Friday December 21, 2012

7:30 a.m. at a 7-11 on Chang-An Road in Taipei

I am at my second favorite morning coffee spot. This 7-11 is much larger and has tables as well as the window counter. The other 7-11 is much closer to my apartment, but it is also much smaller and I can feel guilty about occupying a seat there for too long. I decided to give them a break today, and I came to this 7-11.

This neighborhood – my neighborhood essentially – can be an odd mix. It is near a couple of high-end hotels and a few mid-range ones all catering to well-heeled Japanese tourists. The Japanese often come here to go shopping, and the neighborhood ended up with lot of high-end fashion shops – Gucci and the like. There are also a number of department stores here, and so it is fairly commercial. It’s actually a great neighborhood and I like it very much. However, right around this particular 7-11 I’ve noticed a bit of a darker atmosphere. I don’t know why it would be, but when I sit here, just across the street from my other 7-11, I often encounter a rougher type of person – men and women that may not be homeless but who have a certain homeless quality to them – a certain unkempt look with mysterious liquids in bottles hidden inside bags – sitting on the sidewalk and leaning against the wall. A rougher type of person also often occupies the tables in this 7-11 and stays for a long time. I’ve never seen the staff try to throw them out, but I imagine there has been some conflict there from time to time. My other 7-11 is generally run by women, and they are fast and efficient and friendly. This 7-11 tends to have male clerks (perhaps to deal with the rougher clientele), and though they are just as friendly, they aren’t nearly as fast or efficient. The weird thing is that they LOOK fast. One guy in particular does everything at top speed. He looks like he is working ten times harder than anyone else. Every movement is super-fast and done with lots of effort. But it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. He doesn’t end up actually doing anything faster. In some odd way, he ends up being slower. And he does all the individual actions so quickly and harshly, that the end result is generally worse. Coffee gets spilled and slopped. Things get knocked over. You’d have to give the guy an Employee of the Year award if you just looked at how hard he worked and his overall work ethic. The results, though, are quite the opposite. I’ve noticed that pattern in general when it comes to the male and the female clerks in Taipei (well, around the world).

Well, I’m here at the 7-11 quite early in the morning again. I’m here mainly because I’m an early-riser in general, but also because I was quite stressed out and tired last night and I went to bed early. I didn’t sleep well either, but I compensated for that by going to bed early and staying in bed a long time. I wanted to sleep in this morning and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it wasn’t to be. I finally gave in and just got out of bed, and here I am.

I have another drama contest to attend today – another large event, I assume – and if I’m this tired first thing in the morning, I will likely be a total wreck by drama contest time. Hopefully, it goes well. The reason for all this fatigue and stress? Of course, it was the classes that I taught at the school in Sanxia. Being exhausted and close to throwing a screaming fit is no indication that classes went badly. It’s just how I feel after all of these classes. Even when I don’t feel stressed out on the surface, the stress gets deep into me, under my skin, and affects me for a long time. I can’t stop thinking about the class and I end up dreaming about it. It’s exhausting.

The classes began, as all these things do, with heading out to an MRT station to be picked up by a sales rep. In this case, I had to go to Yongning MRT station, which is the terminal stop on the blue line heading south. It is pretty far away, and I left early to make sure that I had plenty of time to get there. I had prepared all my material and had a solid lesson plan, so I felt ready. That is no guarantee that things will go well, though. I find that my little exercises follow the rule of unintended consequences. I can never tell how the students will react to something I put together. Things I have no confidence in will be a roaring success. Other things that seem simple and natural to me completely stump the students and turn the class into a nightmare. This particular class was complicated to begin with because, as I mentioned before, I was jumping in in the middle. The students had signed up for a 5-class course in telling stories in English using pictures. Another teacher had taught one class and then vanished off the face of the earth. I was asked to fill in at the last minute last week just for one class (the one where the sales rep was 40 minutes late). Then afterward, I was asked to finish out the course to the end. That makes things complicated. I dislike jumping into things in the middle. I like to start at the beginning and work through to the end. Plus, there were two groups of students. And for some reason, though I was teaching the exact same thing, one group had a two-hour class, and the second group had only a one-hour class. Therefore, I have to come up with two lesson plans to teach the same thing – one lesson plan that lasts an hour and a second one that lasts for two hours. It’s a bit complicated to do that.

