When in Roman Classrooms

Friends,

Earlier this week I was told I would be chaperoning my 8th grade students during a parade. I had no idea what that meant, and still wasn’t sure up until the moment that our parade began this morning. We ended up walking a few blocks around the school, with a large assortment of flags and broken up by homeroom classes. There were monitors at every corner and intersection stopping us to let traffic pass. Lots of people taking our pictures and clapping but surprisingly no one honked at us. My students were, of course, most amused by having time off from class.

And so I survived that experience, chaperoning my first parade, with no problems. Other experiences overcame in the past month: Having the dead skin eaten off of my feet by tiny fish in a hotel stream. (The above picture is from the Lanyang Museum, which we visited on the same trip as the skin-eating fish. It was very pretty to take pictures of but very boring inside.) Eating my weight in mooncakes the week of Mid-Autumn/Moon Festival . My first parent-teacher one-on-one conference.

Most shocking experience so far in Taipei? I really like my job. Like a surprising amount. I kind of assumed that this job would be a stop-gap until I found something new university-level, but a month and a half in and I don’t really feel that’s the case anymore. My students are smart and funny and they talk way too much which is super annoying but less annoying than the students who didn’t care about my class at all at the university. It’s a lot different than what I expected, while being both similar and different from schooling in the US.

I mentioned homeroom classes while describing the parade above: that’s one of the biggest differences. The student body is divided up into homerooms of 20–40 (depending on grade) students. They meet in their homeroom first thing in the morning. Their homeroom desk serves as a miniature locker. Some class teachers come to teach in their homeroom. They eat lunch in their homeroom (the cafeteria isn’t big enough for all students so they only go to the cafeteria once every two weeks). They finish their day in their homerooms. They even have a homeroom flag that they carried today during the parade. And their homeroom teacher serves as a sort of class parent. They’re the main point of contact for any parents. They know what’s going on with each student. They’re my first go to for any sort of unusual issues, discipline or otherwise. Not only that, but the homeroom teacher follows them as they move on, so my 10th grade homeroom teacher has been with his students since 6th grade. I’m sure it has a few drawbacks, but overall it seems really cool.

The frustrations are frustrations that would be familiar to anyone in any workplace. There’s a big gap between the ideals that the school promotes and the reality on the ground. Big, familiar example: we’re encouraged to teach in a very holistic and liberal arts style while simultaneously being required to give them a test every two weeks and rank students for opportunities purely on grades.

Other random observations: They have naptime every day that ~95% of students and ~50% of staff participate in. Students must surrender their cellphones before school for the! entire! day! The bathroom sinks are completely open to the hallway outside, there is no way to dry your hands, and the female teachers’ bathroom is down a small hallway slightly inside a boys’ student bathroom. A small number of elementary-aged students ride the public bus by themselves to school. Students have to bow to the teachers during assembly. Students are responsible for cleaning their classrooms (chalk board and sweeping), after lunch (including dumping leftover food into a separate composting/pig food container), and all teachers’ offices. Misbehaving students also have to clean the outdoor campus before school begins. There are no whiteboards except in computer labs and I’m worried the yellow chalk dust is going to dye my hands.

Acknowledgment: My school is really expensive to attend, so I have zero sense of how it compares to schools with a different SES-level student body here in Taipei.

Only slightly less shocking than liking my job a lot? Or maybe more shocking but less interesting to write about?

I actually like the cafeteria food most days. It’s not great, but it’s healthy, cheap, and they have a big jar of chili paste to put on anything I don’t like.

Further reading:

• I’ve only read one book from the National Book Award Finalists list , but it was a good one that I’ve recommended on here before: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. There are a bunch I’ve been meaning to get to though, especially Ogawa and Krasznahorkai from the translation list.
• This week I talked to my 10th graders about examples of non-human narrators, so I showed them the Dave Eggers story “After I Was Thrown Into the River and Before I Drowned .” I saw him read it when he came to Southwestern University wayyyyyyyyy back in 2011 and it definitely stuck in my brain! The students were very amused.
• Did you know you wanted to read a full article about the diet and exercise of chess champions ? Because I sure didn’t before I started reading it!
• Pokémon Go is still really big here in Taiwan, and apparently 300,000 players met up near us .
• The best thing on Twitter this month involved Lizzo .
• Self-plug: I had a book review published this month, for the first time in quite a while. Unfortunately it’s in a print-only journal ( Prairie Schooner ) so I don’t have an easy way of sharing it with you, but the book was The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke (tr. Carlos Rojas). It was a good one! (The book, that is. Hopefully the review was too.)

Your Mandarin lesson for the month: the word here in Taiwan for popcorn is 爆米花/bào mǐ huā, which literally translates as “explosion rice flower.” And isn’t that perfect?

Sincerely yours,

-g