Return to Chungder JHS: A Tiger by the Tail

Chungder Middle School Class in Hu-Wei* (虎尾鎮 -Tiger-Tail) Yunlin County

      On July 25, 2017, I returned to Hu-Wei in Yunlin County to instruct a three-hour summer school EFL class. I would go back once more the following Tuesday. These one shot deals the publisher sends me on pays well but there is no follow-up to them. This time, I had no illusions of an ongoing project as I had when I went to Chungder Middle School a year ago. (July 2016 Chungder JHS Weekend Enrichment )The students were  as motivated as they were last time I visited but everything else had changed, including how I conducted the class; I grabbed a tiger by the tail.

      Half of the Chungder Middle School had been torn down and a new wing was being built. Gone were the quaint grounds and gardens of the fifty-year-old school; only temporary classrooms and a twenty-year-old wing were left. The large conference room was no more.

      I was told there would be a total of thirty students in two classes. Instead, I taught 32 teenagers in a cramped room with barely enough space to stand and go to the green chalkboard. Ceiling fans buzzed loudly overhead. The air conditioner  shut down with fifteen minutes of class time left. Nevertheless, we managed to have two team contests; a straight team competition and a controlled composition revision relay race. The glue that held the class together between activities was reported speech. 

Motivation: “Our House” by Madness, on YouTube, cued up and amplified through Bluetooth into an X-mini near a microphone piped into the class PA system. We heard the song and chatted about the lyrics comparing them to the students' home lives. 

    I had made copies of three pages of handouts and brought them with me. We did the controlled composition activity first and the students took time chatting and reporting what they had asked each other. The class was awesome and I was looking forward to going back the following week.

     We weren't sure there would be a class August 1st; a typhoon passed north of Taichung quickly and a tropical depression in the southwest went up the east coast and made a good turn. Yunlin and Taichung weren't affected much.

     The publisher's agent picked us up again and we were driven back in a light rain to Chungder Middle School. I had enough copies of handouts. We would work in reported speech with the second and third handouts about “Services and Facilities” in the city, the “TV Robbers” story board retelling, and “Improving a Park,” if there was time; I wouldn't rush it. 

      When we arrived at the school, I was informed that the class would not be held in the air-conditioned room as it was the week before. Luckily, it was twenty degrees cooler after the two typhoons passed through, but even when it is 75, not 95 degrees, a 20’x 15’ classroom with 32 fourteen-year-olds can be just as clammy no matter how many open windows there are. The chalk was so damp it broke at the slightest touch. The foot-high podium the length of the board was an obstacle for warm-up team contests.

Being the same group as the week before, the students had an opportunity to review and build on the reported speech I had introduced. I added time and vocabulary shift but it didn’t bode well when the students demonstrated  they had forgotten how to change a command. We spent the rest of the period practicing with a contest to review.

I saved the last two periods to do the "Improve This Park" activity. The class started out okay. We concluded the board contest and the children wrote answers: “How would you improve the park?” and “What would you add to make the park better?” before the second ten-minute break. I told the students that they would create their own parks with their teammates and prepared by dividing the class into teams for the cooperative learning activity. They were raring to go. I played “Saturday in the Park” by Chicago to motivate them and handed out  mini whiteboards to draw blueprints on. One student would sketch ideas onto the boards, another would write a description, one would go to the board to draw the park, and  fourth would read the report. I brainstormed three questions for them to start their report with:
1.     Who would use the park?
2.     Where will it be in your neighborhood?
3.     What will the rules of the park be?

The break was chaotic. Some students didn’t seem to understand the rules; I had to explain them in Mandarin. It seemed most only wanted to draw the park and forget the description in English or learn cooperatively. I realized, too late, that they had probably never done a cooperative learning activity before!

     After the break, some students went to the board and started drawing their parks without much preparation or cooperation. I asked them to sit down with their groups to work together. Still, the students didn’t write an English script based on their park blueprint and the overarching questions. I had to reconvene the overzealous students and explain again that this was an English activity, not only an art activity; that each group had to have a script to read before their artist could go to the board.

The twenty minutes I had reserved for preparation was wasted explaining what to do and there wasn't enough time left for the reports. Not all nine groups completed their board parks and only four gave oral reports. What went wrong?

