So this seems to be the week to get sick. In three days we've had three different teachers, and unfortunately I'm able to use our new vocabulary from book 2: "我感冒了" or "I got a cold." Or perhaps is 我生病了, I got sick. Either way I'm feeling under this dreary weather. Apparently the temperature is supposed to drop from its lofty 32+C to about 21C this weekend, but I haven't confirmed the fact. I have rarely experienced such temperamental weather.

But besides learning how to say I'm sick and my throat hurts and I have a serious illness, I've also been finding Taiwanese dramas to be quite interesting. Of course the English subtitles are one of the reasons.

Although right now I can actually understand what people say some of the time - make that a very small percent of the time - there are myriads of topics we haven't yet discussed in our uh, beginner-intermediate level. But! I now have some friends in book 4, "Class 4" as I like to call them, and as I hang out with them I get to hear their conversation, which makes me envious of course, since they can talk about anything from shopping to drugs. But it's incentive for me. I only hope to one day be able to really converse on their level with them. 

Yes, there's only so much you can learn in one day. Today after class one of my friends said "Don't! Don't talk in Chinese! I've just had 3 hours of class and I had to speak almost half of the time and I just can't take it anymore!"

So there are times when you've had just about all the language learning you can take before your brain tells you firmly that it will not be accepting any new information. That has happened many times to me, where I've stumbled out of the classroom dazed and weary and unable to form a proper sentence in any language.

But I'm pleased to see improvement in my speaking. Except, today one of my friends asked me in Chinese about my language improvement, and I had to ask him to repeat himself many times, so sadly, I think my improvement, while existent, is still slow and sometimes slower. But I press on! Mostly because, um, I did pay for the whole term :D oh yes, and because I enjoy it!

Right now it's evening and my energy is slowing disappearing. The weekends always get busy, but this weekend I'm afraid I'll have to stay and rest a bit. Argh. I hate missing the social life. Well perhaps I shall blog about it. Perhaps tomorrow morning when I wake up again at 3:30 I shall write a blog about the 半夜 or midnight (I think).

(Because Chinese has so many similar sounds and detailed characters, if I write just one line a little shorter than it's supposed to be written, it could potentially change the whole meaning of the character :) Details are important in writing Chinese characters, as I am finding out. Sometimes I tell myself stories to help remember, "the ski character has snow on top and a pair of skis below." 雪

And today we learned why in Chinese you always say East or West first when giving directions, instead of saying north or south first like we do in English. For example, instead of "northeast" you'd say "eastnorth." The reason our teacher gave us was because of the sun going from the east to the west, so the directions follow the sun :) I thought that was very interesting.

There are other interesting stories in Chinese characters that make so much sense when you hear them. The character for day 日 originally was the shape of a sun with a dot in the middle, and the character for moon 月 was originally shaped like a moon. It's fun to write the characters!

Well I shall go in search of some food and then get some rest. Have a lovely weekend on all sides of the globe!

until next time!

What time is it? 現在幾點?

I'm doing it! I'm writing in Chinese! The nice thing is that I've learned a lot of handy repeatable words such as "he/she" and "want" and "don't want" and some other random nouns and verbs, so I can write a nice essay, and if you couldn't read it you'd be impressed, but if you could, you'd quickly see that I'm basically repeating myself and my 30+ words :D hehe. Ok, maybe I know more than 30 words, but the more I learn, the more I want to express myself, and the more limited my vocabulary seems.

The first week of class was exciting - I was actually getting to talk in Chinese! I hadn't done that in years The second week of class was even more exciting - I was learning new vocabulary and was able to talk even more about my daily life! The third week of class I began to feel more comfortable with speaking, and now, the 4th week, I'm beginning to become impatient, "Why can't I express myself more clearly?" I demand to know. But when I stay up too late at night, endless checking friends' posts on facebook and writing long e-mails home, a thought manages to crawl into a tiny space in my brain that's open '24 hours' and make itself known that perhaps lack of sleep is one obstacle to my learning at a faster speed, that and the fact that I decided to tackle Chinese, one of hardest languages in the world I've heard, or 聽說, in Chinese.

So right now I'm not sure why I'm awake at such an unearthly hour, and writing about the consequences of staying up late, of all things. Why am I not resting? Who knows. Taipei doesn't seem to sleep at night, which makes me want to stay up too. Why miss out on something exciting?

Except tomorrow I have another dictation quiz and we're starting on book two! I am so excited! Oh the simple joys of a beginner language student :D so now I'm not sure what time it is, but as I peer through half-closed eye lids, I think my computer clock it says it's almost midnight...hm...how do you say that in Chinese? I forgot. No wonder, my brain must've fallen alseep when we learned that in class. Hm.