I was at the MRT station in plenty of time and I found a shady spot where I could read my Dexter book and while away the time until the sales rep showed up. The sales reps are an odd bunch of guys and I’m never quite sure what will happen. I assumed that the sales rep would be on time today, but you never know.

The sun was out though, and it was pleasant to sit there and wait. And when the sales rep showed up, I hopped into the front seat and we settled in to wait for the second teacher, who was teaching an identical set of classes to mine. Once he arrived and climbed into the back seat, the sales rep set off and drove like an insane person to the school. It was a beautiful day, though, and it was nice to sit in the car and enjoy the sunshine. All too soon, we were at the school and driving through the gates. The school is a very nice one. It’s new and modern and is in a nice location with a beautiful backdrop of low mountains. This area is one of my stomping grounds, and I’d been there many times on my scooter and on foot, driving around and exploring and going on short hikes.

I find that the classrooms in Taiwan are a big part of why I have trouble teaching. I find them to be poorly designed – particularly from a sound point of view. The buildings are made of concrete, steel, and glass and the classrooms have terrible acoustic properties. There is a massive amount of background noise coming from all directions and this noise bounces around on the hard surfaces. Nothing gets absorbed and the result is that I simply can’t hear the students and they can’t hear each other. That is not very conducive to an active ESL type of class. It works if you want to simply talk into a microphone for an hour and have the students listen, which, as far as I can tell, is the normal way for classes to take place here. But if you want to have a give-and-take with the students, it is very challenging. For me, it is more than challenging. I would say it is impossible and when asked to “teach” a class at one of these schools, to say I crash and burn would be accurate. In this case, however, I was lucky. I was assigned a special audio visual room and it was nicely sound-proofed. It also had nice round tables and the students sat at these round tables and formed themselves naturally into three groups. The class size in Taiwan is generally quite large. I’m usually looking at about 40 students. In this case, the class had been split into two, and I had 20 students in each class – a much more manageable number.

The students in these classes are actually quite great. That could be because they are mostly girls. In any event, they are friendly and eager and polite. In fact, out of the two classes, there is only one student that gives me any attitude. No big surprise that this student is a boy. He’s the class cool guy and he refuses to do what I ask him to do and when I force him, he does it like a clown. This is the type of behavior I actually get lots of times at these schools when I try to teach – and crash and burn. It’s been refreshing – and a relief – to have just one student like that instead of the usual fifteen or twenty. Again, it’s probably because the vast majority of the students are girls.

Despite my careful lesson plan, things did not go well for the first 2-hour class. In retrospect, I can see that I over-thought the class and tried to be too clever. One exercise in particular tipped the balance over to disaster. In my defense, the exercise could easily have worked, but for some reason the students have not grasped the one lesson I’ve been trying to get across. It’s a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve hammered away at this one point over and over again and I’ve demonstrated it many, many times. Yet, I definitely did something wrong, because no one in the class had the slightest clue what I was talking about and no one actually did it. And this exercise proved beyond a doubt that all of my three hours of work had gone completely past them. They clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

Part of this disaster was that I was trying to get the students to speak with some kind of emotion. The point of the class, after all, is to enter a storytelling contest and win the contest. Therefore, we are practicing public-speaking techniques and I wanted them to put some emotion into their voice. Any emotion. Just something. Just the tiniest little bit. Yet, none of them could do it. Not one. Not even the best student among them. I would even stop a student who had just delivered a line in a classic robotic dead monotone with their eyes focused on the ground, and I would deliver that same line the way it should be done – with emotion and addressing the audience. I’d asked the student to copy my voice – to say the line the way I’d said it. And they would simply do the robotic monotone thing again. I’d jump in and say “No, no, no. With emotion. Like this.” And I’d do it again and ask them to just copy what I did. And they’d stare at the ground and do the monotone robot thing again. It was very strange. I know that people will say they are just shy. But it’s more than that. It was like they really didn’t understand what I meant and didn’t hear the difference between what I said and what they said. It’s the strangest thing. I know that any student in Canada would get it in two seconds. It’s not rocket science. The student in Canada might not do it well and might just ham it up and act goofy as they tried to put emotion into their voice, but that’s fine. The funny thing is that the one boy who gives me all kinds of attitude and disrespect was the only student who finally gave me just a little bit of a performance. I demonstrated for him how he should say the line, and he came back with a cartoony and clowny voice – way over the top and stupid and goofy. He did it basically to insult me and make fun of me, but I actually liked it and he seemed quite surprised when I smiled and praised him and said, “That’s it! That’s what I want. Nice job.” I mean, it was the first piece of actual speech-making I’d heard in all those hours of work. I’ll take what I can get. Go ahead and insult me, I was saying, but at least you spoke above a dead whisper.

