Ordering Lunch in Puli in English

 On Monday, Aug. 3, I was told the gig was on. Wednesday, at the McDonald's with elementary school students (up in the air since last week when the school wanted to change the day to Tuesday) and asked if he had any suggestions on what I should do. It gave me a chance to think out loud about this unique three-hour meeting at a fast food restaurant with other customers moving about. The school thinks it's cute, like I'm some Bozo the clown doing tricks at a birthday party. I cannot let the kids leave their seats. I will arrange teams of 4 randomly. When they are eating I won't talk with them. When I talk with them, they cannot eat. I will bring mini-white boards and markers. I'll start by introducing shapes and colors and have them point to things they see with those shapes and then make a list as I tell them the words for each item in English. After that we will have contests: First, I will introduce "word shapes" and give points to the team that identifies the word. Second, I say a shape and the contestant looks at his list and copies the item that is in that shape. Third, they made a sentence with the word I suggest. Fourth, I introduce prepositions of place and show relationships between two or more items and locations ("The hamburger is on the counter next to the soda.") and have another contest on the white boards. I will tell them to draw items (or shapes with a hamburger "ball" marker) with placement instructions. Finally, if they are up to it and there is time, I will do a time-order ingredients-recipe instruction for a Big Mac and other McD's items. I'll teach them the Big Mac song from the 70's and have they sing it, if it is appropriate and the manager doesn't mind. 

          On August 5, The agent is coming at 9:30 am to bring us on a magical mystery tour to an elementary school south of Taichung for three hours, maybe to a McDonald's, maybe to a school and McD's. The request for me to teach the kids to order in English is ridiculous; the counter-person won't understand them, even if they repeat what I tell them correctly. I will go prepared with a plan and mini-white boards and play it by ear. It’s a paid day trip for us. 

          The class at Puli Elementary School went very well yesterday. It began outside their classroom in a wide area where the sixteen children were sat, by their teacher, on the floor. The teacher had provided large color illustrations of items they could purchase at a fast food restaurant, though not necessarily at McDonalds. She had placed them on chairs to display and so I felt compelled to address the preparation and not proceed with my lesson plan beyond categorizing the food items into lists of large, medium, or small drinks, snacks, side orders, and main orders. I engaged the students in conversation about what they would like to order, and even some reported speech.  I played the Big Mac theme song from the '70's (two all-beef patties, special sauce, pickles, cheese, lettuce, onions, on a sesame seed bun) and had them sing along a few times before going into the ingredients of a McChicken and double cheeseburger. Each student was provided with a white board and a piece of paper to write notes on in addition to a four page script and Q&A bilingual dialog they had been prepping with. We went over the details, some of which was not relevant to McD's in Taiwan (for example, they could not 'pick up' napkins or sauce and ketchup from a condiment station)   and vocabulary. Before the end of the ninety minute briefing, the children could give an order to me in a role play I did at the desk as a counter.

           When it was time to go, the children were divided into four car pools and driven to the restaurant on the other side of Puli. It was a special event as many of them had not eaten in a western fast food restaurant in a while, if ever. The teacher had contacted the restaurant in advance and they had one counter-person who could understand English especially for their line. The children lined up and each ordered their meal. The teacher and I stood by to listen and help if there was a misunderstanding. The children did amazingly well. 

The Da-hwa Student Interchange

It was eight months ago, on January 6, 2020 that I was first contacted by the regional manager for Central Taiwan of Kang Xian Publisher to visit Da-hwa middle school in Da-ya just north of the infamous unconnected Taichung highway interchange from route #1 to #74,; a traffic nightmare for drivers. It was a different world back then, the world before the COVID-19 corona-virus pandemic took hold and tore apart our daily lives. If not for the class of EFL students at the middle school tying our hopes together, I don't know what we would have done. We began wearing face masks but ended wearing smiles. 

On January 10^th, the agent picked us up and drove to the middle school. I brought my Community Curriculum and presented my credentials to the dean. We discussed a once-a -week conversation enrichment class. I could use my material from the Community Curriculum in a similar cooperative learning format I had used at FDR High School in Brooklyn, NY and at Shengang Middle School.  The new gig for the ninety minute class would be Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:50 pm. My payment would include compensation for travel time.

I might have a chance to ride to school on the shady, bucolic Tan-Zih bike path as I did to Shengang Middle School twice a week for three years, but the new school was in an area closer to Taichung and the path would have been out of the way. I then thought I would ride north on a route from home along the Han River path, west under highway #74 path passing the baseball stadium. and then north for a few kilometers on Zhongqing Road Sec. 3 at the Da-ya Interchange; a forty-five minute ride. I’d probably leave the house at eleven o’clock and be home by three.As it turned out, I didn’t ride the bicycle there once due to the heat, pollution, and traffic chaos where the bike path ends.  

