, because many sounds in Chinese are not sounds in English, so it requires a base knowledge of Chinese pronunciation to use, but it is the transcription system which I (and many others) find most useful.  The predecessor to Pinyin, which is outdated but still used in Taiwan is the Wade-Giles system, which also Romanizes the hanzi characters, but notes the aspiration/unaspiration of plosive consonants (like p-b, t-d, k-g).  An unaspirated consonant is notated with an apostrophe, so that a word like "Taiwan" would be written T'aiwan to show that it starts with a /t/-sound rather than a /d/-sound.  The main downfall of this system is that people who are unfamiliar with it tend to ignore the apostrophes (both in writing and pronunciation) which leads to constant mispronunciations.  My favorite example of these mispronunciations is a common term among Chinese food eaters around the world: Peking (as in 'Peking duck' or 'Peking chicken'), which came from the Wade-Giles writing of Beijing (China's capital).  The last of the systems that I am vaguely familiar with is BoPoMoFo, which uses symbols and tone-markers to represent all possible sounds in Chinese, which makes it the most accurate system.  Most children in Taiwan learn Bopomofo in school, which they can use for learning new symbols, inputting text into a computer/phone, etc..

wo ai Taiwan (I love Taiwan)

"The best laid plans [of mice and men] often go awry." My resolve to update this blog every weekend was broken last weekend when I got home to discover my internet wasn't working, so this post will need to encompass two weeks of Taiwanese adventuring.

For starters, there is school.  I am quite comfortable in my school now, and lesson planning has become second nature to me, which is a welcome relief.  If I'm being honest with myself I would say that these last two weeks have been more stressful work-wise than I would like.  As all teachers here eventually discover, our teaching systems are very flawed, and there is little we can do to change them.  My frustration of the week stems from a lesson with my youngest class, who are on average 7 years old and have been studying English for about 2 months now.  I stayed late after one of my classes to help them with their homework, and it came to my attention that the school's expectations of the students is completely unreasonable.  While I can't paint you a picture that will thoroughly explain the context of this story, I can briefly explain that I have just been working with the students on household items (toothbrush, comb, table, chair, etc.) and simple prepositions (in, on, by, under).  In their homework they were working on questions like "Is the chair under the table?"  In class we use flashcards and the whiteboard to teach vocabulary, so there is some focus on word recognition for vocabulary and simple sentences (for example: "Yes, it is." "No, it isn't.").  We also teach phonics, by teaching the alphabet and teaching the sound that each letter makes.  What we do not focus on much is how to use phonics to get to word recognition.  Shane schools expect students to learn whole word recognition before they learn how use their phonics to sound out words, which means that, while it is impressive that a young learner can see the word "toothbrush" and pronounce it, if they are shown the word "toothbrushes" they will either not understand the word, or will not pronounce the "-es" because it is foreign to them.  The concept of word recognition teaching is presumably taken from a Chinese approach to reading, which has to rely on this method because of the logographic nature of written Chinese, however it fails to allow the students to utilize the productivity of language.  My frustration with this system began when I was informed by my manager that one of my students (the smallest and probably sweetest little girl in the class) started crying when she could not understand her homework.  Remember that these students have only been studying for 2 months, and expecting whole sentence recognition and comprehension is unreasonable, especially remembering that they are 7-9 years old which puts them in a similar age group as American children who are learning to read.  Can you imagine asking an American 7 year old to comprehend full Chinese sentences? Even if they are in an immersion school you probably don't even expect them to comprehend full English sentences at that age.  While I admit, that rant does not change the situation, it does put into words the inspiration for goal to change the way we teach reading in the school.

On a happier note, there is so much happening outside of my school life in this country (which, while it might sound like I dislike my school, that is completely untrue.  I adore my school and classes immensely, and if I didn't care about them so much, then I wouldn't care to evaluate the ways I would like to improve things).  October 10th is a festival known as "ten-ten" day in Taiwan, a holiday to commemorate the start of the uprising which eventually lead to the establishment of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan).  Ten-ten day is a national holiday, and many businesses (including the buxibans) were closed, so a group of 11 people, consisting of teachers and Taiwanese people, went for an all-day scooter trip through the mountains.  We at lunch in a French restaurant atop the mountains, crawled through a bat cave, had dinner at an Indian restaurant in Taichung, and my favorite thing about it was the complete spontaneity of everything, we literally picked the events and directions by randomly screaming "left", "right", or "straight" each time we came to a set of lights.