Anyway, things did not go well during that first class. And I heard about it afterward. That’s another odd thing about life in Taiwan. On the one hand, the students seem to be so put-upon. Everyone talks about how hard they have to work and how they go to school all the time and all that. Yet, in another way, the students seem to have all the power. In this case, as soon as the class was over, the students reported back to their regular teacher that they didn’t like the class. They told her that there was too much review. The teacher came directly to me and delivered the students’ verdict – the masses had spoken and they didn’t like my class and that I should do less review.

I could have delivered a crushing retort. In fact, the teacher was touching on something that I’d thought a lot about. From what I’ve seen of the education system in Taiwan, a large problem is that the students will often move on to a higher level of English without mastering what came before. They simply keep progressing and progressing without actually learning anything – without learning the basics. I could have said to this teacher that we ended up reviewing a lot because no one in the class had actually demonstrated that they’d learned anything that I was trying to get across. As a teacher, I sat there in the room and just shook my head wondering why the students were not grasping even the simplest point. So I’d jump up and go back to that point and demonstrate it again and try to get them to understand and show me that they understood. But none of them even came close. From the exercises, it was clear that nothing I had taught them had made an impression. Thinking back, though, I couldn’t see how I could possibly have been any clearer. I had even started the lesson by saying quite clearly that our goal for the day was to learn just this one thing. And I hammered at it. And yet no one got even that one point. The students simply wanted novelty. They wanted something new and different. Who cares if they hadn’t grasped the point of the class? They just wanted to move on and, as one student put it, “play games.”

Despite all the thoughts I had when I was told that the students had disliked my class, I didn’t say anything to the teacher. I simply nodded and listened and accepted the feedback. I already knew that the class hadn’t gone well. I knew that, and I felt that it was my fault. Something about my lesson plan and my exercises was just completely wrong. At the same time, though, I mentally rejected the idea that there had been too much review. My review had shown me that the students hadn’t learned anything, so technically there was no review. I was still trying to get them to master just one point from the first class. Simply moving on and ignoring the fact that they hadn’t learned anything would be doing the students a disservice.

I think what struck me about that conversation was its matter-of-fact nature. The teacher was not trying to get information from me about the class – its goals and its nature and how I felt things had gone. She was never in the classroom, so she had no direct knowledge herself. She was simply reporting what the students said. She was not interpreting or translating or considering. She was simply a pipeline from the students to me. And it was clear that what the students said was considered law. They didn’t like review and she was telling me that I should not do any more review. Just do new and exciting things. The tyranny of the students. The goal, then, seems to be to just make the children happy, not teach them anything. There is no trust in the teacher. I was having my legs cut out from under me before I’d even got started – and this by the teacher of the class. After all, if the goal was simply to make the students happy, then why not just cancel the class? The students would be happiest if they didn’t have to come at all. They’d also be happy if they could just put their heads down on the desk and go to sleep. Alternatively, they’d be happy if they could just hang out and do their homework from other classes. Once you go down the road of just doing what the students want, it’s hard to know what to do.

This gets back to my overall problem with these kinds of classes in Taiwan. There is often a disconnect between what is asked formally of the teacher and then what is actually expected. I always get confused by that. In this case, I was asked to finish out this course about storytelling in English. That is the point of the class – to help the students develop some ability in telling stories in English. I have no choice but to take them at their word and then try to put together a set of lesson plans to help the students do that. If they simply want the students to have fun and practice English in a series of random activities and conversations, then they should say that. But it doesn’t work that way. There is often this world that exists on paper – the formal world. And then there is the real world. And they may or may not be connected. You just don’t know. You have to feel your way along. The school, for example, will ask us to teach a lesson based on one of the articles in a magazine. Yet, when I do that, it is a complete disaster. Everyone complains that it was boring and the teacher will tell me afterwards that the students want more activities and games. Fair enough, but then why did they ask me to come teach one of the articles? Why put that down on paper when it isn’t really what they wanted? This doublethink trips me up all the time in Taiwan – the gap between what is written and said and then what is really expected.

