Being Schooled

Above: The view of Taipei from Maokong, a village formerly known for growing tea and now a tourist hotspot just outside the city. This picture is notable because we’ve been to Maokong three times, and having looked back through our photos, we’ve taken nearly the exact same photo all three times. It’s quite the photogenic vantage. Fun fact: Maokong means cat hole.

Friends,

Last time I wrote, we had just slept through a small earthquake. Today we were woken up by one: a 6.0 magnitude quake off the east coast, about 30–40 miles away from our apartment. They say it felt like 4.x here. I’ve never been in an earthquake, so it was quite the novelty. It was like our bedroom was on a gently rocking boat for about 30 seconds. Little dizziness. I’ll let you know if I’m still amused when a bigger one comes. Typhoon is coming close tonight, so I’m just getting all of my natural disasters out of the way early.

It’s that anxious, itchy time of summer for educators where we’re both dreading the coming semester and ready to cut through the building anxiety and get it over with. Or, maybe not educators, maybe just me. The feeling is especially acute this year since I’ll be starting a totally different job. Not only am I jumping countries, I’m also jumping from college to high school, from composition to literature, and from weird part-time schedules to a full-time, 8–5 five-day-a-week burn. I haven’t had a five-day-a-week job in right at ten years. Maybe it will break me and this TinyLetter will turn into a slow chronicling of my unwinding.

I like my boss, the school seems really well-run, and I don’t think it’ll be that different from what I’ve previously done, but man am I keenly aware that there is a lot about this situation that I don’t know and that’s very scary. A few times now when I’ve told people where I’m going to work they’ve told me I should be worried about the parents, not the kids. Apparently it’s a lot of very wealthy people who want their kids to get into American/Canadian/European universities and have a lot of high expectations. The school tells me the parents mainly go through them though, not directly to teachers. We’ll see!

I’m also very curious about the literature side of things. The school operates under Common Core as much as possible. I’m using an American textbook and we’re reading two novels in each class. The difficulty range seems odd to me — my eighth grade class is reading Tuck Everlasting which I’m pretty sure I remember reading in 4th or 5th grade, whereas my tenth grade class is reading a couple of Ibsen’s plays which I definitely didn’t encounter until well into college. We’ll also be reading The Kite Runner in my tenth grade class, which gave me an excuse to finally read it recently. I wasn’t a huge fan (brief review here ), and now I get to be nervous about part of my very first full high school course and my very first teaching experience in Taiwan covering a rape in the reading. Okay, honestly less nervous than just anxious to see what the tone of the class is and how I need to prepare for such a discussion which who knows, might not even be for several months. I am still making my way through a small mountain of paperwork to learn the curriculum. The second book for the eighth grade class is Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech and I’m very excited to hear what the students have to say about reading the dialogue in that.

A lot of unknowns. A lot of unknowns indeed. The school I’ll be teaching for is a private school that’s split into two sections, each going from kindergarten up to graduating high school. One section is bilingual the whole way through, with English classes from the get-go and gradually phasing English into all subjects (as far as I can tell). The other side is entirely in Mandarin, though in later grades they can take English courses in the same way that we take foreign languages in the US. The kids seem super motivated, which is good (though I’m sure it tips into burnout, especially with an expectation around after school and extra programs beyond the typical school day), but I’m a little worried about diving into a test-driven environment.

I’ll report back to you as I learn more! I’ve barely even met my coworkers yet.

I feel super guilty that my reading for teaching has pushed me away from reading for Women in Translation Month. I’ll get a few titles in before it’s over. In the meantime, check out the Twitter for recs.

I wrote some about the food situation here. In the near future I’ll write up what my job search process was like. Let me know if there are any other aspects you’re curious about.

Further reading:

• There’s no one living today we could lose who would be as big of a loss to American letters as the death of Toni Morrison was. Celebrate her. Read her. Go all the way back to Sula or just back to November of 2016 . Listen to her accept the Nobel Prize . Read others try to capture her, like Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah here in 2015 (you might remember Kaadzi Ghansah as the writer who won awards for her work on the Charleston massacre). Or Hilton Als in 2003 . There’s a new documentary about her that’s in theaters now, The Pieces I Am , that has a very limited release (it’s at the Arbor in Austin), but hopefully does some serious work at plumbing the depths of her life.
• Here’s a good clip of some of her contemporaries discussing her legacy.
• Rejoice in the voices that serve as Morrison’s echoes, continuations, keepers of the flame. Voices like Claudia Rankine .
• Or voices like Eddie Glaude Jr. Something is broken in me because I’m going to link to a segment from a news talk show.
• I really enjoyed this little art project showcasing a few memories of technology pre-broadband.
• The two things you didn’t know you needed to read about: a lonely skyscraper outside of Houston and a Tupac-loving Iowa Department of Human Services’s resignation .
• Are you concerned about 30–50 feral hogs running through your yard in 3–5 minutes while your children are out playing? Slate has an article for that.

Here’s your fun Mandarin tidbit of the day: the word for bread is 麵包, “miànbāo,” which translated literally (which you really shouldn’t do but is fun anyways) means “noodle package.” I am looking forward to making some noodle packages in the near future.

Hope the record-setting heat of July wasn’t too hard on you and that you’re able to greet August with vim and vigor. We should use the word vim more.

-g