Voiceless Teaching, a Bus Acquaintance, and Leftover Turkey

I've been sick recently with a nasty cold, which puts a cramp in my usual teaching style because my throat has been too sore to deal with all of the (loud) talking that normal teaching demands. Fortunately, I have the fabulous Patty to back me up in class, and together we formed a scheme (about 30 seconds before our first class) to use my lack of voice as a teaching tool. When the students entered the classroom, they found Teacher Rebekah apparently asleep with her head down on the desk, which drew a lot of curiosity. As class started, Patty explained that I was resting because I was sick with a sore throat, so I couldn't talk to the students, but I could still respond to their English! She reminded them of our vocab words from the last class (get up, go to bed, go home, and go to school), and prompted them all to tell me, "get up," which was my magical clue (after having *slept* through the cacophony of the students' arrival to the classroom) to wake up sleepily. Although in the beginning Patty prompted the students to give me different commands, after a little while they were all raising their hands and yelling things out. Smart-aleck students had me running back and forth between "school" and "home" (drawn on the blackboard) over and over, or they would tell me to "go home and go to bed" and then promptly order me to go to school, resulting in some sleepwalking. To end the activity, I waited until someone told me to go home, and then I would leave the classroom and fall asleep out in the hall, upon which some puzzled student would be sent to find the missing teacher. Finding me asleep usually flummoxed them for a moment, after which they would remember to use their vocab and command me to "get up and go to school." We all had a ton of fun with this activity, so it really wasn't so bad that my throat was sore.

One of the unexpected side effects of doing the "sleeping teacher" act in the beginning of class was the way that the students reacted when they saw me asleep. A lot of times the students would arrive before Patty and just hang around speculating about their sleeping teacher in Chinese:
"Why is the teacher asleep?"
"Maybe she is tired."
"Maybe she doesn't feel well."
"I think that she must be tired because she doesn't get nap time. I heard that she teaches the English Angels class during nap time."
One student even came up and started massaging my shoulders, and another pressed a heating pad to my forehead! Also, in one class, after Patty told the students that I had a sore throat, I woke up to find a little collection of cough drops and candies contributed by various students sitting in front of me. Sigh...as much trouble as my students can be sometimes, I really do love them. They are so adorable.

Patty and I went to the doctor together after school today, where they poked things up my nose and sprayed what I think was anesthetic down my throat and told me that I have "the flu," which is Taiwan English for "a cold." (not actually the flu!) Now I have medicine and am hopefully on my way to a quick recovery, because Patty is busy coming down with whatever I've got. To my mother: Patty says do not worry about me, because she will take good care of me. Patty is the same age as my mom, so she tends to feel responsible for me the way she is for her own two daughters.

I had an interesting experience on the bus ride home on Monday. I overheard some high school girls talking about me ("you talk to her!" "no, you do it!" etc.) and debating whether or not I would be able to speak Chinese. I heard one of them say "what about Taiwanese? Foreigners usually can't speak Taiwanese," after which point one of them finally came up to me and said hello...in Taiwanese. Which fortunately sounds enough like the Mandarin for me to understand, so I said "hi" back. She kept looking at me, and it was kind of awkward, and then she started asking me questions. At first they were the normal questions, like "what country are you from" and "what are you doing in Taiwan" and such like. Once we had established the basics, though, she started asking me strange things, like who my American idol was. At first I thought she meant American Idol, and I was really confused, and then she suggested maybe Rihanna so I knew it wasn't the uppercase Idol, but I still didn't really have an answer. There was another awkward period where she got really close to my face and stared at my eyes (dear heavens, they are blue! alert the press!). Then she saw my Peking University t-shirt and we got to talking about mainland China. I asked her if she had ever been to China, and she said no, but then she started spewing all this stuff about mainland Chinese people. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I could tell that it wasn't exactly favorable. Finally she ended up telling me that they were heixin, which literally means "black-heart." I was a little bit taken aback. Admittedly, it is a lot less likely that people are trying to rip you off in Taiwan than it is on the mainland, but that doesn't mean that all Chinese people are bad people! I started to say this, but before I could give much of a good response, we were at my bus stop. Oh well. I have to wonder if many Taiwanese people hold these kind of views, because I haven't encountered it with anyone else. Kind of intense, coming from a 15-year-old kid. Weird times.

And to top off this post, I think it's time for a serving of leftover turkey...it keeps being delicious!
I am thankful for "my mother"

...if that's really who she is.

I am thankful for my grandparent

...but I can't tell you which one!

Alien turkey, by Leon:


Strangely patriotic turkey from my crazy Tina (the Obama lover):


And one of my personal favorites:

Happy to Rebekah! Incoherent but cute. Although the nails are kind of creepy, let's not lie.

Here's a little panorama of my classroom...you can click on it to see a big one. It is pretty much plastered with hand turkeys on all available surfaces: