First Week of Teaching - Hsing Hwa HS in Chiayi

I’m posting on the blog now with the goal of summarizing my first one-week assignment here in Taiwan, at Hsing-Hwa High School in Chiayi (Ja-yee). It’s a daunting task. This week was simply too big, too jampacked, too moving, too special to be captured in some sort of play-by-play retelling of all the week’s events. So I won’t do that. I guess I’ll do a bullet point review of my favorite moments and observations. I’ll also ignore the fact that I’m sitting at the bar at 10:45pm in a noisy, 15-seat street kitchen in, of all places...Tokyo. That’s a post for another day.

- The morning of day one at Hsing Hwa was brutal. Each of the 8 teachers from our program that traveled to Hsing Hwa were assigned a home room of either ‘middle schoolers,’ aged 13-15, or ‘high schoolers,’ mostly 16-17 year olds. My group, the Cuba group (a curious choice by the program to name a group Cuba… probably wouldn’t have made my top 8 most recognizable countries list), was of the younger type. The morning was really tough. The kids were incredibly shy, which I expected, but I thought I’d at least get some nervous, quiet reactions out of them. There were basically no reactions at all. In the Opening Ceremony event, I stood on stage in front of 200 students and introduced myself, and in an attempt to forge some team identity, I cried out, “Okay, Cuba, I want you guys to on the count of three, make as much noise as you possibly can! I want the people at the 7/11 down the street to hear us! Ready?! One! Two! Three!” Crickets. Crickets. Not a single peep. The whole room laughed after a few seconds, but the mood carried through to our icebreaker activities and early classes. Bit by bit, however, they started to come into their own. I dedicated a lot of time to talking to each individual student during the exercises and trying to find the confident ones, the class clowns, the stars. After lunch on day 1, I’d found them.

- The high school is located on the outskirts of Chiayi City, ranked somewhere between 6 and 10 in terms of population on the island.

- At right is our fantastic teaching and TA team in Chiayi. Working with all of them was simply awesome.

- We lived in dormitories on the high school’s campus. Some of the students in the summer camp, and throughout the entire school year, live in the dorms during the week and travel home only on weekends, as they live several hours away. The dorms were quite spartan but nice enough… no internet, and air conditioning only from 5:30pm to 6am, but we learned to manage.

- It was freaking hot. And humid. During daylight hours we always tried our very best to stay in the A/C. Expeditions outside were pleasant in the evening, but that was pretty much it. And we had a 10:00 curfew. Which makes it even more improbable that it was one best weeks I’ve ever had.

- My homeroom was split into 5 groups of 4, 5, or 6 students each. They chose their team names: Team Remix, the Eagles, the Bears, Team Gama (Taiwanese for orange, apparently), and the Doggies, which I had to step in and rename when they initially suggested that they name themselves after the Snoop Dogg rap album titled “Doggy Style.”

- Each team created a fictional TV commercial and a drama, the best of which were performed at a closing ceremony for all the classes at the end of the week. I chose Gama, who advertised several orange-based food products, Remix, who made a bike helmet, and Bears, who attempted to sell sunglasses that I modeled aggressively during the closing ceremony. In addition to the commercials and dramas in my own homeroom, I taught two lessons to all of the classes: Table manners, and a USA tour. At right is me working with middle school students on a tourism poster for Miami during the USA tour exercise.

- We teachers agreed that this summer will likely be the closest any of us ever come to being treated like a celebrity. It was difficult to walk through a hallway or across the school grounds without being mobbed by students requesting photos, autographs, or Facebook information. By the end of the week, girls had mustered up the courage to request hugs, which when given were greeted with audible swoons and squeals from the crowd of girls gathered around. I was asked out to dinner several times and given tightly-folded notes routinely. It was absolutely wild.

