The Readers Theater that was Killed by Teachers

  I love the workshops and in-service training I occasionally do in Taichung public schools, but not when the two are mixed as they were at Shuang-Wen Middle School yesterday. 

     I was told that it would be a workshop for students trying out their Readers' Theater presentation. I was expecting to work with the students on delivery and make suggestions. It started out that way. My wife and I took a taxi to the school in Da-Li. We were met at the gate by a student escort. He was very friendly. I asked him if he was in the Readers' Theater troupe and he said 'yes.' I asked him the name of the skit and he said "The Frog Who Became Emperor." I told him that, In the USA, we have a skit called "The Pig who Became President" and he laughed all the way up to the workshop room, even sharing the joke with his classmates and teacher.

     After greeting the three or four teachers and seven students, I listened and then gave a few suggestions. Then, one teacher spoke to my wife and asked her to tell me to stop talking until others came. We assumed the others were students, but there were another fifteen teachers who entered and sat around the u-shaped tables. The children were asked to repeat their skit. Then, the Taiwanese teachers attacked and criticized  them. The children's faces turned solemn after the laughter they exhibited with me earlier, and they listened to the teachers put in their two-cents and berate their performance. 

     I was left to whisper with my wife wondering when the teachers were going to stop talking. When was I going to be asked again to workshop with the kids? For more than an hour, I sat. Once, the gentleman teacher who, I learned, was the new coordinator of the readers' theater initiative (the very pregnant teacher who did so well last year organizing a contest victory for the kids was on maternity leave) had the audacity to approach me and ask how a particular sentence in the script should be intoned. The whole script was in need of intonation modification but directly with the students, not with the face-saving coordinator.

     
     In fact, the script, for which the students had very basic body language or acting, was vague at best, for a plot that made no sense. It made me wonder: where on earth they had found it? My wife checked on Google and found a video of a Jewish westerner who had adapted the story from a western approximation of a 'classic Chinese story' not found anywhere in Chinese history. The moral, "Never give up," had nothing to do with the plot. For the life of them, not one of the twenty Taiwanese teachers could identify the Chinese idiomatic expression that tales from Chinese history usually moralize. 

     With plot twists like the alien birth of a frog to human parents, a frog who could predict the future, a frog that swallows hot coals to spit heat, a frog that disguises himself as a stranger to catch a ball so as to marry the princess who he then reveals his frog-ness to, and the emperor who knows the frog's secret in the line before the frog actually tells him (perhaps clairvoyant, too) the secret that wearing the cloak will give him eternal life, without explaining the side effects of losing his emperor-hood to the frog who then becomes the new emperor. This is the moral? Never give up? I gave up.

     At 2:45, fifteen minutes before my wife's cousin was to pick us up and get us home, the Taiwanese cache of teachers asked me to comment, and so I did. I told them that the children were saddled with a non-comprehensive story that they couldn't get into for lack of coherence and they would surely lose the contest this year unless there was major surgery done on it.