I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó).

Get it while it’s hot.

A run

After getting out of the school in the evening, I ate a snack and then went out for a run. I’d been planning on going to the long canal that goes up to Danshui, but at the last minute I chose to go to Da’an Park instead. The run started out well, but I got a little too enthusiastic and ran the last 2km in about 9 minutes. I’ve definitely been getting in better shape. My resting pulse has been under 50 three mornings in a row, but still… I don’t want to push it too much on the longer runs. All in all it took 1h26m to do 16km, and I’d planned on doing in about 1h40m. That left me with no other choice but to go out eating and drinking so as not to leave my body depleted for the next day.

Food and drink

On the way out of my apartment, I saw one of my best students getting out of a car with her parents and sister. They were startled to see me and asked why I was out so late. Her parents probably thought I was going out to drink like all the “bad” foreigners. Oh, the injustice… Anyway, I stopped by TU first. It was closed. Then, I tried Brass Monkey, but it was pretty lifeless– nothing at all like I remember it being three years ago. Just as I was debating the idea of turning in for an early night’s sleep, I stumbled upon the awesome seafood nightmarket! The one where I used to go with Nathan back in the day. I made a beeline for the restaurant run by awesome-laoban. Since the first time going into his restaurant 4 years ago, I’ve his absolutely rock-solid nightmarket restaurant laoban credentials have commanded my respect. He’s always got a cigarette dangling straight down from his lower lip. His “Taiwan Guoyu” is full-blown. He not only eradicates all “r” sounds in his speech, but he even pronounces all his ㄈ sounds as ㄏs. And most of all, rain or shine, day or night, there are always a few of his buddies hanging out in the back of the restaurant laughing at his jokes. Here’s to you awesome-laoban!

Lawyers

I had just ordered rice, some yam leaves, fish chin and a beer when some red-faced guy at a whole table of well dressed younger women called me over. It turns out that he was a 主管 of a law firm and he was taking out the staff! … for whiskey shots! I know the stereotypes about lawyers, but geez. I have never in my life seen a Taiwanese group, especially a group of mostly women drinking like that. In the time I drank a beer they must have done 4+ shots each, while inhaling various other drinks on the side. The way they partied was insane and not entirely bloggable, but they were a pretty friendly group and it was nice to chat with in Chinese about things completely unrelated to EFL or kids. The price of my meal was unbeatable, too: 250 bucks!

I kind of wish I’d had a chance to see some of the natural beauty in that part of Canada myself. Unfortunately, I fell into the same trap everyone else does during my last visit. I made a beeline for Vancouver and stayed there the whole time.

Then came the logistics problems. They didn’t have that many students, but those few they did have are all strung out amongst two teachers and six different time slots. For us to move in, a few of the classes had to go. Guess who would be in a bind if their old students weren’t willing to merge into our classes?

At times the past couple of weeks, I’ve nearly wanted to give up on it, but in the end all has worked out. Today, I successfully moved all my classes over to their school, and merged one of their advanced classes in with my 2nd year class. Their students found it a challenge, too! I don’t want to trumpet myself too loudly, but for the last three years, I’ve poured all my heart into becoming the best teacher I possibly can, and seeing these results was great. I have multiple classes of students who have achieved superior reading ability, phonics, grammar and vocabularies than their peers at this school who have studied for twice as much time. Admittedly, I’ve put in a lot more time per class than any cram school teachers working for an hourly rate would, and I give a lot of homework, but it’s still a wonderful feeling.

On the other hand, stress has really been a problem. Yesterday, I went to eight different bookstores in search of the readers I’d need for the new students joining my class. Then, I moved things from our old school to the new, chatted with Simon, came home, recorded materials for CDs until 4:30AM, spent until 6AM burning the CDs, got up after just three hours of sleep, copied keys, went into the new school and nearly exploded over a problem getting internet connectivity to my computer there. My Taiwanese partner in the school had a memory stick that would have worked, but refused to temporarily empty its contents onto her own computer and lend it to me for the school. It was a small thing, but I was sleep deprived and under a deadline for THE big day– Ding’s students’ first experience with my classes. I got really irrationally pissed off, but managed to contain it for the most part. In the end, I jogged to 愛買 and bought a memory stick so I could get documents onto my computer in the new school’s office in time to print them for class. All the students got their handouts and everything went reasonably well, but things were rushed and the quality of the classes wasn’t quite up to par. Hopefully the students and their parents were understanding, since it was the day of our move.