- Despite the program rule of not spending time with students outside of the school or after hours, our directors made an exception when the girls that lived in the dormitory invited us to dinner in the dorm common room on Wednesday night. The display of hospitality and selflessness that followed was something I’ll never forget, and I may remember it as my first moment of truly loving the Taiwanese. The girls, who certainly didn’t have any money, had somehow scraped together cash to buy us a massive meal, complete with bubble teas and desserts from restaurants around the school. And they had already eaten the school-provided dinner. They just sat and watched us eat and talked. Their generosity was, in a word, overwhelming. We took pictures and played silly games, notably “Hai-Dai,” a variation of rock-paper-scissors that takes a bit more skill and time. The same girls invited us to a ‘snack’ on Thursday, which was a delicious yet curious concoction featuring shaved ice, noodles, what seemed to be root-beer flavored jello, and a series of other unidentifiable items.

- The Taiwanese have a flair for sticking beautiful, historic-looking buildings in the tiny spaces between characterless concrete ones. See the photo on the right.

- One night I went with fellow teachers Brian, Orit, and Kate to meet up with the Taiwanese TA director Rayo, a good friend of ours. He took us through the city center to a tiny open-air restaurant filled with happy-looking locals. The place's specialty: Taiwanese shaved ice, or niu nai xue hua bing. It's not anything like shaved ice in America or Europe. The ice is actually shaved from a frozen block of milk, and is usually mixed with fruit (mango is the most typical, I think) and a type of cream, so that after a few minutes they all melt together into a gooey concoction of goodness. It was awesome, and I really enjoyed chatting with Rayo and a friend of his about life in Chiayi for a 20-something.

- Like their Chinese counterparts, Taiwan’s brilliant, world-renowned engineers too have a problem designing a shower that doesn’t flood an entire bathroom.

- The closest thing to a sit-down meal we had in Chiayi was a Taiwanese dish called niu pai, a sort of sizzling skillet of beef and noodles with either mushroom or black pepper sauce. Delicious, and eating it in a mom-and-pop street kitchen makes it even better. You know you're at a legit, family-owned place when the restaurant bathroom is filled with their toothbrushes and hand towels. Love it.

- The first rule when teaching shy foreign children? Keep smiling. Always. No matter what. Rule #2? Keep smiling.

- 7-eleven in Taiwan is a religion. In Chiayi it was our saving grace; they have free wifi, a copier, printer, can call a cab, everything.

- In chatting with Taiwanese friends and with people who've been here before, perhaps the defining cultural experience, the one go-to cultural event in Taiwan is the phenomena of the night market. Cities set aside massive blocks of space that at night spring into wild, carnival-like landscapes. Hundreds, even thousands of vendors sell strange foods, common foods, sweets, strange drinks, clothes, trinkets, jewelry, everything. Most even feature carnival-style games and gambling sections. The night market is what Taiwanese people of all ages do at night, especially on the weekend. The crowds seem equal parts teenager, families with small children, and elderly people. If you were to come visit Taiwan for 24 hours and wanted to see something purely Taiwanese, we'd head straight to a night market. At right, I share some night-market fare with Syllvia, Kate, Nancy, and Krista.

- Speaking of strange foods, I haven't had anything that outrageous in Taiwan yet... fried fish paste, squid-on-a-stick, and pork blood tofu are the weirdest. And the infamous stinky tofu that is the island's "national dish?" It tastes just as bad as it did in Beijing.

- They really like baseball in Taiwan (a feature of the heavy Japanese influence on the island). Big Major League Baseball games are televised nationally. After hearing I was from Cincinnati, the first reaction from a class would usually be several boys saying, simply, “Reds.” One time I asked a student to use the word “seldom” in a sentence and he responded, “I love Joey Votto but I seldom watch the Reds.” Fair enough. Taiwan has its own domestic league, and Tainan’s team, the Uni Lions, play about 20 blocks from our apartment.

- At the end of the week, it was difficult to say goodbye to the kids, especially in my Cuba group. They knew it was my first time teaching but never said so, and honestly made it so easy. In addition to a healthy load of personal notes and letters from girls in other classes, my awesome TA Nancy had somehow collected a letter from each of my Cuba students and put them in a giant card. I almost got a little choked up after the closing ceremony, they were a really great group. If they’re any indication of how students are across this country, the future is very bright for Taiwan. At right, me, Nancy (in purple), and the Cubans. I'll miss them a lot.