Come On On Safari with Me

Well, I had a brief conversation today with Dave Roberts at the Head Office in Taipei. It was good I caught him when I did, because he's leaving on holiday soon and I know not when he'll be back. He said very clearly that he would back me up in any confrontation with my branch over the visa situation. My branch cannot dock my salary to pay for the teacher who covered for me last Friday. He also stated unambiguously that the branch has to pay for any visa-related trips I have to make until they get their license and I apply properly for a work permit and residency visa. Thereafter, if my visa situation still is unsettled, it becomes Shane's responsibility to pay.

I haven't related all of this to Ruby and Eve, but I will, and soon. I figure it is probably best to wait, however, until they broach the subject again. It is pretty clear at this point that they don't have a leg to stand on, and it seems they need me more than I need them--they need me not to tell the authorities that they have been operating the school without a license more than I need them as employers. There are literally thousands of EFL jobs out there, all over the world--some in countries where I might even be paid better than in Taiwan.

On Monday and Thursday evenings, I have a class of two students--a boy of twelve and a girl who I believe is ten. At our first class, it became apparent that we had placed them at too low a level, and we have now corrected the error and are getting more advanced materials for them to study. While we are in the process of this, however, some of what we need for them we do not have, so tonight I found myself having to improvise a little.

Now, my feeling up until now has been that the adult classes are the ones that allow for real creativity. Adults will ask you all kinds of things, and you can kind of veer off and teach not only some interesting language that wasn't your original target language, but also, often, interesting things about American culture and society. But tonight, I found myself veering off into untargeted language with these couple of kids.

A lot of what you do in these kids' classes, I'm finding, is setting up run-and-touch or race-to-the-board games ("Everybody go touch the window" or "Everybody touch Brazil!"). Tonight, I set up such a game where I wrote a sentence on the board, the kids had to say the sentence and then race to slap the target word from the sentence with a big plastic hammer. My target language (again, this is EFL jargon for "the language you are trying to teach") was four countries--Canada, Singapore, France, and China--and various recreational activities. For fun and extra practice, I mixed in some review language from their first lesson, which was about names of subjects in school.

Well, I got a little bored, so I started writing sentences that might not mean anything in particular to the kids, but would be pop culture references to the kids: "Let's go surfing now," +"I'll take a slow boat to China", that sort of thing. At one point, I put "Blame Canada!" on the board.

Well, this gave me an opportunity to explain the word "blame". I was amazed how quickly my kids seemed to grasp the idea...although explaining why one would want to "Blame Canada" was harder. It didn't help that I've never actually seen the South Park movie, and have no real desire to. I finally just said it was the name of a song and I was trying to be funny.

I also learned, in the course of the evening, that Taiwanese people don't really go surfing. I did manage to get the concept of surfing across on the board, drawing pictures, but the kids seem a bit baffled as to why people might find this fun. As I find the whole idea kind of scary myself, I really didn't know how to answer them.

In the course of playing, however, I also go to learn the Chinese name for Chinese checkers. And, since we had so little to do tonight, without the CD or other acoutrements that usually enliven the lesson, we spent some time with a big map of the world going over countries and capitals. I got to learn some of the Chinese names as well. I don't really know why, but at some point in all of this I found myself singing "America", from West Side Story. This got me into explaining that I was from the West Side (okay, not technically true, but when you have a teaching moment, you use it). Sandy, the ten-year-old girl, likes music, so I said I would try to find the lyrics to that song for our next class. If they're good and we get through everything we have to get through, we can do the song together.