Ok, I'm convinced. I shall go to bed. After I finish checking my 3 other e-mail accounts of course...

until next time,

:)

Learning and Still "Teaching"

Today I'm back online in blog land. It's been way too long, and though I've thought often of updating my blog with my current whereabouts, I always put it off in favor of something more pressing like researching second hand kitchen appliances to buy to add to my collection in my new room.

So I'm back in Taiwan, this time as a student, and I am really enjoying this new position. It's already been over 3 weeks since classes began, and already I can understand a few simple phrases in Chinese spoken at regular speed. That is definitely improvement, as when I first returned I still could not understand anything. I am trying to slowly transition my accent from a thick Beijing accent to a softer Taiwanese accent, so I don't stick out so much when I talk :)

This week we are learning about the weather. The weather is also giving us much to talk about as it is constantly changing. It seems that "qiutian" (pronounced 'tyo tien') or "autumn" may actually be making an appearance. The temperature has dropped a few degrees and it feels much cooler outside. I'm very grateful, as my room is on the 4th floor, and as you know, heat rises, and the higher you live, the hotter you apartment will be, as least I am finding that out.

We are still in the very beginning level of Chinese, but we are fast approaching book 2, and are very much excited at the idea. We will soon graduate to harder lessons and more complex homework. Today we had our first preview of future class 'presentations.' We had to introduce a country and talk about its weather for 1-3 minutes. I chose northern California, and 1 minute :) I talked about how strange (ji gui) the weather is becoming, since it snowed last May. I didn't have a lot more to say after I described the sunny aspect and the occasional rain and the nice temperatures most of the year. My limited vocabulary kind of stopped me after that point.

My classmates are from all over the world. We have Asia, Europe, and North America and Latin America represented in our classroom. It's really quite exciting.

The title of this post is "Learning and Still 'Teaching' " because I can't help but continue 'teaching' or telling everyone I know about the useful information I'm learning, such as where the library is and where the good restaurants are. I couldn't help but tell all my friends about how to get a library card and after a couple trips at least 8 of my friends now have library cards and 4 know where the media center is, where you can watch movies :)

Well it's getting late so I shall begin to end here. One last thing - something I do not cherish about Taipei is the enormous and speedy cockroaches that meet me on the stairs with beady eyes (I think) in the middle of a dark night. Thankfully I've found that light is one weapon I can use against them, and I happily shine my small beam from my small flashlight on them, but we always end up in a dance - I call it the cockroach dance, because usually the cockroach is faster and more scared than me so he usually gets to go where he wants and I have to just jump out of the way. Thankfully not too many have charged towards me, and thankfully I'm still at least 50x times their size (just a random number). But still, I could do without them, as well as the anonymous bugs that have bitten me in at least 14 different places. (I was careful to count my bug-battle scars so I could tell people so they could feel sorry for me. But that's just how a city-raised girl like me feels in regard to insects.)

So until next time, but seeing as how regularly I write, that may not be until next year, at which point I shall probably write in Chinese and you won't be able to understand it anyway unless you use google translate (which I probably will use to write it anyway), until then, have a great time!

:)

Starting to perk up

Probably the worst part about being a procrastinator and a teacher, is that there is a stack of homework sitting on my office, begging to be released back into the outside world. I have held some of those papers captive for far too long and it is time now to begin letting them go. However, first things first - one cannot work in an untidy office. So today I spent around 5 hours trying to organise myself and my files for my successor.

I realised I have multitudes of files all saved in mulitple locations bearing similar names... in other words, I was very careful to make sure I wouldn't lose any of my research and worksheets and handouts to any technology malfunctions. I have the files on my USB, my documents, my network places... so I managed to consolidate most of those today. Thankfully it didn't take too much time to figure out the duplicates and happily delete those out of existance, or at least out of sight and into my vitual trash can.

Perhaps it shows, perhaps it doesn't, but with the end of the school year fast approaching, I am beginning to perk up a bit and even venture out into the night life I live so close to. Tonight at 7-something I realised I hadn't yet eaten supper. At 8:30 I finally stumbled out of my office and flew down the stairs in an effort to go find some food for supper. Unfortuntely, by the time I made it to the vendor I had planned to buy some pineapple fried rice from, I realised too late that they closed at 8:00... So I kept wandering around and ended up finding a deep-fried cheese empananda and a vegetarian burrito minus the beans, all for less than $4. I was quite pleased, as was my stomach.

It is so fun to wander around the night market with all its clothes, watches, shoes, and trinkets stores. The food is quite something to behold too. I saw a pizza cone with squid, at least the pictures told me it was squid. I haven't learned that word in Chinese yet, although I did learn "shrimp" after one very unfortunate curry experience.

This week I will have another Chinese class and I forget the topic, but last week we learned how to say where we were from. Unfortunately I still don't know how to answer that question, in any language, so I alternated between "America" and "England" giving my classmates a bit of confusion. I made one new friend and was so excited because she is from England and I have so far not talked with anyone from England here in Taiwan. Of course I felt very un-British around her.

