aaand SCENE! "The American Language Village"

You can call me...

I'm surprised I have energy to write this post! My day started at 5:30 this morning when I rolled over and my newly-arrived, jet-lagged Nova Scotian room mate said, "Hi! Are you Andi?!" I then proceeded to explain to her all she had missed in yesterday's teaching orientation.

6 am- I'm here at a beautiful, posh golf resort in the eastern mountains, and the American Language Village company has transformed the interior of this place into a mock English Environment. All of our teachings are situational (i.e. cafe, airport, movie theatre, karaoke, etc.), and the kids have signed a contract saying they will only speak English for the entire week. They have passports and American Language Village dollars, and if they speak any other language but English (Chinese or Taiwanese) we fine them one dollar.

This is indeed organized chaos. The professional printouts and workbook packets impressed me at first, but now I see much of the chaos is a product of understaffing. We are four teachers for 72 kids, and we each have our own Teaching Assistant. My TA is Peter, and he pretends he's from Singapore so that the kids won't speak Chinese to him! In fact, all of the Taiwanese employees are wonderful. I would say I am looking forward to getting to know them better, but I am not even sure I'll have time.

What a job.... Anyway, I am hoping to spend more time outdoors tomorrow, as it is just exquisite! We're outside of Hsinchu City, on the northeastern coast.

One of the most inspiring parts of today was reclaiming arts & crafts creativity through designing name tags with my students. They were impressively creative in their approach to using clay mixing and layering colors in ways not apparent to other 9 year olds I know! Here's a photo of mine in the midst of my kids' tags. I'm excited to wear it tomorrow :).

Otherwise, I am thrilled to have a fellow vegetarian amoungst the camp ranks. Contrary to presumption, he is a nine-year old prodigy named Daniel. Luckyily, he's part of my class, the Elephants, and I am surely looking forward to hearing more of what he has to say.

Alas, I'll have to call it a night. Tomorrow I am responsible for teaching cooking and table manners. Hopefully it will go better than my magic show today :).