Lesson Plans and Close Escapes

Every Thursday lesson plans are due by the end of the day. The school has a shared drive where they keep everything (class rosters, lesson plans, student files, etc). Lesson plans are mainly just a personal benefit for me, but they are checked periodically by supervisors just to make sure you're on schedule and that you're doing them.

My lesson plans didn't take long to create. Since I'm teaching younger children, we repeat activities daily, and since I have a lot of newer students it is hard to do a lot of group activities in one class, so I have to keep things simple. There is a certain setup for the lesson plan though: the subject, class, time, and procedures. In the procedures area you have to have at least four steps: warm up, presentation, practice, and closure. For warm up I usually sing a song or say good morning and get them all to repeat it. Presentation is where I introduce any new words or lessons or just review past things. Practice is where we'd play a game or do a worksheet or activity. Closure is usually another song or simple review. Not very detailed at all. For my toddlers I can do bimonthly plans because we will repeat things for a week or two so that they can learn and remember. So far this job is easy :)

My friend Gretchen however, is having a harder time. She has some older classes and she has a daily class that's two hours long. Her lesson plans are more in depth and lengthy. She's also been having classes with more "problem" children and with the language barrier it has been frustrating for her. She has a pretty busy schedule and since we still only have one set of keys, I stay at work with her till she's ready to go home. Today I told her I was her personal assistant to help with anything she needed since I was finished with my work.

As part of my contract I have to teach 12 hours at the Joy Language school. I haven't been there yet and I don't know when I'll go in September. I'm guessing once that starts then I might have a harder time like Gretchen is now.

In other school news: for about an hour and a half today all the foreign teachers (me and the 7 others not from Taiwan) had to sit in the basement due to the fact that a government offical was here about us teaching. For those of you that don't know, it is technically illegal for me to be teaching Kindergarden, there is a law against it. I questioned this in my first phone interview and was told that the law isn't ever really enforced and that they have never had a teacher sent home because of it. I also asked why it was a law and they told me they thought it has something to do with the Chinese not wanting "foreigners" taking all the jobs. So I had some good bonding time with fellow teachers, we just played games while we sat down there. I almost got caught to! I had finished a class and was walking downstairs to get some water when Fiona (a supervisor) came running up, grabbed my arm and said "Marisa, come with me!". She pulled me upstairs and onto a balcony where we went down the outside stairs. She explained what was going on as she peeked around the building. She was trying to find an outside enterance to the basement. We then had to sneek around to the front of the building to the other side, through the bus parking garage and into a side door. Very "Mission Impossible" lol. I don't know what exactly would happen if we'd get caught, but I don't plan on finding out!!

First Day of School

I'll keep this quick because I have things to do and classes to plan :P

School went ok, I was shaky at first, plus I still felt unprepared because I didn't have everything I was supposed to or even know everything I was supposed to. My morning starts out with the same group of kids, but some of them are pretty new so they just cried the whole time which was frustrating because I want to help, but I make them cry more so I had to try and move on with the rest of them. After them I go to an older group to teach Math, that was alright and I made it through ok. Next was Circle Time with toddlers and when i got there I realized everything was going to be alright lol. I had observed classes with most of them so they were not shy at all and we had a lot of fun just talking about colors and then playing games.

After lunch I had an art class with older kids and that was alright, still figuring out good art ideas that only take 30-40 minutes, so I had them draw their family and then we talked about each others family. At least they only have art twice a week. Next was PE with my toddlers again!!! I taught them "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" since I'm supposed to teach them body parts. There's one boy, Rick, who really loves to sing. After that we just played in the gym till that class was over, but then I get to take them to Art. I just had them color on a peice of paper, then I cut it into four peices and they had to try to put it back together. Sort of worked, but didn't last long so we did "head, shoulders..." again :D

Although my day started out a little shakey, it ended well, so I'm pleased.

bye bye

Update

So, at the moment I don't have good access to internet so I'm writing this in Notepad and then I'll copy and paste into my blog later. But I at least wanted to get an update started.