Perhaps I should end here for now and continue another night. It's hard to keep up with life sometimes, and other times it drags by. This is one of those speedy times, and I know I will soon be wondering where in the world the time has gone, and how a year could have passed by already. You may even find me looking under the cushions in my house to see how I could have misplaced a whole year's worth of time. Where did it all go? I know at least half of it has sped past me. The other half is best left to itself.

It will feel good to say I survived my first year of teaching. I am quite sure that my students' learning is at least comparable to how much I have learned from this year. I'm thankful to my students for being such fun teachers. Teenage years are definitely the hardest and I have certainly had my struggles trying to combat this in my classroom. But there are those days that just stick in your memory forever, days when you laugh wih your students and watch them happily oblivious to the adult woes we carry so heavily on our shoulders. The memory of these days lasts longer than the hard days where your energy just goes into breathing deeply after every confrontation you face.

The happy days I'm talking about are when you watch a student up front expertly taking prayer requests and offering up the prayer; the times you watch your own students teach the class, and pattern their class after yours; the days where your students ask you about your plans and what you think about a topic; the days where someone has an 'aha' moment and suddenly gets what you have been trying to explain; the days when you read a 'thank you' note from a student, or you watch your students help a classmate to succeed... these times I will not forget, and I'm so thankful for memory and that I can keep these good memories as long as I want to, and think back on them anytime I want a smile or a little tear of nostalgia :) perhaps this is the reward many people talk about - deeper than those "I finally understand" moments in your teaching career; it's the connecting your students do for you when you don't realise it, connecting you back to life and away from the minutiae that takes you away from people and being part of life. Thank you students... I never knew this was the lesson you would be teaching me. I knew I had something to learn, but I never realised it would be the one lesson I had come to teach you... so thank you. For all the energy that went into planning your classes this year, I can only say that it was well worth it, and you certainly surprised me with your own lessons for me. I wish you the best this next year. I know you, and I know each and every one of you has the potential to succeed. May you never forget how to love and how to live.

Until next class,

- RL

The question that begs to be asked

So my question today is, how do you keep the balance between spilling out all your thoughts in one go when you can't hold them in any longer, to your friends or whoever happens to be around you, and, holding everything inside and not letting anything out at all so that people forget you're around sometimes?

A related question would be, how much de-stressing can you safely do before you turn into a garbage truck, but instead of collecting the rubbish, you are dumping it out onto those around you?

The reason I ask, is because we all feel stressed from time to time and it seems most helpful to talk it out with someone who can calmly sift through your emotional rantings and can piece together your fragmented words and give them back to you in the form of a more complete and logical picture of the situation you are having trouble facing.

Hypothetically speaking, let's say there is a limit to the amount of barraging words we can safely dump into the ears of our patient friends or family. And let's say that one day we reach that limit.

Now, the other question that begs to be answered is, what should be said to the friend who finally holds up his hands in mock surrender and says, "I am sorry, I can no longer take anymore. From now on, I can only handle (#) of minutes of your troubles, after that you need to stop." Now is this friend setting a boundary, and is this a logical boundary, or is this friend no longe a 'true' friend who is there to listen and help and support?

Perhaps there are many answers to these questions. Perhaps you have felt you were both: the dumpee and dumper, or perhaps you are more prone to fall into one of the two categories. The reason I bring it up is because I was just hit with the realisation today of how powerful the combination of words and emotions put together can be on those around us. A simple sentence like, "Do you believe me?" can be a calm, direct question, or it can turn into a piercing accusation, all depending on how you deliver the words. You can deliver a clear message or you can deliver a whole package of bits and pieces of emotions and feelings that the listener has to sort through before being able to give an answer, that is, providing the speaker pauses long enough to take any incoming information in.

Sometimes we can be like radios - always talking, always giving out information, always running. And someimes we can be like answering machines, the only thing we say is "hello...." and then the rest of the time we take in information, spitting it out when asked for a recounting of the past.

Perhaps a valuable lesson I learned today was how powerful words combined with emotions can be, and important it is to carefully balance the two when freely sharing them with others. Perhaps there is wisdom in carefully considering what we say before we say it, weighing the consequences and the possible effects our words will have on our hearers. Perhaps we don't do this enough.

