My first week here in Taiwan is coming to a close, so I thought I would take some time to reflect upon the happenings of this week. This week I have been trying to get my body acclimated to a new time zone, new schedule, new everything, and I will say it is not an easy task. My body has no clue when it should be eating and I think it really dislikes me for disrupting its schedule. However, I am beginning to feel better and am able to eat more. Hopefully I will also get onto a Taiwan sleeping schedule-going to bed at 9 pm and waking up at 3:30 am is really not working for me. (This has been good though, since I am always ready for school on time.)
This leads me to the next topic--traffic. At the moment I walk everywhere I go. My walk to school takes about 20-25 minutes. Always plan for that extra time, you may have to wait a few minutes here and there to avoid be a target for the scooter drivers. Although there are sidewalks, they are essentially glorified scooter parking or a place for stores to extend their store front. This means walking on the street as close to the buildings or sidewalk as you can get. My first walk to school, I thought I was about to get ran over by a scooter a few times. Traffic here is much different that what I or any U.S. is probably use to. The roads can be tiny and cars try to weave around each other to get to their destination-weaving can even occur in one lane streets. Next are the scooters--they tend to dart around the weaving cars and drive very near where the pedestrians walk. Maybe I will get a bicycle while I am here, but first I would like to get more comfortable with the way traffic works here.
Now onto my job, teaching English to students whose native language is Chinese. This is very different than any teaching I have ever done in my life, and possibly a lot harder than teaching math or science. Although the class periods are only 30 minutes, it can be hard to fill those thirty minutes with the right mix of English teaching, practice, and games. It is really important to include games into the teaching because a lot of these kids are really young-4 years old-and they don't have an attention span for practicing English. The goal is to teach the lesson and try to just get them to practice talking to you. They still want to try to say things in Chinese to me-especially the younger ones who have a small English vocabulary. (I'm not sure if I ever will get the hang of Chinese; it's a very different kind of language where the tone is important in determining the meaning of a word.) The other problem is some of the kids are so smart that the lesson and practice can be done in 10 minutes and you have 20 minutes of class left. It is also difficult because different teachers want you to teach differently to their classes. Mostly, I think about the kids. A lot of the kids that come to this English school go to regular elementary school in the morning and then English school at night-so they are in school all day expected to learn and be well behaved. Kids are kids and I feel bad for how they are expected to be 8 year old adults. I always try to make the practice some sort of game or physical movement because the kids are tired of sitting there. This teaching environment is just very different and I know it will take me awhile to get the hang of it.
Other than teaching, I have not been able to do a whole lot else during this week. I have been very tired and just wanting to go to bed after school is over. Today is Saturday, and this afternoon I took a walk a couple of miles down the road that I live on just to see some more of the city that I live in. It has been difficult to convince myself to get out and explore this week as it has rained continually since I have arrived here. (Today was the first day there was no rain, so I took advantage of that.) On the other hand, although the low is around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, it feels a lot colder--either with the continual rain and wind--or because it feels colder inside than outside. Since Taiwan never gets that "cold" the buildings do not have heating or insulation, so it often feels colder inside than outside. Or in the case of the school that I work at, the building is open to the outside and the individual classrooms have doors--so it is pretty cold at school too.
So goes the beginning of my adventure in Taiwan.