I arrived in Taiwan Monday night (Monday morning for most of you in the states). Angela, an exchange student my parents hosted last year, met me at the airport with her family. Which was nice because there was only one person there from the school and I don't know how much English he spoke. So after a 13 hour flight it was nice to have Angela there because she could translate better and faster than I could mime with the school person.

For the first few nights I stayed with Lucy, a Chinese teacher who works at Uncle Sam. she lives with her boyfriend and two cats. She is extremely friendly and sweet even though she doesn't think she speaks English well.

On Tuesday, I met with Amy, one of the workers at the school and we went and met Gretchen, the other new foreign teacher. She got here last week. We looked at two apartments. One was furnished with a couch, tv, bed, and had a kitchen with a sink, fridge, and one burner, plus a washing machine. The other apartment really didn't have anything, just a bed. The first was 13,000NT and the second was 12,000NT
and that's not including utilities, which rounds out to $380 and $350. This was a higher rent than I was expecting and much different from what Mitch, the supervisor from Reach To Teach, told me in emails. Later on I was chatting with Gretchen and she told me that most of the apartments in this area are luxury apartments and that's why they're higher priced. Because school is starting, or at least getting into the fall semester, all the studio/dorm-like apartments are taken, and those run around 6,000-8,000NT ($170-$235). Gretchen and I talked more since we pretty much spent the day together and decided to be roommates. She was already staying in an apartment like the ones I had looked at, but it had two beds in it already.
It's furnished with a couch, coffee table, washing machine, queen bed, twin bed, kitchen space, bathroom with shower and tub and lots of built in storage, all for 13,000NT, which will be about $190 a month for each of us! We are both happy with that because I'm trying to save as much as I can through this and she doesn't have a lot of money because she just finished teaching a year in Bejing with a church group. She has internet set up but we have to figure out if we can get it for two computers, so far that is 399NT per month ($12). Not sure of prices for electricity or water. If we ever do decide to get cable that runs about 500NT ($15) a month I think which comes with numerous Chinese channels of news, sports, cartoons, shopping networks and other ones I still don't know :P including HBO, Starz, and a few other movie channels usually in English.

After apartment searching, Gretchen and I had to take the MRT (subway) to a hospital to have a health check for our health insurance/card. It was a long process involving waiting two hours till 2pm for the doctor to be in (lots of time for us to get to know each other :P), then dealing with a bit of a language barrier to get papers filled out, then they checked eye sight, blood pressure, and took blood. They ended up taking my blood pressure twice (I think I was nervous!) and she didn't have to hard of a time finding a vein which made me pretty happy because usually (in America at least) they have a hard time finding my veins because they roll and hide. Next I had to go see a doctor and he checked my eyes, ears, heartbeat, that normal stuff and after that I had to have a chest x-ray. It was weird because you can tell they move people in and out quickly. You change clothes go down the hall, stand in front of the machine he snaps once or twice and you're done - NEXT! It was pretty simple over all.

Wednesday, today and tomorrow is training at Uncle Sam American School (USAS). Wednesday and today we had to be there before 9am and from 9-noon we observed classes of other foreign teachers, at noon we had lunch from the kitchen which usully consists of a bowl that you put rice in and then there's 4-6 trays of food you put on top of the rice. The teachers eat outside the kitchen but the kids get food brought to them in their rooms. In the afternoon we'd have some videos to watch and meetings with Amy or Fiona, to talk about staff stuff, teaching stuff and any questions. I have my own desk in the office and there's four computers, only two of which have internet, but they also have a shared drive with papers, grades, and such. Two or three months ago they installed wireless, so I think I might be putting this laptop to good use! I think the school is 3 floors, I have only been to the second so far. The kitchen, some classrooms and a small auditorium type room are in the basement. The main floor has the entrance, reception area in front of the offices, some meeting rooms and more classrooms I think. Right past the entrance is a little area full of small cabinets for shoes....yes you wear slippers in the whole building!

