Leaving Beigang and quitting a job in a Taiwanese public school

I found a job teaching college and so I will be leaving my teaching job in Beigang/Shuilin and moving to the big city.  I will follow up with a best of Beigang post just so that the handful of people who make it there know where to eat/get their hair washed/find a dance studio.  Basically, I’ll give you the info I wish I had when I got there.

Beigang was nice, but it was difficult living there as a single expat.  There just aren’t many other expats or that much to do.  I also got kicked out of my place.  Here’s what I think happened.

I was supposed to teach ballet classes in exchange for rent, but there was confusion from the start.  I’m a belly dancer, not a ballet dancer; a critical difference.  I did bail on my end of the bargain, and was refused my offers to pay rent.  I did hold up my end in terms of tutoring my land lady’s kids, but she wasn’t that interested in that part.

What really sucks about the above is that finding an apartment in Beigang is this side of impossible.  One pretty gnarly place was trotted out, and that was my only choice.  Thankfully the job in Taichung, where apartments are more plentiful, popped up.  And the apartment I found here is nicer than any I’ve seen in Beigang.

My apartment is cool

Here are two cultural differences that were highlighted in my varied exoduses.

Firstly, the Taiwanese yes. “Yes, you can move in.  Yes, it’s ok that you aren’t a ballerina.  Oh wait, I wasn’t allowed to rent you the space and I thought you were only staying a month.  You have to move out.”  This was the dialogue about my apartment.  I’m still perplexed about who was lying, but someone was in order to save face.  The man who found me the apartment either forgot to tell my then future land lady that I was planning to stay for more than a month (I had 8 months left on my contract) or that I was a teacher at his wife’s school (implying a stay of longer than a month), or my former land lady really did rent me a space she had no authority to rent, which is weird.  I’ll say this; someone was very careless/thoughtless because as previously mentioned, finding apartments in Yunlin county take connections.  I worried that I had offended or been somehow wanting as a tenant.

I heard through the gossip mill (which is prevalent in rural anywhere) that the land lady was pissed about the ballet classes.  Well, I tried to make amends, so life goes on.

My leaving the school was another cultural difference.  To quit, you need to give 30 days.  That’s just a heads up to the five of you reading this.  Your boss has to “let” you quit, which is jarring to an American. My bosses and recruiter (Teach Taiwan) initially told me they could have me deported (they can’t).  Slowly we moved from “We can have you deported” to “We’ll let you go after 3 weeks and you get your full pay, but you won’t get your termination documentation for two weeks, so your new job won’t be able to pay you on time.”  I considered that to be as good as could be expected.

So now to new adventures in Taichung.

Giving quizzes, assigning presentations, and the chill-out bottle

I’m new to ESL primary school teaching, so I have insights or “ahah!” moments that might seem super obvious.  I’m going to share them anyway in case they help someone.

My job is to specialize in spoken English.  I’m the one with the lovely, near-standard newsreader American accent (hint of Chicago in there, not super noticeable).  Because thinking is difficult, I took this super literally and until recently did virtually no writing in class.

But that has changed; firstly because I personally cannot remember a damned thing in language acquisition unless I can see the word written down and spelled.  I’m a visual learner and a student of Chinese, which is my 3rd foreign language.  I can repeat a sound in the moment and be told what it is, but I won’t remember it until I write it a few times.  I personally use self-created flashcards, which I’m starting to do with my students.

Quizzes– I gave my first diagnostic quiz this week and boy, was it informative.  It would seem that I have about 4 kids in a given class who know the answers, and the rest kind of mumble vocalese along with, giving the impression of knowing.  I decided to teach the names of the days of the week to my 3rd and 4th graders.  I asked my co-teacher if she thought the 6th and 5th graders would know them; she was confident they would.  Not so– 4 kids out of 11 knew them.  You wouldn’t be able to tell from listening to the class, but you can totally tell who knows what when you read the words you want to find out the kids know in Chinese and see if they can write down the English.  Quizzes are great because they aren’t for a grade, but they’re a much more precise way of discovering who knows what and what needs to be reviewed.

Assigning oral presentations (duh) is an idea that came to me in a fit of petty vengefulness.  I have a few particularly arrogant 6th grade classes, which blows my mind, because these kids are like 4′ 8″ tall and I’m pretty sure I could kick their asses literally and figuratively in any number of pursuits.  But abusing one’s students is frowned on both in the U.S. and Taiwan (fair enough).  So I had the very mature mental narrative of “You get up day after day and talk to a room full of bored kids and see how you like it.” and it hit me that I can force them to do exactly that.  My theory is that by putting them under pressure to speak passable English in front of  their peers, they’ll gain some empathy and humility.  I may even develop simple lesson assignments so they can take turns teaching each other.  Reports to follow.

My last teacherly discovery this week is the chill-out bottle.  It a mixture of clear glue, water and glitter poured into a clear plastic bottle with the lid glued on tight; It’s supposed to be like a snow globe that takes 5 minutes to clear.  Allegedly, it works well with ADD and ADHD kids as a way for them to focus on something and return to class with a clean slate.   I have a few of those, so I may be making some this weekend.

Again, I will follow up with a report on how these techniques have worked as I implement them.  So far, formative vocab quizzes are a big success.

* Update 3 months later: I didn’t do the chill out bottle, so I still have loads of glitter and glue (maybe I’ll make them for my place).  I did make chill out trays:

Cushion, tray, crayons– isolate the unruly and pacify them with coloring.

One of my classrooms

This is what one of my classrooms looks like. I want to include everyday pictures to give those interested a look at normal life teaching in Taiwan.