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 10th, 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.
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.
they must let you waste time writing places. Covid brings out writer's now, eh?
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