It was my mistake to divide the class in two ways, first by rows for the board competition and then in blocks of four for the park project. The students weren’t clear which team they were on. But my biggest mistake was starting the cooperative learning activity before the children were prepared to cooperate. Cooperative learning is a skill that must be practiced and can’t be rushed into. Instead of cooperating, a few students took on all responsibilities or a group simply floundered into silliness. 

     I have been an ESL/EFL teacher for thirty-eight years. I am not an arts and crafts summer camp counselor, nor do I only dazzle my students with razzmatazz; I blind them with language science! But I cannot bring eyesight to the blind. The students in Taiwan have been victim to primitive EFL instruction their entire school lives. When the sunlight hits their eyes, it’s not a pretty picture. For a professional EFL teacher, it can be frustrating. Next time I am asked to do a one-time class enrichment, I will remember 'KISS: Keep It Simple,Stupid,' and everyone will have a good time.                                                     

My Job Editing Taiwan's Middle School ESL Textbooks

In June 2016, my wife got a call from the Taichung agent of Kang Shin  Publishers that informed her the publisher wanted to have a meeting with me about becoming the Central Taiwan EFL curriculum developer and editor of their EFL middle school textbook series. I was glad the summer was starting to shape up with things to do for the publisher. There was even a chance I would be be asked to re-write textbooks. I would talk with the publisher's rep soon; the editor was coming to Taichung to meet me. But business agreements in Taiwan are funny. Don't believe anything you hear until you see it in writing and it is signed by both parties. Bosses in Taiwan are used to getting something for nothing, from natives and ex-pats alike.

Since there is little written into a contract with foreign teachers and writers, a hiree  is dealing with a slippery fish.  I knew in advance what could torpedo the next day's meeting with the editor from headquarters in Taipei: I would want intellectual property rights on my creations; compensation and royalties. I would not write any material for them that I would not be  rewarded for unless they gave me an  upfront bonus.  I would want to know how many copies are published and how many copies they expect to sell.  I would want to see an ISBN for the book to be sold worldwide. But it was a preliminary meeting we had. I had no reason to discuss any of it, yet. 

     On June 17th, I had the meeting with the managing editor from one of Taiwan's three textbook publishers. We had lunch and left with a hand-shake agreement that I would be freelancing re-writing the story and dialogue sections of their EFL textbooks used in Taiwan's public schools island-wide.

By June 28th, I had finished editing the dialogues and little stories in the first EFL textbook, English 1, First Half. I began editing English 1, Second Half. There was no editing to do in the corresponding workbooks. There were two more levels of EFL textbooks to do, each with two parts. I spent about sixty hours editing six textbooks.

     By September 1st, I finished editing the dialogues and stories in the last of the six junior high school EFL textbooks. The topics meandered, were irrelevant, had few corresponding exercises, and there was no cohesive theme. The grammar and idiom used by different second-language Taiwanese writers in the original books, was stilted and unnatural. Only one of the six books was written by someone with natural American English dialect and content.

     The books' dialogues and stories were off-kilter; either straining to be cute, or downright off-color. For example, there was a dialogue in one between two mice discussing how to kill a cat. In another dialogue to expose idioms, G-d was juxtaposed with devilish idiomatic expressions.

      I changed the content and hoped my suggestions would be taken to heart in the new edition, due to be revised in two years. I didn't give it another thought until before the Lunar New Year.

     I knew that, in Taiwan, businessmen like to clean their books before the Lunar New Year. I had recently heard back from the publisher's editor who called to say they hadn't forgotten about me; he hemmed and hawed about new Dept. of Education changes to the curriculum that had to be incorporated immediately, but I had not yet been fully paid, so I asked my wife to give him a call. My editing assignment would have to be put on the back burner. At least Eric Yang agreed to have me sent compensation for the work I had put into editing and revising the six book series. 

      As of this date, August 2017, though I continue to be asked by the publisher's agents to do freelance enrichment in schools that use their textbooks, I have not heard any news about the textbooks I revised or whether they would ever be published or not. It's a good thing I am a retired pensioner and not dependent on Taiwanese schools or book publishers for my livelihood.