Making the best of it

These past couple days have been pretty full of silliness. From Tues-Thurs we spent our mornings visiting the elementary schools we're going to be teaching at, and in the afternoons we went to Lingzhou Primary School to present their English Village to local teachers. Visiting the elementary schools was kind of interesting, although I think I'll make my decision based mainly on the teacher and not the school. On Tuesday I had bread and coffee in the morning, which proved to be a mistake: every school we went to plied us with more beverages, and one school even gave our group a gigantamongous basket of dragon-eye fruit. The last school gave us bubble tea, which I usually love, but at that point it was all I could do to drink a little of it. So much hospitality! Soooo much hydration! Ay. After that I learned not to consume anything in the morning before school visits. On Thursday we even managed to get fed by somebody else for every single meal, since Fulbright buys our lunch at school and the head of Taiwan Fulbright took us out for dinner that night.

Anyway, the elementary schools here are rather different from at home. The hallways are all open to the outside, and the environment is very green...one school had mango trees, another had a butterfly garden, etc. All of the schools seemed pretty nice, although it was pretty funny to see how each school tried to sell themselves to us. On each tour, the teachers and administrators would tout their schools facilities, or long history, or the competitions that its students had won. In many cases, they came right out and said, "You should come to our school!" This amused and perplexed me, because there is no need for the schools to sell themselves...every one of the schools we visited is getting an ETA! I suppose the teachers still want us to pick their school first, but it's a little silly nonetheless.

So the school visits were okay (a little bit redundant after a while), but trying to do the English Village thing in the afternoon...well, it got better as the week went on. Here is the story: Apparently, some administrative person went to Korea, saw that the students there had good English, and noted that in Korea they had "English Villages" staffed by foreigners where children went to practice their English. The Kaohsiung educational bureau, wanting to improve their students' English, decided that they should have English Villages too. Schools spent a lot of money building fancy sets, but who was to staff them? Well, it just so happens that this year there is a posse of English speakers coming to work for the Kaohsiung educational system for the brand-new Kaohsiung Fulbright ETA program. That's approximately how we got roped into this whole thing. We are supposed to work in different English Villages around the city, taking shifts so there will be one of us there at any given time. Students from Kaohsiung City schools will take turns paying visits to the English Villages to practice with us native English speakers. It sounds like a good concept, but the logistics of the whole thing wayyyy had not been worked out well. On Tuesday, the first group of local teachers came to see us demonstrate the English Village. Working with scripts that had been written by some random person and edited into some semblance of natural English by us, we had 40 minutes to show each group of teachers the dialogue for each set. Bad dialogue + way too much time = either lots of criticism from the teachers, mind-numbing boredom, or both. Argh. To make matters worse, we spent quite a while in an auditorium of teachers listening to the Minister of Education talk in Chinese. At one point, realizing that some of us could understand Mandarin, he switched into Taiwanese to make a crack about the Asian-American Fulbrights, and how they could just get some local college students if the English Village needed more staff. Same thing, right? It was very insulting, and really illustrated the kind of misconceptions about Americans that we're all going to be laboring against this year. In a society as homogeneous as Taiwan, it is hard to understand that America is an immigrant nation, and that those of us with Asian faces are no less American (and no less of a native English speaker) as those of us with white skin and blonde hair. Taiwanese people are generally very nice, so I don't hold this misunderstanding against them, but we as Americans have the task of educating our students and our acquaintances here to understand otherwise. It's a big job.

So anyway, Tuesday was pretty rough, but we fixed things up for Wednesday and Thursday. We revised our dialogues, shortened the sessions to 20 minutes, and on Thursday, our coordinator Alex even came to introduce us and give a little speech about hard we worked to get here (general message: respect us pleeease, we are not just 12 random Americans). It was a lot better, and the teachers got a lot easier to work with those days. Granted, it still is not thrilling to spend an entire afternoon acting a 4-line dialogue as a waitress in the Lingzhou Hotel restaurant, but we got through it. On Friday, we were back to doing teachery stuff with the LETs that we're going to be working with, so that was good, although we were all pretty beat by the end.

I was supposed to go to Hong Kong this weekend to see my friends Jacqui and Richard who I know from Beijing, but unfortunately there was a typhoon in Hong Kong, so my flight got canceled, as did Richard's flight from Taipei. All of the flights the next day were full, so no weekend in Hong Kong for me. :( Sometime soon Amanda will go with me to the airline office so I can attempt to get a refund...cross your fingers! After that, I guess we will just have to schedule a trip another time. Oh well. On the bright side, since I'm not leaving town this weekend, I can go with everyone else to a dance party that's tonight! Yayyyy dance party! Also I will not miss out on the Sunday evening gathering where all of the Kaohsiung Fulbrights get together to watch Battlestar Galactica. Hahahahah we are so cool.