The class was supposed to begin after the Lunar New Year at the end of February, but schools island-wide were delayed two weeks because of the pandemic; chaos ensued. No one knew when the program would start. It finally began on March 26, a month later.

The first of ten sessions I conducted to a class of twenty-two masked fourteen-year-olds was an introduction of the reported speech we would be using; the best way to get shy students into discussion. The seventh-graders were tentative at first but I brought them into the program with simple statements and reported speech leading to a direct-indirect speech contest and then a collective board paragraph introducing me. I left them with “That Special Feeling”. It went well but it was all for naught as they mostly forgot what we practiced as well as the notebooks, and clear books for handouts as the next session would be three weeks later, on April 16, because of school wide tests and scheduling issues. and asked them to think about describing their homes for the next meeting.

April 16 was a beautiful sunny morning with a soft breeze and chirping birds. It was getting warmer, finally. I felt like riding my bike but it would be a long day with tutoring in the evening; I decided to drive the car. More importantly, I had recently had a medical procedure done and my doctor was advising me not to ride the bike. On the last night of Passover, I put off my bike ride until after the check-up. I would take it easy before attempting the forty-five minute ride.

 My afternoon in Da-ya went well. After lunch at a local fast food restaurant, I arrived a half hour early for class. In class, I reviewed the introduction I had given of myself three weeks earlier and began the Community Curriculum starting with the rooms in my home, putting the ten words on the board.  I had to tell the boys and girls to copy the words down and checked to see that only half had brought notebooks and clear folders as I had asked.

By the end of the first period, I had modeled an introduction and set the template for them to follow. I then told them to write at least ten sentences about themselves, their homes, and those who reside there. I went around the class checking most of their sentences. Students were told to prepare to report to the class and those who hadn't written anything were assisted. I randomly chose eight students to come to the front to describe their homes. The next week, when we would delve deeper into the interior of their homes, I would choose other children to report first. Meanwhile, I engaged the students in reported speech dialogue having them ask, answer, and report what their classmates said. 

The next week, I tackled how an ESL teacher could teach rhyme through rap and poetry. It dawned on me that the handout “That Special Feeling”, from the Community Curriculum, was the key. The handout uses the five senses to motivate a discussion about one’s home by asking for metaphorical responses to questions like: “When you think of home, what sounds do you think of?” It asks fifteen questions that can be answered poetically, like this:

When I think of home

What do I smell?

I smell my mother’s cooking

She cooks so well.

 

  

That Special Feeling of Home 1

That Special Feeling of Home 2

        I introduced the concept of rhyme and poetry by playing “Hello-Goodbye” by the Beatles while the students looked at the lyrics. I told them “a song=lyrics + music” and that poetry is lyrics without music. I then brainstormed the rhyme pairs in the song and pointed out how they were used at the end of every other line to connect the verse with the sound of words. None of the students had answered any questions on the handout distributed at the first meeting a month ago, so I brainstormed some answers with them and pointed out the five senses, verb and noun forms. I showed them how to brainstorm two poems based on “That Special Feeling”. Their group was to recite the collective poem during the second period.  I walked around and helped them compose their poems. The project went very well. The result was all the students produced and read aloud their poems in their groups in the front of classroom into a passed microphone; I recorded the presentations. I will segue the lesson on “homes” into the next phase of the curriculum; the students “houses” on their streets.

The weeks passed, sometimes interrupted by school tests when my class was postponed, sometimes because of a holiday, but by June 24, I thought we had reached the tenth week. I was wrong about having the final class at Daya. It was the start of a four-day Duan-Wu-Jye Dragon Boat Festival.

Aim: How can we make a final presentation?

Instructional objective: collectively describe a map,

individual topic review oral/written report

I was able to set up the final presentation. Each student would choose one aspect of the class to report on, and they would collectively draw and explain maps of parks I handed out. In past Community Curriculum practices, the students designed their own parks after brainstorming what a good park would include. This time, I made copies of famous Taiwan parks- Taichung, Taipei 228 Park, etc., and gave the groups a copy. They were to use the park to draw enlargements. One group was given a Google map of their school to recreate and describe. Only one group was left to their own devices to create a park from scratch. The students would have two weeks to finish the drawings and write five sentence person and group reports for the last class, with a pizza party to motivate them.

Before we broke for the holiday, the school dean called to say that the principal wanted me to give grades to the students that week. I explained that I had been nonchalant and non-threatening with the students and had no grades to give. I explained that I would survey the students’ notebooks and handouts to see how much preparation they had done. I had an idea of which student participated more than others but wanted more empirical data. I could give the students grades after they perform their final reports and group work. The school agreed and so, at the end of the final class, after the pizza was eaten and the students were gone, I sat down with the dean and gave him my grades for each student based on their preparation, participation, and performance. It all worked out well.

