It Must Be Sweden

I dragged myself out of bed comparatively late this morning. My first alarm went off at 7:45, but I set it for 8:30 and went back to sleep. At that point, I got up and took a look at the notes in Shane's procedure manual about being "on standby" (meaning, being forced to be available to come in if another teacher calls in sick). The rules said not to call before 9:35. So I went back to sleep again until it was relatively close to that, then got up and called in from the payphone across the street as my cell phone balance is depleted and I had no idea how to refill it until today.

When I called in, I was told to report to a school Taipei for two classes: a kindergarten class in the afternoon, followed by a children's class. I was to be at the school by noon, as the kindergarten class started at 2:00.

I really have no idea why I was called in to teach this kindergarten class. Had the manager looked at the schedule for the class for half a second, she could have realized that there was not a single thing to be done that a Chinese teacher could not have handled adequately. Apparently, on Friday afternoons this class has songs for half an hour--somethng we did with the class next door--and plays with toys brought from home before having their snack and a brief Chinese lesson.

Yesterday and today, my kindergarten classes were remarkably docile compared to the "class from hell" I've taught at another branch. It still doesn't make me want to teach kindergarten, but I've realized it isn't always as hellacious an experience as I had at first thought.

My second class today was much more interesting. This was a CE22 class--Shane elemenentary (CE) classes go as high as CE27--and was quite advanced. In fact, classes at this level are so advance that there really isn't an appropriate book for them. The book we use at this level, American Wow, is really meant for junior high or possibly even high school kids. It's hard to adapt the book to the kind of activities we do with little kids.

Luckily, these kids were also amazingly docile. And it really was amazing to hear Chinese kids this age using the first conditional perfectly, every time. We played a few different games: one where they had to make first conditional sentences with varying vocabulary based on a roll of the dice, and another where the students had to guess countries based on clues and answer with the words "it must be," which is part of their current target language. I let the kids pick the countries in teams beforehand, to make the game a little more interesting for them.

Their clues were often very clipped ("The country' s name begins with an S....oh, it must be Sweden"), and I quickly had to disallow any references to Chinese words after one student said something like, "its Chinese name has three words"). But they did amazingly well.

In some ways, I hate lessons like these because I don't feel they really reach very much new language. But I did at least manage to concept-check (the twenty-dollar word for "make sure they understand the meaning of") the first conditional and a few odd words like usual, polite, impolite, etc. i just kind of wish I could have done more.

But I've found I really like having an office of other teachers I can seek advice and support from. One of the teachers today, for instance, gave me a great activity to do with reading. At this level, the kids have readers (usually shortened and sometimes bowdlerized versions of English-language classics--in this case, Dracula) that we do group readings from. One of my teachers suggested setting up the reading as a game in which, ever time you shouted out a number, some students had to come up to the board and write the last word we had read. This activity helps keep the students paying attention to where we are and not nod off during reading, which can be a problem.

I will probably recycle this activity next week, when Jay from Head Office comes to observe a cover lesson I'm giving at a different school. That observation, though not "official" (meaning that it won't count toward my quota of observations should I be placed elsewhere) will likely have a big effect on whether I stay with Shane, or possibly even in Taiwan, long-term. So I am going to pull out all the stops for it. At least this is one I know I can pull.