Enjoying 10-10 day in the mountains.

Last weekend was the annual Chili cook-off in Taichung, an event featuring local bands, and lots of homemade chili.  First of all, I just want to say that every time I go to Taichung I am amazed at the number of foreigners who live in the city.  I know that Taichung is the third largest city in the country, which results in them employing more people, but there are easily hundreds of foreigners that live there, and to be surrounded by English speakers when you are used to being a minority is a strange feeling.  Second of all, I have some amazingly talented friends here, two of which performed in the concerts portion of the event which made the event more personal.

These past couple of weekends have been very "low key" which has allowed me more time to explore the city I live in.  Markets are very common in Taiwan (and I know I have mentioned the night market in multiple posts), and today I visited the day market.  The night market is very focused on food and games, while the day market is where you would do most of your shopping (it is easy to find cheap clothes, shoes, fruit, bedding, etc.).  

This week I also began meeting with my language exchange partner.  Language exchange is, as it sounds, an opportunity to practice your language skills with a native speaker of the target language (so in my case I help a Taiwanese woman speak English, and in return she helps me to speak Mandarin).  Having a language exchange partner is a fairly common experience among the teachers I know (however for many people they don't last long).  My Mandarin is coming along very slowly, I have yet to make a major break-through with it, but I manage to get by and get what I need, so I believe that is a start.  The trick to learning in an immersion setting is to keep using what you know/learn, so that is exactly what I do.

October!

Welcome to October, my how the days fly by.
I know I will jinx myself by saying this, but my class schedule was fairly close to perfect this week.  No early starts, 3 early finish days, and mostly brilliant students.  There are definitely some classes that frustrate me more than others at this point, particularly the classes that won't stop speaking Chinese as soon as the TA leaves the room (in my buxiban (another word for Cram school, which is the type of specialty school I work in) we have a fairly strict "no Chinese in the classroom" policy to encourage immersion learning).
This week one of my favorite classes to teach was my private lesson with two teenagers who are relatively advanced in English.  The nice thing about teaching private students is that they can help you select what topic they want to learn about, so this week my privates agreed to a lesson about psychology (which is actually a unit in their student book, so it wasn't completely random, however I still can't get over how perfect of a topic is is for me considering it was one of my majors).  It gave me a chance to use what I know outside the book and get genuinely excited about a lesson!
I went on several adventures this week, the first of which was to a waterfall on Tuesday (before class).  Sounds like a simple little photo-opportunity, right?! Let me assure you, it wasn't, but it was still a fun time.  For starters, the path to get to the water wasn't so much a path, as an incredibly steep hill, and the path along the water to the waterfall was so grown-over that it wasn't even an option for walking.  As a result, our path to get to the waterfall involved climbing over and under boulders IN A RIVER for 20 minutes.  We all walked away with battle-wound scratches from the experience (but luckily none of us fell in the water).
Most of the weeknights, while exciting to me, leave little to be reported.  My friends and I had mini-adventures like going to the Homei and Changhua night markets, playing our weekly pool games, shopping (my first encounter with Caves bookstore and Carrefour), and ever-enjoyable trip to Flamingos (one of the most "Western" food experiences in town).
This weekend I finally got to visit Lukang, the city I have been dying to visit since I got here.  It was a wonderful day trip!  Among the historic streets, beautiful temples, and shopping districts are two artist's whose work I have heard about for months: a famous lantern painter and a famous fan painter, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to purchase a piece of work from each of them.  I bought a beautiful scenic painted Chinese fan, and a personalized Chinese lantern which says "Make your dreams come true, step by step".

The owner and artist of a beautiful hand-painted fan shop.

One of the most famous lantern stores in Taiwan, with the artist who personalized my lantern.

Taiwan fact of the week: in Taiwan it is the year 101.  The Minguo calendar, which is used in Taiwan originated in mainland China in 1912 (the year of the founding of the Republic of China (Taiwan)) but its use was discontinued in China in 1949 with the founding of the People's Republic of China (mainland China).  Like the Gregorian calendar, the year changes on January 1st, so, for this upcoming New Year I will be "watching the ball drop" into the year 102 while my friends and family back home will be celebrating the start of 2013.