Doubting to shuō

My friend Patrick is looking for teachers for a well-paid position in Taizhong right now. Rather than continue posting an entry for each job opening my friends and associates tell me about, I’ve decided to make a page for EFL jobs in Taiwan. It won’t be an open job board, though. I’ll only be posting jobs with people I personally know and can vouch for. You can find Patrick’s classified ad there.

I finally have some video from my classes I can put up here, thanks to Patrick. Here is a clip from an oral spelling drill. This isn’t rote memorization. None of the words I ask the students to spell have been previously taught; they have to use phonics rules to figure out how to spell them. I accept any phonetically equivalent spellings, since there’s no possible way for students to differentiate between them. In other words, “pound” and “pownd” would both be considered to be equivalent responses, as would “gait” and “gate”, “carpet” and “karpet”, “staff” and “staph”, etc… In my opinion, these drills are one of the main reasons my students at First Step have so much better pronunciation and so much better of a handle on phonics in general than my students at Tomcat did. It just isn’t possible for kids to make it through this curriculum and not be able to hear the difference between words like “special” and “spatial”, or “hit” and “heat”.

This class had studied at my school for a total of 4 hours per week for 5 months at the time this video was taken. On the first day of class most students couldn’t understand, “How are you?”, or tell the difference between E and A sounds. On the very first day, we did a spelling drill on words composed of only short A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and T’s. Less than one third of the students’ answers were correct. In contrast, at the time of this video, the words they could be quizzed on included all of the letters of the alphabet, long and short vowel sounds, including “oo”, “ow/ou” sounds, “th” (voiced and unvoiced), “ch”, and “sh”. At the time of this spelling drill, the students were expected to know our school’s first 22 phonics rules.

I went back to Taizhong today to hang out over at Patrick’s place. I met his wonderful wife, his exuberant children, as well as Michael Turton and family. There was also another blogger, by the name of Carl, whose URL I can’t remember. Like Michael, he’s also been in Taiwan for a long, long time. Everybody had interesting things to talk about, and it was a great time all around. Micheal snapped a few pics and put them up on his site. Check it out!

Update: The geeky tools Michael said I showed him are Google Finance and Zooomr.

Update: Patrick put up some more great pics on his new blog at http://thenebulonfry.com/

Last Saturday, Patrick, a teacher at a middle school in Táizhōng visited my school. He has some influence on his school’s curriculum and wanted to investigate a hardcore bŭxíbān to see if there was anything we do that he could adapt for use at his school. I was both impressed and amazed that a teacher would come all the way from Táizhōng to visit Guīshān on his own time. He’s obviously much more dedicated than any of the other English teachers I’ve known who work at Taiwanese schools. It must have been at least a three hour bus ride each way, and I can only hope that what he saw gave him some teaching ideas worthwhile enough to justify such a trip.

From what he said, it sounds like Patrick really has his work cut out for him. Unlike the other classes at his school, the English classes taught by foreign teachers don’t really “count”. Talk about a way to ruin the kids’ motivation. On top of that, the foreign teachers at his school aren’t really allowed to speak Chinese in class. I’m sure that slows down the progress of the kids at the lower levels quite a bit; I’ve been at that kind of school before. Still, he said that the students at his school have 18 hours per week of English language classes if P.E. and drama are included. That’s a whole heck of a lot of input. If they can just make sure that it’s comprehensible and get all of the kids paying attention and interested in class, they should be able to get some pretty phenomenal results. Considering that my school’s bŭxíbān classes are only 4 hours a week, I really doubted that much of our curriculum would be of any use to him. From what he said though, they do have some pretty confused kids at the lower levels who fail to get what they should out of all of those hours of English classes.

While I can’t say for sure what will be useful and what won’t, I hope he gets something out of it to justify the long trip. It was sure a nice thing for me that he came up to visit. It’s always nice to meet interesting people, and people who care about their work. Another thing that I’m really happy about is that he was able to film some of one of my classes on his super-uber-duper cell phone. The resolution and overall quality are far better than that of the DVDs with the cameras built into our classrooms. Once I get a copy from him, I can convert it to an FLV file and stream it from this site. Then, all of my family and friends back home can finally see what it is I’ve been doing out here in Taiwan these past few years.

Recently, one of Michael Turton’s (see my links on the right) friends from Taizhong emailed me and asked me for input on curriculum design for a private middle school’s English program. I answered his questions as best I could, and tried to tell him a bit about different activities I’ve found useful. It was a little difficult to describe them over the phone and so he asked if I could show him some of our curriculum materials. I was all for it, but I had to ask my boss first. His reaction?

Him: Oh, sure. Yeah, I care about beating the other schools, but I care more about improving the level of education for as many Taiwanese kids as possible. That’s why I’m helping X high school, that swiped our curriculum just across town.

Me: What!!? What do you mean? Somebody copied it?
Him: Yeah, the’ve got the whole thing photocopied. They aren’t teaching it properly, though.
Me: So… uh… you’re going to help them “copy us properly”?
Him: Yeah, man. We’re talking about the education of thousands of kids!

I just don’t know how to take that. It’s such a shock after my last school, which cancelled my contract over an “all your brain is belong to us” IP clause I refused to sign. I love his ideals, but will the market reward him?