Wednesday, November 18, 2015

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Tuesday, January 6, 2015

New Years Resolutions

So........it's been a while. Looking at around 3 months since I've posted last, and I'm going to attribute it to being busy around work, getting a bit too much into a routine, and most of all--laziness.

But, alas! What better time to jump back into things than after new years and making a cliche resolution to write more!? (If you can't tell, I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to New Years). Anyways, I'm going to give this blogging thing another go. Got the creativity juice (whiskey sour) on my desk and the music turned up. Let's do it.

With this first post after my hiatus, I'm going to keep it short and sweet. In a future post, I'll update you all on what I've been doing for fun and share some more pictures from around Taiwan. In this one, I'm going to focus on what happens in the classroom and around the school. A sort of "Funny school stories" or "Shit Taiwanese kids say", if you will.

First off, I've found that some familiar racial and gender stereotypes are not lost on this side of the Pacific. I'll preface this by saying I don't condone stereotypes or gender roles, but couldn't help but chuckle when I saw these. Here are a couple examples:
     -In one class, we were learning about adverbs and their uses, and a vocab phrase was "jump high". Lo and behold, the picture on our flashcard was a black kid dunking a basketball. It seems that even in Taiwan, everyone knows that white men can't jump (at least not high).
     -To follow up with a gender stereotype, we had a vocab word in another class that was "sweep the floor". Sure enough, we had a picture of a girl sweeping the floor. When practicing in our workbook, we also had the question "Who can sweep the floor?" and the correct answer was "Alice can sweep the floor." Damn right, she can. And after, she can make me a sandwich. (Hope the sarcasm wasn't lost through text there).




Let's stick on the theme of funny vocab phrases. In my 1st grade class, I was teaching some basic adjectives, one of which was "mad". In order to use it in context, we would practice with the phrase "Are you (adj)?" Every time "mad" came up, it took every ounce of restraint not to say "you mad, bro?".




And finally, one last thing from our workbooks that I found funny. The picture is supposed to represent "The happy baby is sick", but I couldn't help but think of the Van Halen album cover of the smoking baby. Here's a side by side. You decide.

 


Let's move on to a totally random story. In one of my youngest classes, I called a kid out for not paying attention. As I walked over to see what he was up to, I find that on his paper he had drawn a handful of swastikas. No idea how to make heads or tails of this one...


I also have some belated Thanksgiving ideas from one of my students if you're struggling to find things you're thankful for this new year. Let's call the student "Ed" for privacy's sake. When I asked Ed what he's thankful for, his response was "my eraser" and "my shorts". It's the simple things in life, folks. Don't ever forget that. I must admit, he did have some sweet camo shorts the day of our Thanksgiving party (not to mention an awesome Batman shirt).



I've also acquired a few nicknames in my 5 months of teaching here. My appropriate title is "Teacher Brett", but certain students have taken to calling me "Teacher Super Brett" (the 1st grade boys that are obsessed with superheroes at the moment), "Teacher TNT" (This stems from me laughing at a kid for using TNT explosives in a sentence correctly), "Teacher Baby" (not sure how that started), and "Teacher (insert female co-worker's name)" (The kindergarten kids think it's absolutely hilarious to call me by a girl's name).


Now that we're mid-post, I think it's a good time to share some advice. Forewarning for any future English teachers: it's just about impossible for any students that are about 12 years old and up to say the words "beach" or "sheet" without bursting into laughter. You'd be surprised how well middle school, Taiwanese kids know their English curse words. While we're on the subject, I think it's extremely funny to hear my middle school students swear in English or talk about the things that middle school students tend to talk about. In a creative writing assignment, I even had a student say he would "kick the monster's ass" if he saw it. I pretend to put on my "angry teacher" face, but deep down, I'm laughing uncontrollably. Hey, at least they're using English.

One of my favorite interactions with a student was with a kid (probably about 5 or 6 years old) in a class that I substitute taught for about 1 month. Like my first graders that are obsessed with superheroes, the boys in this class love their dinosaurs, and are actually quite knowledgeable on the subject. Every class, this one student would ask me a hypothetical about "Who is win?" between two different dinosaurs or animals. These hypotheticals ranged from "lion or tiger", "Velociraptor or T-rex", to my personal favorite "T-rex or Spinosaurus" (I went with Spinosaurus, obviously).




To wrap things up, I'll quick touch on an event we had a couple weekends ago at school. We called it our "ACP Fair" (ACP = American Curriculum program). Every ACP class at our school set up a booth and we would put on a performance for parents. Our topics ranged from science, to math, theather, spelling, singing, and phonics. Preparing for this fair definitely kept me busy for a couple months, but it was great to see the kids put on a good show for their parents. Here are a few pictures form the booth I was in charge of that day.






These pictures seem like a good note to end on for now. There's a good chance I'll have more pictures from the ACP fair in the near future. Like I said, I'll be making a new post in the next week or two about my social life and things going on outside of school in the last three months. 

Here's to keeping new year's resolutions and getting back on the blogging train. Cheers, folks!