Crash Landing at the Student Recruitment

         The Recruitment class at Bei Xin Middle School in Beitun, Taichung on Tuesday, January 22,  was a crash landing. The agent picked me up at 7:30 am  to drive me there fifteen minutes from home. It was supposed to be four 50 minute periods in which I planned to spend the first with students getting to know each other with reported speech, but the size of the group, sixty, and the configuration of the library, long and narrow, made me look more like a flight attendant on a 747 with its seating plan; three sections, two abreast, going back twelve rows. But the  laptop was set-up and I went into my PowerPoint presentation on Lunar New Years, on the eve of the Year of the Pig, leaving the cockpit as I roamed the back of the room handing out cardboard white boards; one for each cluster of four students.

 It would have been impossible to award points for correct responses to questions I asked so I went into comparatives with ‘too’ and ‘either’ or ‘adj.___er than’ and just had a student designated A to D write a response to my question about their birthdays and the Lunar New Year zodiac animal they were born into. I told the children that in the West, we called it "The Year of The Boar", not pig, and went into the possible reasons why for comparison writing; a boar is strong and wild, a pig is weak and domesticated, a boar is clean but a pig is dirty, boar meat tastes bad but pork is yummy, etc.  

 Most of the children responded and behaved well, but a group of four boys in the middle up front were starting to goof off so I asked them to stand and move to the rear while a more active group of girls from the back replaced them up front; they deserved first class since they were paying attention. There were a few senior students that helped control the large group;  one spoke to the group when the attention wasn’t given. 
The organizers of the recruitment took advantage of my trouble-shooting skills the year before when forty-five students were placed at tables facing each other in more appropriate space, with room to stand up and move to the board to write responses in a contest. This year, instead of reducing the size of the group for maximum participation, they increased it thinking the cardboard whiteboards would do the trick;  they were right about that, but for the recruits packed so tightly with nowhere to move, their participation suffered because of the school's economic arrangement.Read "Recruiting Pupils in the Year of the Dog" here.

 Nevertheless, I soldiered on in the second period picking up where I had started with comparisons, but I could only speak with few students as most were out of ear- shot. Originally I thought I would show the power point in period two and have the students do cooperative learning reports of the different slides about New Years around the world; I'd show the Western and Lunar New Years - but a CL was impossible to organize with such a large group; 17 groups of four each. Each child was called to write a response twice in the three fifty-minute sessions. I went around checking almost every response sharing the best answers with the entire group, though the writing was small and the distance was too far for most out of the immediate area to see. Few students had notebooks or pens to copy anything down. I asked for and was given a handful of eighteen inch rectangular sheets of paper that I ended up writing large notes on and held up as I walked down the aisles for any child that wanted to copy. The small white board they'd provided up front wasn’t secured to the floor or wall and was hard to write on.

 I kept eyeing a large flat screen TV mounted off the wall midway down the narrow fifty-foot long library wishing it was plugged in and connected with a video camera on; regretfully, I declined a microphone thinking I'd be loud enough. But I felt like a flight attendant at the front of the cabin giving instructions in how to use a seat belt and overhead oxygen masks; emergency exits to their left. Luckily, it was a cool day and there were plenty of open windows for ventilation and gremlins to escape.

Towards the end of the third period, after I had gone through the power point about Western and Lunar New Years and how celebrations in Taiwan compared with the West, I introduced The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, showing a three-minute mock movie teaser from YouTube. Things were going fine. I was building up a head of steam to do what I had done a few days before at a girls’ school in Yunlin and Hu-Wei; the reading of the beginning of Chapter 3, “China’s Little Ambassador”, and the collective summary writing of each group. It was going to be bombastic; instead of five or six groups, I would have seventeen groups writing unique summaries. I let the students know what we were going to do after the 10:50 break and stepped aside to relax and collect my thoughts as they went to the restrooms. It was then that my flight  was hijacked and I was rudely interrupted.
See a trailer of "In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" here

“You have to stop now,” said the agent who approached me behind the book case. I noticed an entourage entering through the front portal; around five of them including the teacher that had given me the cardboard white boards and blank paper.

“But my wife said I was to teach until 11:50.”

“You have to stop now." the agent whispered. "The principal wants to talk to the students.” Indeed he did. 
I can’t say the principal ignored me; he smiled, waved, and gave me a  thank you bow as he assumed his place in front of the screen I had shown the power point on. Nobody was overtly rude to me; the teacher in charge simply asked the students to thank me for coming to teach them that day and to give me a round of applause. I acknowledged it and said thank you before finding my way around the crowded fuselage of students, seated and standing, to the exit ramp onto the tarmac.

The agent inside, I learned, was telling the teacher in charge how we had been blind-sided by their change in plans to have me recruit all morning. The principal couldn’t wait to hand out important documents promoting his school, the one the children should write down as their first choice. 
There is a fierce competition for public schools and colleges to enroll a  dwindling youthful population in Taiwan. It means survival of the school and its staff. Many schools and colleges have closed down as parents, caught in the crossfire of domestic and international economics, suffer from low wages and over-work, making it difficult to consider raising children, even marrying at all. I can understand how the principal wanted to strike while the iron was hot; he had all the recruits’ attention thanks to me.

I sat stunned in the van on the ride home. The agent apologized to me for the abrupt ending of my enrichment, but it wasn’t his fault; he was blind-sided, too. When he handed me the envelope with the very nice stipend for four periods, I was not shy to take it although I only deserved compensation for three periods; it would have embarrassed the principal had I returned the extra money.

The year before, at a similar recruitment, I had finagled all obstacles; no chalkboards, no internet connection, and a new PPT. Next year, if I am invited back again, I will take out the file for this school and compensate for their flippancy by finishing up my program early just in case they have something else up their sleeves. 

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