Taiwan can be a silly country at times. Sometimes, when there is a national holiday
that falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, the holiday will be expanded into a long
weekend by displacing the previous or following workday (either the Monday or
the Friday, depending on when the holiday falls). The hours from that non-holiday day-off will
be worked on a Saturday instead. This is
true of most businesses, including schools, offices, shops. This week was one of those “extended work
weeks” which is intended to reward employees with a 4-day weekend for Moon
Festival (which falls next weekend). The
thing that is most irritating about this week being a 6-day work week isn’t the
extra hours (I quite enjoyed my classes on Saturday), nor is it the short
weekend (I wouldn’t have done much more than lounge anyway), it is the fact
that there was no forewarning about our Saturday hours. When I arrived back in Taiwan last weekend my
co-worker gave me a copy of my official schedule for the week (it didn’t
include Saturday), when I got to work on Monday my manager gave me a copy of
the week’s schedule to post in the Teacher’s Room (it didn’t include Saturday),
I signed out on my work schedule after each class of the week (it didn’t
include Saturday). The first indication
that I was given of these extra work hours came at 9:30pm on Thursday night in
the form of a note, stating that the school had neglected to pass on this
information. I think my main frustration with the whole
situation is the fact that I work for a school that employs foreigners, a
school that relies on people from other countries to draw in their customers,
yet they forget that being from other countries means we don’t know everything
about Taiwan. I may have lived here for
a year, but last year Moon Festival fell on a Sunday and wasn’t a long weekend,
so I couldn’t have used that memory to predict this week’s schedule.
It has been nice to be back around my students again, my
crazy, adorable students. While I was on
my contract break in the US our school picked up two new beginner classes which
were added to my schedule, thus putting me at a comfortable 24 classroom hours
a week (which is much better than the 18 I was working a few months ago). The beginning weeks with a new class can be a
little out of control, and my two 01-level classes (one intensive and one
regular) are no exception. I have
students who wont speak, students who won’t stop speaking, students who can’t
stay in their seats, students who know nothing about English, and strangely,
one student who can hold basic dialogues with me already. Within a term or two I expect the levels will
have evened out pretty well, but for a while the main challenge will be to
teach all of these kids how to behave in a classroom setting (which is easier
said than done).
On a completely non-Taiwanese note, I have been
internet-less for about 10 days now due to my lack of technical
comprehension. I returned to Taiwan with
a Mac rather than a PC, and despite my Ethernet convertor and cable, and my
WiFi router, I can’t seem to connect to the internet. The problem seems to be that I need the
internet to recognize the router, and I need the router to get the internet,
what an unfortunate cycle.
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