Welcome to month 4 of my Taiwan adventure! Wow. Time has a mind of its own over here. I always have Time. I have Time when I need it, when I want it, and when I don't! Time goes by so slowly when I want it to- when I'm getting ready in the morning, or when Monday is only a couple hours away, or when I really want to do an activity with my kids after they finish their classwork (okay, maybe I don't have THAT much time). Then it gets weird. I have all this time, but when I look back on my week or month, I think, what happened?! I just got here! Where did Time go?! To be completely honest and totally cheesy, it went right into my heart. Taiwan has a saying: Taiwan touch your heart. It's all over everywhere. We always make fun of it, but secretly, I think they're on to something...
So, here's what has happened over the past month!
I don't know if I have ever mentioned this, but the success of every day (well, at least Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when I have them) is measured by how my 6th grade class went. I love those kids so much, even the crazy ones (actually, especially the crazy ones) and the ones that don't like me very much. When my kids are on task and don't break every little rule the school has implemented, class rocks! But, those days come maybe once a week. We're working on it... Teaching is hard! Actually, I take that back. Teaching is a cinch. Classroom management is hard. Sometimes, completely impossible. It takes good ideas, time, knowledge of your students, stubbornness, but flexibility, and most of all, experience. Knowing that makes me understand why I liked the teachers I did. They were almost always older teachers. They just knew how to handle a class! They knew what kids like, don't like and how to manipulate the whole system so us kids had fun while doing things we found incredibly boring. The teachers I liked that weren't them were either super easy or really attractive. Truth. But yeah. 6th grade. My favorite group of 12 year olds I have ever known.
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| These kids rock. |
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As you may have seen on facebook, this month was science project month. We had fun! I had originally planned on us growing salt and sugar crystals, but they had already done that, so I changed our big project to one called, "Pavlov's Fish". The idea was that you feed the fish, ringing a bell first for a couple weeks and then one day just ring a bell and see if they expect food. Sounds simple and interesting, right? It would, wouldn't it? But you don't have my class. Number one, we didn't get the suggested Goldfish... I don't even know if they have those here. Number two, the school didn't have fish food at first, but they did have turtle food! They said to just crush it up and the fish would eat it. Well, they didn't. And it took my kids all of 2 minutes to realize what they were feeding the fish and freaked out! My camera was filming one of the fish, so I got this whole conversation with my kids on video of them explaining why fish won't eat the turtle food. Part of it when a little like this: "This is TURTLE food! Fish don't eat TURTLE food!! Like, we don't eat elephant food, and people will not eat pig food! Fish will not eat turtle food, OKAY?!". Haahaha. Number three, I had to replace fish at least 5 times in the first week and a half. I don't know if these fish were dumb, defective, suicidal, or if the torture they endured in class was just too much for their little bodies to handle, but they did not want to live. In fact, one teacher told me that one of the fish actually jumped out of its bowl and died on the counter. Oh the horror!! Number 4, we have such little time in class (and a general lack of self control), we are often doing it in a hurry, not exactly waiting for the right times to be ringing the bells and such... If nothing else, we had an excuse to play with fish for a month.
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| Our first, very messy, science experiment |
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| Vinegar+baking powder balloons |
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| Extracting DNA |
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| My kids wanted to see if they could scare fish to death... |
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| One back up remaining... |
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In my baby class, I have to admit. I have favorites. Love them all! But some I just downright enjoy every day. Aison, Joe, and Jerry (for adorableness), and Julian (for hilariousness). Julian I have story after story of the funny things he does or says or just about his personality. He has a semester less of English than the other kids, and Kaitlyn and I have practically been been his first English teachers. He said nothing for the first couple weeks, but then one day he just started shouting everything! ORANGEEE! ORANGEEE! He got really good at that word. One other story I think is funny of him: We made patterned necklaces a couple weeks ago. He really loved it, except he didn't want a necklace. He just wanted the untied string with the beads on it. He refused to let me tie a knot. Well, during break, he went to the bathroom and didn't come out for a couple minutes. I wondered what was up, so I went over and just started laughing! He must have lost all his beads while he was going to the bathroom because he was standing in the middle of the floor, trying really hard to put the beads back on his string with his little pants down. Hahaha ohhh, I just went in and helped him and tied a know on the end of his string even though he still didn't want one.
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| Jerry's new haircut |
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| I have plenty of pictures of Julian, and none are of him smiling. This isn't | candid! He seriously posed his face like that. |
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| Aison is so silly. He loves my glasses! |
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| It was cute when he did it, then it just got crazy when all the other kids wanted a go | (: |
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| Joe! |
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We had a pretty significant sized earthquake here on Wednesday! (I heard it made US news?) It was a 6.0, but we probably felt it at a level 5 intensity. Still pretty big! I have felt some pretty significant sized earthquakes since I have been here, but they are all like 5 seconds long (long for what I experience in Cali, but still short enough to just wait out). So the interesting thing about this earthquake was that it was really long. I noticed it right away, but I thought we'd just wait it out. Then it didn't stop! And I had no idea what the procedure was... At first I was just standing there, looking out my classroom window, swaying. It was the coolest feeling! We got love waves at Berhan. (This is where I usually give a warning that I will start talking Geology and give my audience the option to skip down a couple sentences if they want, but I know whoever is reading this isn't lame. So, read on and like it!) There are two kinds of surface waves- the kind we feel when an earthquake happens. Rayleigh waves and love waves. Rayleigh waves have vertical and horizontal displacement, so you get up/down, side to side shaking. Love waves have no vertical displacement so it's all side to side shaking- but it's not really shaking! It's like swaying. Puts you in a weird trance. Okay, so that last part isn't scientific, but that's what happened to me! Took one of my kids to snap me out of it! My little 8 year old, Gabriel, saw that it wasn't stopping and he got up and ran to the wall across from me, sat down and put his hands over his head. He looked up at me like, "Teacher, what do we do?!" And I had no idea. What were the drills in school in the US? Oh! Right! Get under a table! Well, it looked like the kids were taught something else, because they were all against the wall, except for a couple. So I thought, oh! Uh, door frame! So I lead the remaining kids to the door. By the time I opened it, the earthquake had stopped. We took all the kids out of the building and waited there for like 10 or 15 minutes. In case of an after shock? I'm not sure. Made it a very interesting morning, though! So, 2 things I learned from this experience: One, I really need to clear up the whole earthquake drill thing. Two, I understand why they're called love waves! Cool!
Last little tid bit: I finished my 3rd book! I have read The Notebook, Hatchet, and The Help. Onto Great Expectations.