The students were thrilled to show their competency in intermediate ESL, some quite surprised that they were as verbose as they were; I had brought out the best in them by being non-threatening and not insisting on micromanaging their grammar patterns; the key was getting them to feel confident to speak. The children loved the class and the dean asked me to return next term. The students had already removed their masks thanks to Taiwan’s successful containment of the COVID-19. We can only hope that there is continued vigilance and no second wave appears to compromise the program. Maybe I can even ride my bicycle after the bike path is extended. Until then, the Da-hwa interchange of ESL would untangle any traffic mess in between practice and comprehension. 

Aim: What is the Community Curriculum?

Instructional Objective: Using reported and direct speech 

Aim: How can we get there from here? 

Instructional Objective:  Giving Directions 

Aim: What is housing; Facilities and Services? 

Instructional Objective:  Brainstorm objects on a city street

Aim: What do you see when you think of "home"?

Instructional Objective: Brainstorm- rooms and items in a home

Aim: How can we organize and explain our thoughts?

Instructional Objective: Write an essay

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

Copyright © 2020 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

Middle School (Silent) Essay Partner

          On April Fools' Day, I received an essay sent by an agent from the Taiwan English textbook publisher I do assignments for. An EFL teacher in a middle school in Changhua was asking if I could look over and edit an essay for a student who wished to compete in an recitation contest. This was not the first time I had edited and re-written an essay for students in Taiwan, but this time was different; I was asked to record myself reading the revised essay. I was going to be some student's silent partner; not taking part in her management but providing the goods.

          I spent a good two hours reading, deciphering, dissecting, and rearranging the gist of the ambitious essay on the topic "A Special Person from Changhua", trying to keep the tone and most of the content but arrange the essay in an organized format. I then got on the cellphone Messenger and recorded four one-minute voice clips in my best intoned Brooklyn accent. When I played it back, I realized I sounded like Dr. Fauci, the US infectious disease expert who was also raised in Brooklyn. At that time I had no idea if I would ever hear about the essay again. Like the others I'd done, I figured I wouldn't. I took my fee for my work and thanked the agent and school for requesting my assistance. 

Fellow Brooklynite, Dr. Fauci

          On May 4, I was picked up by the agent and driven south from Taichung to Xi-Yang middle school in rural Changhua off the highway and down winding single-width two-way roads through rice paddies, corrugated buildings, and weather-worn brick structures. After an hour, we arrived at the school in a sweltering heat.  I was hoping there would be an air-conditioned room in my future. When I saw the condition of the quaint little school, with  bronze statue of pygmy-sized Sun Yat-Sen out front, I would be happy if they had a fan. But I was pleasantly surprised. They brought me to their comfortable, cool school library. 

          I was there to hear and coach two young ladies that would compete in Taiwan public school English contests; one reading a prepared text on COVID-19 and the other an original essay she had memorized. On the way to the school, I had asked the agent if he knew the content of the essay I was to listen to; he didn't know. He didn't even know if it was the essay I had rewritten.  

          When I arrived, I was greeted by a well-spoken EFL teacher and her male colleague. When she handed me the printout of the essay that her protege was to recite, my eyes almost popped out of my head; it was the essay I had worked on a month ago! It was about a famous Changhua artist, Mr. Hsu Tsung-Huan, handicapped in an accident, but who became a successful pottery artist and teacher for special education children, giving his all for the local community; quite a worthy hero.

      After the class bell, a shy young lady entered the room and was met by her teacher who introduced her to me. We could only see each other's be-speckled eyes. I couldn't see her face nor she mine for the masks we wore in accordance with Education Department guidelines to prevent the spread of corona-virus. I thought I would have to hear her recitation without seeing her mouth move, but when the teacher took of her mask, we all followed suit. We smiled at each other, I gave her the thumbs up, and she began reciting rigidly at the head of 'u' shaped desks. I read the composition without looking up; I wanted to first hear her read. 
          I admired what perfect intonation she had, such fine pronunciation and a flowing style linking words almost like a native speaker. Then I realized it: This was the essay I had recorded and sent to the agent!!! This young lady sounded like me, Brooklyn accent and all! I was flabbergasted! When she reached the last sentence, I couldn't believe what I had just heard. We applauded her and I joked that she sounded like my daughter. 
         In our consultation afterwards, I complimented her on writing the essay. "Actually," her teacher said, "she wrote the essay in Chinese and I translated it." Ah! Another silent partner. We went over very few points; she listened carefully with her teacher nearby and looked at the notes I had made. "When you are ready," I said, "I'd like you to go back and read it again. Next time, I will watch your gestures and body language." 
          In the meantime, the second young lady who'd been seated, stood, and with paper in both hands, read the essay on the virus that had delayed the opening of school and had turned Taiwan and the world upside-down. She was very good reading, too, louder than her classmate, but I suggested she not hold the paper in both hands and shake it rhythmically as she read; hold it in one hand and gesture with the other glancing at the audience after each paragraph. 
          When Mini-Me was ready, she returned to the podium and read again. I suggested she not stare at me but share glances with the judges; to not use trite gestures to define words everyone understood but to highlight her resolve that Mr. Hsu was the greatest Changhua person she knew. She tried a few times, following my suggestions, and then I stood to show her how I would do it. Meanwhile, her teacher, cellphone in hand took a video of my performance to, no doubt, show her in the weeks leading up to the contest.  
           Doubtless, every student in  contest in Taiwan has some teacher that translated or re-wrote the student's essay, even asking a foreigner to polish it up. Will she win the contest? Who knows!  I take pride in writing with beauty in proportion to age and English fluency. The only danger is that the judges will base their scores on  faulty English and interject prejudice. As we have seen, those making decisions at the top don't always listen to the experts.