The second floor is where the classes I observed where at and I think the third floor has older students and a room for mini-workshops for the teachers, which we have every Thursday, and there's staff meetings every Tuesday.

Now to try to explain the "grades" and my schedule:
They have semesters: fall, spring, and summer. Right now they're in Summer but Monday, when I start, it's the Fall semester. In the fall grades are labeled: T1, T3, K1, K3, K5 and G grades. T is for Toddler, K for Kindergarden and G for Grade school.
In the spring it's: T2, T4, K2, K4, K6 and G grades. It's kind of like they move up a level.
I've tried to break down the grades, but it's based on the knowledge of the child and age I think. Toddlers are mainly 2-3 year olds and kindergardners are 4-6 year olds. This is who I'll be teaching!! Every day I get more and more excited. I've already gotten a few hugs :D

Now for my schedule:
9:00 - 9:40 K1 - Road to Reading, don't know yet what this is :P
9:40 - 10:00 K1 - Snack and Hygiene, I take them to the bathroom and while they snack I teach them some hygine thing weekly
10:00 - 10:40 K1 - Super Tot1, this is some sort of English/phonics class
10:50 - 11:20 K3 - Math, this subject is very fixed with syllabus and lesson plans for you to follow
11:30 - 12:00 T3 - Circle Time, I think I just spend time with them and review colors, numbers, or games
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Meetings or monitoring duties sometimes, or lesson plan time
2:00 - 2:40 K3 - Art or EQ, EQ is a new class - Emotional Quotient to help them learn their emotions and how to control them
2:50 - 3:20 T3 and T1 - PE or Music
3:30 - 4:00 T3 and T1 - Art, Art is one of the classes that does not have lesson plans layed out for you unlike everything else, including PE, you just come up with things for them to do.

Gretchens schedule is different as she has older kids and she has some evening classes, while I'm done by 4pm everyday, but 12 hours a month I have to go to Joy Learning school and teach. Still not quite sure how that goes, I've asked once and got some information. I think everyone is really busy right now because of the new semester which includes new students and then throwing me and Gretchen in there they are reorganizing some classes to make them smaller so we'll see how things go on Monday :D

Tonight, Gretchen and I decided to go grocery shopping. Since she's been here for a week she knew her way a little more and we walked to a busier area of Sanxia, probably only a 5-10 min walk. I wrote down what I bought and how much, just to show what prices are like. I don't have individual prices since my reciept is in Chinese but I have the total, I'm still kinda surprised by it.
1/2 jar of peanut butter, 1/2 jar strawberry jelly, 1/2 loaf of white bread, 20 wire hangers, Dove candy bar, 1 liter of Sprite, 2 jars yougurt (strawberry and apple), 2 cans pinapple, 1 instant noodle cup, 1 sm box candy strawberry sticks, 1 bag frozen dumplings, 1 bottle Head and Shoulders shampoo
And the grand total = 615NT, about $18. Now I don't go shopping very often in the US, I make Mom do it :P but that seems cheap to me. Now I did seem to get
smaller sizes of things, but still, I'm pretty happy with the shopping.

That's about it for now. Hopefully I can get this posted tomorrow while I'm at work. I'm going to use the internet for arts and craft ideas for toddlers,
I have a few ideas, but I wanted to find more....any suggestions let me know :D

Bye Bye

Welcome to the Adventure

So I'm sitting in Los Angeles Airport right now, it's 11:00AM in Nebraska, 9:00AM in California, and 12:00AM in Taiwan. My flight for Taiwan doesn't leave till about 3:00PM so for the moment I'm just sitting here taking it all in. It's finally real. My family got up at 4:00AM just to take me to the airport, Mom, Dad, Megan, and Nick...I'm still kinda surprised they all got up to go, especially that early. We got to the airport to early so we just kind of hung out until it was time for me to go, at least Dad kept saying it was time, Mom kept saying it wasn't :D My goodbyes were okay, a few tears of course for my mommy, but not as bad as I expected. Although I did turn around when I was going through security and saw them all standing at the top watching me - big mistake for my emotions, but nice to know they were still there. Plane ride to LAX was good, no one sat next to me so I was able to sleep pretty comfortably. I don't know what this next flight will be like, I still have to get my ticket, but the counter isn't open yet since it's still early. Just time to prepare myself for the rest of the journey.