I’m also always very surprised at the difference between how the students are in class and then outside of class. In class, they might be shy and reserved. Then when I make myself available during the break or between classes, they are suddenly very upbeat and very forward. This time, I had two girls track me down and hit me with a barrage of questions: How old are you? Are you married? Why aren’t you married? Aren’t you lonely? Don’t you want to get married and have children? Then they gaze up at me and tell me that they love the color of my eyes. And they think my hair is so beautiful because it is curly.

I’m always a bit dazed after one of these verbal assaults, which happen all the time. It’s clear that I really don’t know what is going on here most of the time. It’s a different culture. I try to picture the reverse situation occurring at a school in Canada – a teacher from Taiwan coming into a classroom in Canada to teach a special lesson in Chinese. For one thing, there is no way that the students would complain to their teacher and then that teacher would automatically deliver those complaints to the guest teacher from Taiwan. And of all the questions a Canadian student might ask a guest from Taiwan, the last things they would ask are “How old are you?” and “Why aren’t you married?”

The second class went much better than the first one. I knew that my carefully planned activity wouldn’t work. In any event, this second class was only one hour long, and I didn’t have time for it. We did a warm-up and then we went straight into practicing some storytelling with each group collaborating to come up with a story for their picture. The class went well, though not one student actually did anything that I had been trying to teach them.

Now that I’m under orders to stop with the reviewing and move on, I have to come up with some new things to teach in the final two classes. That shouldn’t be a problem. I was lying in bed last night thinking about it, and I came up with two more fairly basic skills that any good storyteller should have. They will both be easy to teach and even easier to master.

I had another surprise sprung on me for this class, and this was the requirement to grade all the students in these classes. I wasn’t happy about learning that. The form I was handed was predictably complex and required me to grade each student in terms of a whole bunch of things – class participation, pronunciation, grammar, etc. I didn’t see how I could possibly do that, and I suggested that I grade them instead on how well they master the actual things I’m trying to teach them in the class. That seemed reasonable to me, and I proposed having each student tell a story based on a picture and I would grade them based on how well they executed the things they learned in the course. I’m now backpedaling on that idea. I had five basic points in mind for this class, and so far not a single student has demonstrated even one of them. So it’s pretty clear that giving them a score based on that is not realistic. I’d have to fail them all. So I’ll probably use the original form and somehow fill it out. What I have to remember is that this is again one of those situations where what is on paper is not the same as reality. I’m worried that I won’t have enough experience with these kids to fairly judge them on all these criteria. But that isn’t really important. The important thing is to fill out the form. What is on the form doesn’t really matter. Just fill it out. Everyone will get a good score. That goes without saying, since that is how it works here. I was thinking that I could use a simple 3-part system with the possible scores being Excellent (E), (Good) (G) and Needs Improvement (NI). That should work out well. That way, no one will get in trouble.

 

After class, the sales rep was under orders again to drive us back to an MRT station in downtown Taipei. Oddly enough, this had been set up because the original teacher – the one who vanished – needed to teach a class there right after the Sanxia classes. It was a special arrangement for him. Everyone knew this. Yet now that it didn’t matter, the arrangement just continued unquestioned – except by me. I prefer to go to the nearest MRT station. While sitting in a car, I can’t do anything. I can’t read, for example. And, the way this sales rep drives, it is very dangerous. So when we passed another MRT station early on – the Far Eastern Hospital Station – I asked him to just drop me there.

Once in the MRT, I settled into my Dexter book and made my way home. I got a phone call from the office on the way home asking me to come to the office on Friday in order to do some emergency recording. My schedule has me going to a drama contest in Taoyuan, and since it finishes in late afternoon, there is no point going all the way back to the office. However, I now have to do that in order to do this recording.

 

Tags: Canada, MRT, Taipei, Taiwan