Pingtung, farewell.

It's been good to know you.

For the first time in a week there was no rain. This Sunday the sky was bright and cloudless, a really beautiful blue. As I woke up, I packed the last of my things so that I could catch the 9:10 train to Taipei.

It's possible my writing to the point hasn't probably recognized this, and I won't discount the optimism of retrospect, but in my final moments in Pingtung yesterday morning, I spent almost all of my time reflecting on what a wonderful gift it has been to spend the time I have in this city. Challenges of teaching aside, it has been an extraordinary month and a half. Challenges and frustrations of teaching included, it has been a profound period of personal growth as well.

One: Where do I begin?

Before I even arrived in Pingtung, I was warned by some of my Taiwanese-American relatives that the city was quite out of the way. If not the rural boonies, it might be the equivalent of a Scranton for Taiwan, albeit next to the Philadelphia-sized Kaohsiung. Even on such a small island as Taiwan, both cities are at the opposite end of the cultural and physical geography. So, from my first day, I was wondering a lot, "What will this place really be like?"

It turns out that my relatives' warnings were absolutely right in at least one regard -- in Pingtung, almost no one spoke English. For all of difficulties that this might have posed, it was paired with a really wonderful fact that everyone should know about southern Taiwan: people are incredibly friendly, kind, and really very patient. My Mandarin is far from perfect, but I found that people were always willing to spend an extra five to ten minutes with me to understand what I was trying to say. Not just friends and acquaintances, but even strangers were totally willing to really help me along.

This has been one of the best things from my experience here. My chinese has improved enormously, and even more importantly, I've had a real sense of being a guest, rather than a stranger, in this city. It makes all the difference.

Two: And so I teach.

Obviously, in terms of time, the biggest part of my trip has been teaching English. My job has been the centerpiece of my trip, and the daily anchor for my schedule and life. With a long break in the middle, my first class started at 10:00 and my last class ended at 8:00 or 9:00. So, I spent a lot of time with my students. They were a diverse bunch. The youngest were as little as 3 (and stumbled to calculate their age on their fingers when asked), and the oldest were sixth and seventh graders (who didn't like being asked anything, more or less, or talking to teachers). In the middle, there were students for every age group in between. All told, I taught 7 classes during the week, and including one on Saturday morning.

Even for just a month, that's a fair bit of time. Over the month and a half I was there, I formed some pretty strong connections with a few of the students. Between lecturing and boring classroom stuff, I also got the chance to play soccer, play coin-toss type games, and commit to more interesting activities like discussing superpowers or what their dream house might look like. Leaving suddenly, it feels quite jarring to abandon the daily ritual of class. I don't miss hounding students or getting on their case for not doing work, but I really miss the kids.

Having finished the work, I think I'm only just now starting to get a sense for the real nature of the work I was doing. The curriculum, for example, I can't say mattered very much. But there were a lot of small moments, which, stitched together, make me feel like I really did accomplish something during my time at Carrick's English school.

Three: The non-curricular curriculum. Games!

What were these, you ask? Sometimes, it meant acting out being old, tall, short, or pretty, and then getting the students to follow along. One day, the whole class pretty much looked like a comedia dell'arte troupe. Sometimes, it meant helping one student to really get a tricky set of sentences in their oral report. In the morning class, which was always the same group of students, I got a lot of time to work one on one with the kids. My favorite was the sneaky learning that goes on when students got to play games. Hang man of course, was present. But I also got to be really creative here, and invent or transform some existing games as I liked. They were definitely my favorite.

One game involved throwing a quarter (American) into a bullseye drawn onto the tile floor. This one was tough because the coin would bounce around all over the place if you threw it too high. If you threw it too low, often it would roll right past the bullseye altogether. When students made it in, they got to answer a question related to what we were studying, and win points for their team. This one was such a blast that I must have played it a dozen times. It often ended in really tight competitions between two groups. -- By the end of most games, even I forgot that what we were doing was a "productive" activity. We all just got lost in the game.

Another big hit was a game that I didn't discover until the last week of school, which was a pity because it was awesome. For this one, I drew a big snakes and ladders-style pathway on the board, filled with chutes to carry students ahead and ladders that made them fall back. The mechanic of moving forward was a little different for different level students, but basically, they would spell words using a set of Bananagrams (r), and then get to move their team's magnetic-piece forward depending on how long the word was. This one also ended with a lot of jaw-clenching close runs. Plus, you got to see pieces physically move, which was a great way to see progress.

There were other games that I tried, but the last really great game involved the same set of Bananagrams pieces, which turned out to be an incredible tool for teaching English to younger kids. In handling the pieces, it seemed, they got to have a different, much more tangible experience with language. In the hard plastic tiles, they got to hold, create, and tear apart words at will, learning what did and didn't work to create sounds and words. I usually played another spelling-type game here, sometimes cooperative and sometimes competitive. But honestly, with this, it was the simple pleasure of watching kids tear into a pile of letters that was best. The pieces would scatter all over the floor. It was pretty awesome to watch. Who knew that this would be head and shoulders more popular than battleship?

Four: On my own.

As I've mentioned before, one of the most striking things about this summer was that I was working largely without supervision or guidance from above. My host, Andrew Carrick, left early in the summer, leaving me in charge of his curricular classes and to teach the "report" class summer program. Needless to say, it was a bit unnerving to have as much freedom as this gave me. I will admit though, that having that freedom really pushed my own boundaries in ways that forced me to adapt and learn. The alternative being, of course, to sink.

It was pretty cool to feel the classes shift from unproductive to humming along as I found what worked. The games were great discoveries. I also loved the sense that whatever success I found was largely connected to approaches and methods that I myself was able to find. Of course, when classes failed as well, I knew that was also basically influenced by my inexperience. The sense of accountability, not so much to the school, which gave me a great deal of slack, but accountability to the students themselves was really incredible. In the end, it proved to be a really strong motivator for me to connect with the students and with the work that I was putting into the classroom. I don't know what the summer would have been like without this independence, but I do know that the freedom that was utterly shaped the experience I found.

Until next time,

Traveling onward,

-Eli