Enjoy the ride along!

Human for Sale

HumanForSale.com - For sale by owner!

It's interesting to see what characteristics are "worth" more.

New York City Trip!!

Megan and I are finally home from NYC. It was great, I loved every day of it, even the sore feet and legs from walking everywhere. I attempted to make a video, even though we had over 3o0 photographs. This is about a third of them condensed into this 4 minute video, some parts go fast, but I want you to see everything!!

I'm ready....

It's been awhile since I "blogged" so, thought we might need an update. I went to my grandmother's house Wednesday-Friday last week and then had a garage sale Friday and Saturday, so spent all day Sunday getting rid of what was left over from the sale and here we are.

It was nice spending time with my grandma, one on one. Usually, I don't like being around her because she can be a smartass as bad as me and sometimes the things she says actually hurt a bit. I wanted to go though because I wanted someone to talk to about everything going on. Sometimes with people I feel like I'm dominating the conversation with talk of Taiwan and everything going on. But with grandmothers...they love to listen! It was great spending 3 days just to talk (we all know I'm good at it!). It gave me a lot of time to think about things too and just relax, which is what I really needed. I almost didn't want to come home, but I knew I had a lot of stuff to do around here.

Garage sale was pretty good Friday night, very slow Saturday, but some stuff got sold and my main goal was to get rid of my stuff rather than make money, so it went pretty good overall. Plus most of the stuff we didn't sell we took to Goodwill today which makes me feel good knowing someone might get my stuff and like it like I did :D My good deed for the day!

It's two days till I go to New York City with my sister. I'm so excited! And I'm even more excited to be sharing this trip with my sister. We used to hate each other, beat the crap out of each other. I'd tickle her till it hurt and then she'd pull out her claws and I'd run away crying, seriously, it was pretty bad. But then she moved away, and what is the saying?? Distance makes the heart grow fonder....totally true in this case. Now she's my best friend, the one person I tell everything to and, even though she doesn't necessarily want to know everything, she'll listen anyways, and that's hard to find in people. So the fact that I am going to my favorite city in the US with my favorite person in the world is pretty awesome. And don't worry, we're taking two digital cameras so that we get pictures of everything!

I realized tonight that I'm completely ready to go to Taiwan, mentally ready that is (packing is a bitch, excuse the language lol). I'm ready to be done with the over dramatic, drinking, partying, stupid, lazy, materialistic, immature and selfish values that America is built on. Don't get me wrong, I will probably run into these same things no matter where I go, but it never seems to be as bad as it is here. And I'm sure I have some of these qualities on occasion, but I'm ready to grow up, I'm ready to be out in the big world. Taiwan will be a good place to grow up. The people there are some of the nicest in the world and I always try my hardest to be a good/nice person. I'm no angel, but I think I do pretty good. I would do anything to help the person next to me, whether I know them very well or not. I put everyone else in before me, which is good I think, although sometimes it gets tough because if you're always putting others first, you have to remember to take time for yourself too. Dad always told me he'd rather I be too good than not good enough, and I always remember that when I'm bending over backward for someone. But this time my decision to go to Taiwan is all for me. I tried hardest not to consider anyone else in this decision, I did it for me and it feels so good. Believe me, I had many occasions where I almost completely changed my mind because of people around me. I have so much empathy and I was just thinking about how sad some people will be to see me go, but then I realized that I need this. I need a change, different scenery, I'm ready for something new. It would be so boring to just stick around here, get a normal desk job and go through the motions. I'd hate it so much, I know I would. I can't be normal I guess and I like being different. Makes me feel more unique. This is right for me and I'm ready, no doubt anymore.