The Story of a School

I’m back! Sorry I haven’t been updating. My computer decided that after four years and three countries, it had finally had enough of me and subsequently shut off never to turn back on again. One thing about living in a foreign country is that to fix a minor problem, one must first answer a bunch of little questions. Where does buy a computer in Taiwan? Will the salesperson speak enough English to help me? Do I have enough money in my Taiwanese bank account? How do I access my American money while I’m in Taiwan? Where can I find the time to work all this out?

Now, most of my time is spent teaching English. Every morning, I scooter from my apartment in a small, residential neighborhood to my school, Zhonghua Elementary School, in downtown Hualien. Nearly everyone in Taiwan rides a scooter. There’s even a special scooter lane on every major road. I park inside the school grounds with all the other teacher’s scooters and go across the street to one of the many nearby breakfast places to order coffee and toast with Nutella. After that, I unlock my classroom and open up all the windows (My classrooms doesn’t have air conditioning. I will be a perpetually sweaty mess until November).

I teach three to five classes a day with my local co-teachers, Angela and Ariel. In Hualien, elementary school students take English classes from 3^rd to 6^th grade. My kids are energetic and fascinated by this new foreign presence in their classroom. Fifty times a day, a student will poke their head in my classroom or wave to me in the hallway, yelling, “Hello Teacher Emma!” or in Chinese, “Laoshi hao!”

Beyond these greetings though, most of my students are very shy about speaking in English. Some of my students go to nightly cram schools, the most of expensive of which higher native English speakers as tutors, but most of my students never hear English outside of school. My school and the Fulbright English teaching program in Taiwan hopes that the presence of a native speaker like me in the classroom will encourage the students to be more confident in speaking English and help them with their fluency. Progress is slow, as the students learn to recognize me as a person rather than this strange blonde thing that’s suddenly at their school. But there have been a few successes. My fourth graders are fascinated with my dog and the fact that in Minnesota, it gets so cold that one can walk on a frozen lake (They asked me if one could eat the ice, because mango shaved ice is a popular dessert here). My fifth graders, when they found out that I am taking Chinese classes at night, gave me an impromptu Chinese lesson before class. They were ecstatic that their Laoshi (teacher) was briefly their Xuesheng (student).

Besides teaching, on Tuesday mornings I go to first grade Chinese class to observe and try to learn some of the language. The first graders find my presence both hilarious and enthralling and are sad that I can’t play with them on the playground afterward because I must teach my own class. Thursdays are club day for the whole school, so I go to archery club in the afternoon. Just picture seven 4-foot-tall Taiwanese children and then me, all haphazardly firing arrows in the general direction of the target.

I love my school. My co-teachers are so kind to me. They bring me medicine and bread when my stomach is upset and give me encouragement and support when I lead activities in the classroom. I can’t take pictures of my classroom because of privacy issues, but believe me when I say that my students are unbelievably cute. As they begin to trust me, I hope that they will become more confident with speaking to me in English. I am so happy to be in Taiwan and to be at Zhonghua Elementary School.