So, one of my ‘projects’ lately is writing out my hundreds (literally) of stories from abroad. Some are really short, some are longer…

Here’s one from teaching in Taiwan that I remembered today:

So, when I was teaching in Taiwan, in my beginning level class of 8 year olds, we had one lesson on “writing postcards”. The students were supposed to write a special postcard to their parents. So, we did a sample postcard on the board with fill in the blanks. ‘My favorite game this week was_____’, for the majority who didn’t know enough English to form their own sentences. So, we get to the end where you’re supposed to sign your name. So, I write “Love, ‘your name’” at the bottom of our sample postcard. And I try to explain briefly that they should write their own name there. Well, apparently I didn’t explain very well, because as I walked around, I noticed that at least half of the students had literally written “YOUR NAME” instead of their actual name! I started laughing and had to re-explain by pointing to each persons name tag and individually making examples.

So, then… we get to the address part. Now, the kids were supposed to write the postcard in English. Obviously. But the school was going to legitimately mail these postcards from the students to their parents, so they needed to write the address in Chinese. So, I was trying to communicate to them that they needed to write their Chinese address. For one, they didn’t understand the word ‘address’ – and that’s a hard word to teach to beginners, because you can’t really draw it, you can’t really act it out, you can’t really point to it. Especially when they’re 8 and most of them haven’t ever written a postcard anyway.

So, as I tried to explain, they just looked at me with blank faces. So, on the board, where I had drawn the postcard and written the example sentances, I pointed to the address section. In my poor attempt to help them understand that they needed to write their address in Chinese and not English, I started pretending to write in Chinese. I obviously knew that it wasn’t Chinese, but something in my brain thought that they might get that it wasn’t english so it must be Chinese. Haha. I’ll never forget the looks on their faces as they looked up at the board to see this scramble of foreign illegible symbols on the board that wasn’t english and definitely wasn’t Chinese. Because, clearly, what LOOKS like Chinese to me, obviously doesn’t look Chinese if you actually know Chinese. Hahaha. I started laughing when I realized what had just happened and how ridiculous that was of myself. I had to get one of the Taiwanese TA’s to secretly write out a Chinese address so I could copy it onto the board as an example (The students weren’t supposed to know that the TA’s spoke Chinese).

(posted from sept 20, 2010 on my other blog)