My Job

Its about time I wrote a post about my job. That is, after all, the reason I am in Taiwan. I am an English teacher at a cram school called Leader Language School. I teach kids from about age 7 to about 18. I work at two different locations of the school. One of them is called Chang Tai Leader and the other is Min Tsu Leader. The Chang Tai Leader is about a 15 minute bike ride from my apartment. It is a pretty easy ride, and I pass a beautiful 300 year old Confucius Temple every time I go to work there. The Min Tsu Leader is about a 4 minute walk from my apartment. Here is a picture of the Min Tsu school building and here is a picture of my desk:

Last week was my first full week of teaching here and so far it has been enjoyable, but not what I expected. I teach 30 minutes to an hour in 26 different classes. It is really weird to just teach part of a class for 30 minutes before running to a completely different kids who are a completely different age group. One reason for this is because they have Taiwanese teachers that speak English to teach the hard grammar parts to the students, and they use Chinese to do so. Here is a picture of my schedule:

The good thing is, the lesson plans are more or less made up for you. It tells you what to teach, and you just have to decide how to teach it. I'm learning that with the little kids, you have to play games the whole time otherwise they will just yell in Chinese and not listen to you. I get along really well with the high school aged kids though. All my students are pretty quite so far, and I think that's because they just don't really know me yet. Some classes are really frustrating and won't do ANYTHING you tell them to do.

The students are very interested in my nose ring and tattoos. The TAs have told me that the kids talk about them in Chinese all the time, especially the nose ring, because it is not common here at all. I think its really sweet when they ask me questions about my piercings or make up or clothes.

I usually work from around 3pm-9:30pm everyday. I love that because I get off early enough to do things after work, and I can sleep in. So, so far so good. I'm just ready to get in the routine and habit of prepping for and teaching all these different classes. It was a very exhausting first week, but a good one.