On a different note, today was my first field trip, and I took my older students out to a bookstore to do an English treasure hunt :) It was quite fun. All the questions I had painstakingly written over the course of two Sunday afternoons, were finally put to good use. Except, I had missed one vital detail in my planning... let this lesson not be wasted on just my experience - but let the reader learn from my mistakes! Check the time that the bookstore opens, BEFORE planning your field trip.... we arrived 1.5 hours early, and had only budgeted half a day for the trip... needless to say, I was disappointed that my hour-long project shrank to a 20-minute-mad-dash, where even my students were asking me "can't we stay longer?" (music to an English teacher's ears when you're in a bookstore working on a learning project :)

Well, you live and learn, and I learned to be prepared for details like opening times... and I learned that I could trust these students, like I had suspected; and I learned that I really enjoyed this type of teaching/learning! The trip went so smoothly, and I arrived back at school refreshed and eager to continue my day! I couldn't stop smiling :)

Well if I want to smile tomorrow perhaps I should think about getting some sleep soon...

Until nex time,

- R

Memory

Tonight as we were sitting down for the special easter program with our students, suddenly a flood of memories from years past, high school and college, slowly materialised in my mind along with a twinge of sadness for the fact that they were now only memories. But I am thankful for those memories.

There is a staccato of rain outside my window as I write. Fortunately for me, we had an extra umbrella at home that sort of worked, so when I was caught this evening, without my umbrella since it was back at school, I was able to slosh my way and arrive for the evening program moderately unsoaked.

The neatest thing was seeing my students there. The intimidating factor to knowing my students were there, in fact all but two were my students in one class or another, is how many students I actually have out of our total count. I believe it is about 1/3 of the student body, and that is quite intimidating when you realise the opportunities you have everyday to make a difference.

But back to the memory theme. I know I shall look back on today as a good memory, especially when I recall the small group of dedicated students who spent over an hour practicing a song for another program, by themselves, with just a sound file on my computer as their accompaniment. They seemed so excited when I emerged from my staff meeting and came face to face with them as they gladly rushed into the room where the piano was to practice some more! I was super impressed.

One thing I learned this week - and that is that God has a plan for us, and contrary to what some believe, it is not more noble, nor is it even reasonable, to force ourselves into a mold we believe we need to fill. For example, when considering what career path to take, I need to discover the gifts God has already given me, and find out how to use those as much as possible. Then, instead of constantly feeling frustrated in a job where I do not have the gift to accomplish it efficiently, I will feel happy and energised doing what I know I was given a gift to do.

This idea came in direct contrast to the idea I was used to where I needed to 'get out of my comfort zone' to do the 'more noble' work, we sometimes like to call certain positions, and teaching can certainly be considered one of those. I do enjoy coming up with ideas for teaching, don't get me wrong, but once I changed my mindset from "I must be happy as a teacher even though I get more tired in this position than in other positions" to "perhaps my gifts lie in another area" - I immediately felt a sense of relief.

Perhaps we are a little too hard on ourselves at times - imagining that we must valiantly fit ourselves to the position we are in, whether it came to us or we came to it. Of course we do not always have a choice, and that is difficult. But when we have a choice, imagine how much happier we will be when we are doing something we truly are good at, even it takes some training to get to that point?

Having said that, I need to go take another personality/career test :) The difference in a job that is difficult to accomplish, may come from just looking at it from a different perspective. Instead of saying, "I must fit this mold" you (I) could say, "I am going to learn what I can, then go find a mold I more naturally fit into."

The object used to bring home this point to me was an AC remote control. The person giving me the advice said, if he used this remote control as a cellphone, it wouldn't do him any good, and it would frustrate him. That made me smile. And tonight  I smiled again when I saw my students who came to the program. I have the best students ever :)

Back So Soon

Imagine, 2 blog posts in less than a week... I really amaze myself, or perhaps amuse myself. At any rate, I do enjoy writing and need to do it more often. So we haven't done anything radically different in class this week, but I thought I'd share some things we did before... for example...

Did you know that Facebook has several word games called "Word Challenge" where you have 6 letters and your goal is to create as many words with those six letters as you can in 20 seconds or more. Then you can change the letters and start creating all over again. So we played that in my English 1 classes several times. My students are quite good at finding words. I think they enjoy the challenge and the puzzle/problem solving skills. I enjoy it too!

Did you know, that Facebook also has the coolest word game called Scrabble? But anyway, enough about Facebook... back to Taipei... they have the coolest place here called "Subber" - which really is a local Subway with the absolute greatest sub sandwiches. Where else do you get corn and sweet mayonnaise on your sandwich? Only at Subber, in Taipei. Speaking of food. I still haven't visited what is called by some "Stinky Tofu Alley" ... I have a feeling I'd much rather go there only if I canfind the Gelato store at the end somewhere which my friend told me about.

The weekend is coming up... that means 4 weeks left of teaching! And my field trip has been approved! So my students are going to do a literature treasure hunt soon!

This weekend we are planning a special Easter program for the students... I hope you remember that when you think of us... keep us in mind - that it will be a special experience for everyone who comes. It's so neat to see my students blosom into leaders who lead their fellow students in singing and discussing and thinking about the deeper topics of life.

Well it's bye for now. Until next time,

R