Pagewood has made a big step up, and I’ve had a chance to see my students mix with those of a traditional “hardcore” buxiban’s first hand. I just hope the nuisances settle down so I can focus on what I really enjoy, the education.

Related Post: You Can’t Touch this English!

I have no idea why it was under such a brutal attack. I added any sites which met the criteria of being about Taiwan, teaching English or learning Chinese, and promptly removed anyone who asked to be. On top of that the site was entirely non-commercial, with no self-serving purpose what-so-ever. Nonetheless, it was under constant bombardment; perhaps some Chinese activist was upset at all the political blogs being aggregated, but it seems unlikely. In any case, it was pretty clear that the attacker had a Drupal kit. I upgraded the site to the newest version of Drupal in order to close some of its security holes, but that broke half the add-ons I had used to make the site.

So, I’ve moved the Taiwan Blog Feed to wordpress, which I’m much more familiar with. It should be easier for me to keep on top of maintaining the site now, too. People can’t add their sites anymore. Just leave me a comment if you want a particular site added (or if you’re the author and you want it removed).

Hansel and Gretel individual reading:

A fun civilization board game:

Discussing an environmental campaign:

Ross and his program have also made the local news a couple of times.

China Post: Students struggling for positive identity, foreigner says

Then, it was to the school, where I had to so some last minute editing for my Tuesday/Friday class’s first semester exam. For some reason or another, the internet connectivity was horribly spotty (and it’s on a LAN, not a WAN), but I got everything done.

The Bookstore

Next, it was off to the bookstore. I went to the new Caves Bookstore, near 圓山 MRT, and what a bounty they had for me! Over fifty books I had ordered for my students were there waiting for me, and I found a new series of readers that may have some potential for curriculum.

I’ve been very satisfied with the Oxford University Press Bookworms series, on the whole. However, their “starter” level books are terrible. They use the simple present tense for just about everything, and do so in unnatural ways. Chinese speakers have a tendency to do that anyway, and the last thing I want to do is reinforce the problem further. The problem is that the level one Bookworms are a bit difficult for low level students. I push my kids pretty hard, and it takes them about year before they’re able to read them. Not only that, but I have to give them some vocabulary sheets are support so that they can get through them at a reasonable speed (15-20 pages/hour).

Today, I saw a series that just may fill in some of this gap for beginning level students– OUP Dolphin Readers. The entire series is at a very low vocabulary level, and the books are full of good illustrations that make them much easier for students to understand. Levels 3 and 4 include multiple verb tenses, and at least from the browsing I did, the 1st and 2nd level Dolphin Readers managed to avoid the unnatural usage of the present tense that’s so common in other EFL books. They even offer headword lists online. The only problem is that the Dolphin Readers have a lot of writing activities inside them, and I’m really looking for something that can be re-used from class to class. Few parents would be happy paying for all those little readers.

The Election

On my way home from the bookstore, some middle aged Taiwanese guy commented on all my books, and we got to talking. It turns out he’s a History teacher at a university near where I live. He gave me an update on the election– it was an utter rout. I had thought that Ma would win, but I’d never imaged that he’d pull in 140% of Hsieh’s vote total after his party already won three quarters of the legislative seats a couple months ago. The people have spoken for the KMT and spoken loudly. It will be interesting to see what they do with their mandate.

Wayne called me up and told me a bunch of people were meeting up for a post election party, so I hurried home, dropped of my stuff and headed out. I had expected it would just be the usual suspects– Wayne, Franc, and Poagao. I was pleasantly surprised to see that David and Maoman made it there, too. The food was great, and I’m sure those guys will have a zillion pictures online tomorrow.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

My current residence doesn’t seem to have too many. Maybe it’s because I live near 101 in a more developed area where people don’t tolerate the noise pollution, or maybe it’s because they’re illegal. In any case, they’re rare enough that I decided to go downstairs and check it out this morning. Amazingly, the offending truck in question was campaigning for the political election. It was all decked out in campaign slogans and it was telling everyone who to vote for and why.

This doesn’t amaze me because it’s so obnoxious. What’s amazing is that it must work. They wouldn’t do it otherwise. The thing I have to wonder is, what kind of people would be positively influenced to vote for someone who sends those trucks around?