A Good Day

In Which Sometimes Things Just Go Well

Today was one of those days in which even the frustrating things added up to a harmonious whole. I had two classes today, a 1A and a 4A, at different schools. My 1A has five students, who are as rambunctious as the six- and seven-year-olds they are. They finally began to settle into the class routine today, and we didn't even lose much time of actual curriculum to acheive it. Even better, I think it's sustainable.

In my 4A class, we wrote silly questions as preparation for writing a paragraph, or set of paragraphs. My students will be writing about things like "Why do polar bears like chocolate?" "How big is the sky?" "How much water is there in the ocean?" and "Why does Joe laugh all the time?" During the break time, they drew a butterfly on my hand with facepaint sticks.

After the 4A class, I went to Subway to grab a very quick sandwich before the open house at the first school. The sandwich I got had very little on it, but it was sustenance. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll go back there at night. It occasioned a pleasant conversation with another teacher, however, who thought of me and wanted to know if I wanted anything when he went to get dinner. I declined, but the overture of friendship was nice.

The open house was even better. The parents of three of my students came in, listened to the general speeches and introductions, and then came to my classroom to talk to me. They cared about the education of their children. They asked pertinent questions and raised well-considered issues. They brought up the ways in which their children were feeling frustrated, and about what they felt confident. They were eager to participate themselves in their children's education, and when they left, one of them shook my hand and said, "We are lucky to meet you."

And after all of that, I met with the manager for Columbia Schools to talk about a proposed change in the presentation of the curriculum for my Saturday class. It's a group of teenagers, bored, on Saturday morning, with vastly different skill levels. Different kids are coming and going all the time, so it's challenging to keep the whole class on the same page, and would be even if they were willing to lift their eyes above the level of their knees. I want to make the class into a game like I have mentioned here previously. I described to our manager what I wanted to do, and when she understood, she said, "Yes. Please do this. And if it works at all, please let me know, because we want to watch it happen and see if we can use it for the other Saturday classes." I couldn't have been more thrilled.

I walked to the MRT station through the courtyard of the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall and felt pretty good about life.

On The Bright Side

In Which My Internet Is Still Not Working (Sorry)

My friends, I have found the Promised Land. It is a five-minute walk from my front door and goes by the name of 1868. It is, perhaps, the best coffee shop I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing since the Black Cat, and that, dear readers, is saying something.

You don’t know how amazing a decent sandwich on multigrain bread with real cheddar cheese is until you’ve subsisted on oil soaked vegetables and variations on noodles with cabbage for a year. It was marvelous. They make their own bread and their own coffee, and the tea that Tiffany served me was excellently prepared. She used a timer.

Tiffany is the Taiwanese woman behind the counter. I get the impression that she’s also the manager. She’s cheerful and talkative and has a heterochromic cat named Xiao Naiyou, because his fur is not quite white. She has pictures of him on her laptop, and happily displayed them. She had her laptop out because she was playing a game on Facebook in which she was the … manager of a restaurant called 1868. Somewhere, Benoît Mandelbrot is chortling in delight.

And speaking of the French, I’ve met my only neighbor. His name is Alex, he’s French, he works in logistics, and he’s learning very basic Chinese from me. He’s also leaving in two weeks, which means that I will have the entire floor to myself for the foreseeable future. At least until this internet thing gets fixed. It’s been nice to know someone here. Leaving Kojen was absolutely without question the best thing I possibly could have done, but it was nice having friends at work. In time, I’m sure, I’ll get to know my co-workers at Columbia.

In the mean time, I’ve reconnected with Sarah and am still hanging out with a few of my old co-workers. Yuki and I took a trip down to Hualien this past weekend to see Taroko Gorge. It was pretty, and big, but not quite as impressive as I’d been led to believe. Nevertheless, we had a good time walking around and relaxing. We stayed the night in a charming little bed and breakfast that had a few live birds in a stack of old-fashioned cages and a miniature Chihuahua named Muffin.

With that, friends, I'll leave you for the time being.

Delta Stands For Change

In Which Many Changes Are Enumerated And Explained

I have been here for one year, peerless readers, and two weeks. In the last three days I have changed schools, moved, and lost my roommate to the lure of identifiable food lacking MSG. I am now living in a little fourth floor efficiency with huge windows that I shall have to Do Something About when winter comes. They do not quite close all the way. Given a choice, however, between that and endless repetitions of Madonna from a bar downstairs, I’ll take the draftiness. I haven’t finished finding a place for everything yet, but with luck and perseverance I shall win out in the end.

I am no longer in the employ of Kojen English Language Schools. The reason for this, it pains me to relate, can be laid entirely at the feet of [...imagine longwinded fulmination here - leave a comment for details...] I shall miss my friends among them.

I shall also miss Katy, who flew back to the United States on the last day of August. It will be odd to live alone again. I expect it will involve a good deal of going to bed earlier, and more wandering around. Perhaps I shall even improve my Chinese! I will also have more time to devote to studying calculus and drawing. Poor exchanges for a near constant companion, but I believe it is time to catch up on my self-improvement.

My classes now number four. I have two on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and one on Saturdays. The latter two are known as “boost” classes, presumably for students who are moving more slowly than the curriculum otherwise allows, or more quickly. The Tuesday/Thursday one is two hours long and ends at 7:00pm. The Saturday class is three hours long and ends at noon. The students are struggling with concepts like “finding the main idea of a paragraph.”

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I have a two-hour class ending at 3:30, and another ending at 6:30. The first is a lower-level class just learning basic nouns and verbs. The second is a higher level class in which I am permitted (nay, encouraged) to read from a Roald Dahl book, and teach them science. For illustrative purposes, here is a somewhat exaggerated unfinished cartoon depicting my reaction to that last.

None of my classes ends later than 7:00pm, which means that I can stroll leisurely towards a bus or from the MRT, passing fruit stands redolent with pungent guava and sweet mango, stopping at one of the multitudinous 7-11s to buy an Australian ice-cream bar, having dinner at a little Taiwatalian restaurant or getting take-out from a tiny Thai cart. It’s cooler here at night, and walking alone in it reminds me of things – Madison before I knew it as a college student, Chicago after seeing a play, New York City while visiting a friend. Perhaps it is something about being solitary that refracts the night into sounds and smells and sights that match memories of places I’m not, and some of places I’ve never been.