          Here is the original essay I edited on April Fools' Day: 

          Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am . I’m happy to be here and share this article with you! The topic of my article is “Introduce A Well-known Person Who Affects My Life Attitudes.”

          It’s common for everyone to encounter problems in his or her life. Some choose to escape from them, while some keep fighting against them. As for me, I used to surrender to the difficulties I met, but since I heard the story of Mr. Hsu, Tsung-Huan, I’ve learned how to deal with the frustrations in my daily life little by little.
          Mr. Hsu, Tsung-Huan was a mechanic before the accident at the age of 20. After he was told by the doctor that he couldn’t stand up on his feet and had to sit on the wheelchair for the rest of his life, the strong sorrow filled all his heart. However, with the care of his mother and the chance to learn pottery, it seems like he’s getting the second life and it's not that hard to start it all over again. Being a potter brings him not only the passion of life but also the confidence of himself. He is thankful for everything around and begins to devote himself to the children both in his hometown and in the nursery. When teaching those innocent angels, smiles are always on his face and sometimes he gets inspirations as well.
          How does he affect my life attitudes? First, he manages to lead a normal life in spite of his physical disability. Although life was not easy for him in the beginning, he never lost hope and has overcome all the difficulties. Second, the failure is not stopping him from doing what he really wants to do. His talent and efforts even help win his wife's heart. Last but not least, he's a person with a big and kind heart. Because he grew up in a small village, he's insisted on teaching at the elementary school where he graduated. Besides, he spends time teaching children with learning disabilities.
          Life is like clay which takes time to be better and perfect. For Mr. Hsu, Tsung-Huan, perhaps the accident is the gift that Heaven makes up for what he had lost. Give everything a shot because we never know what is going to change your life. Don’t give up when you are able to fly, to dream and to love.
          It has been a pleasure to share my story with you today. Thank you for your attention.

Here is my re-write:

A Well-Known Person Who Has Affected My Life

          Life is like shaping a clay vessel; it takes time to mold to perfection before firing it into a useful pot. But like life, problems can occur. The pot can break if dropped. Some potters choose to give up while others start again from scratch and make a new pot. Hsu Tsung-Huan is the well-known person who has affected my life attitude because he never gave up hope; he picked up the pieces of his broken like and did it over.

          As a mechanic, an accident at the age of twenty threatened to destroy Hsu Tsung-Huan. He was told by a doctor that he would never be able to stand on his feet again; that he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. With his heart broken, his mother stepped in with care to pull him through his tragedy. She introduced pottery to him as therapy, a hobby he could do while seated. Becoming a potter not only sharpened his motor skills; it brought back his passion and gave him the confidence to move on and become a model for others.

          Mr. Hsu devoted his life to inspiring children in a nursery in his home town, showing the children how to do pottery. Not only that, but he touched the heart of a young lady who became his loving wife and partner in his journey. His devotion led him to a career as an elementary school teacher in the small village where he had graduated teaching children with learning disabilities what it means to have courage and never give up hope. It is the story of Hsu Tsung-Huan that reminds me what life is all about.

          Today, Hsu Tsung-Huan is a family man that leads a productive life in spite of his physical disability. It was not easy for him but he overcame all his difficulties. It is a lesson we all must learn, that heaven leaves no person bereft. As for me, hurdles I may encounter can be overcome if I don’t give up. We never know what is going to change our lives, but there are many ways to go on with love, hope, and a dream. Thanks to Hsu Tsung-Huan, I know I must go on changing, making life better, whatever may come my way.

Here is the recitation I sent by Messenger voice clip: 

Recitation 1

Recitation 2

Recitation 3

Recitation 4

www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

Copyright © 2020 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.