Happy Holidays!

Over the next three days, we continued to teach about American holidays.  The students visited Easter to learn about the story of Jesus' death and resurrection as well as have an Easter egg hunt.  They went to a Thanksgiving celebration to make Pilgrim hats, turkey gobblers, and cranberry sauce.  They also had a scare in Halloween as they carved pumpkins and baked pumpkin seeds.  We also taught them to how to play football and basketball.  It was a very busy week!

That was just our school day.  Every morning, our Taiwanese friends gave us a traditional breakfast.  We had seaweed-wrapped rice, a type of Asian omelette, a steamed dough ball fill with pork.  Everything was pretty good.  If you like sushi, you won't mind the seaweed.  Lunch usually involved rice, meat, and an Asian vegetable.  We also had a snack of sweet soup and a sweet roll every day.

Because of our long lunches, we would go out on a little exploration some days.  On Tuesday, we took a walk around the neighborhood, but we soon realized why no one was out.  It was boiling hot!  We took a look around the 7-11 and headed back for the cool air-conditioning at the YMCA.  On Wednesday, our host took a shopping for beautiful pieces of jade.

Each evening was packed with activities as well.  On Tuesday, they took us out for an American-style meal with an Asian flare.  Our foods consisted of French fries, fried chicken, spaghetti, and pizza, but we took of our shoes to eat and sat around a table that was very similar to something you would see in Asia.  After the meal, the high school volunteers showed us around the shopping district and their high school.

On Wednesday, we went out for my favorite meal, Hong Kong Cantonese dim sum!  Dim sum means appetizer or small meal, and they serve you over twenty dishes that you can pick and choose from.  My favorites included pork-filled wontons, fried noodles, and bok choy, an Asian broccoli.  Delicious!  The scenery wasn't bad, either.  We ate on the 12th floor with a beautiful view of the city.  From there, we went shopping with Christine, one of our hosts, who helped us bargain for some great deals!

On Thursday, we finished the day at the Taste of Texas, where we had hamburgers and spaghetti.  It was the first time we were given knives and forks!  Our Taiwanese friends also put on a great show to wrap of the week of hard work.  We also exchanged gifts from our different cultures.

It has been a wonderful week of learning about Taiwanese culture and making new friends.  We have one more day in Tainan with the children at the YMCA as we teach them how to make American food before we head off to Taipei courtesy of our next host, Jackie Yang, a Taiwanese employee of the CUW School of Business.  It should be an exciting weekend!

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Let the Week Commence!

It's Monday morning, and we are off to our first day of camp.  60 campers will be arriving as we eat our breakfast, so it's time to finish the final preparations for our classrooms.  We are starting out with a book about the Christmas story before we make Christmas decorations of popcorn strings, paper chains, and ornaments.  After that, we will teach them some English Christmas greetings to write in their cards for their families.

The next part was their favorite!  We melted chocolate chips to pour into Christmas candy molds, frosted cookies, made graham cracker gingerbread houses, and learned about the story of the candy cane.  Our American treats are very sweet to the Taiwanese, so even the high school counselors were giddy over graham crackers.  They thought they were delicious!

Then, it was time for lunch.  The Taiwanese like to show their kindness through food, so they had been filling us to the brim at every meal.  This was the first time that we could actually enjoy the meal, and they gave us student-sized portions.  We had a 90-minute lunch break so that the students could take a nap during the day.  Everyone naps, even the middle schoolers and teachers.  Perhaps, we should add this to the American school day...

In the afternoon, we taught them some of the science lessons about Christmas.  We made a tree out of newspaper and talked about recycling.  Then, we played Jingle Bells on glass jars and talked about the science behind vibrations.  We finished the day with some games, including Four Corners, Phase 10, and Apples to Apples.

After an hour meeting to discuss the day, we went out for a Japanese-style dinner and a night of shopping.  The food was delicious.  Sesame was very popular at the restaurant, and it was made into a salad dressing, dipping sauce, and ice cream.  There was also a wheat tea that tasted like Cheerios.  The shopping district was a very modern part of town that included many American stores and fast food restaurants.  We walked through thirteen floors of a department store!  Wow, there were so many items to buy!

We finished the evening at a teahouse, which is similar to a coffee shop, where we had more bubble tea and visited with our Taiwanese friends before walking back home and enjoying a long night of sleep before the day ahead.  See you tomorrow!

School Days...on Sunday

We have finally arrived in Taiwan!  After a good night's sleep, we woke up to go exploring around our house.  We are staying at the Tainan Theological College, one of the oldest colleges in Taiwan.  It is beautiful and green outside, and I took a few pictures for you to see.  However, you don't want to stay outside long, because it reaches at least 32˚C or 91˚F and is very humid.


We went back inside for a delicious breakfast of bean milk, dim sum, and Taiwanese bread.  The bean milk taste a bit like soy milk, but the dim sum (an Asian word for appetizer) was my favorite.  We ate pork wrapped in rice noodles and spring rolls.  We also had lychee, a fruit about the size of a plum that is wrapped in a hard, prickly coating but is grape-like on the inside.  I managed to eat the whole meal with chopsticks!


From there, we headed to the school for a day of meetings with our Taiwanese team.  Each classroom has two American teachers, one Taiwanese assistant, and three Taiwanese counselors for fifteen students in our classroom.  We have plenty of help!  We explored our classrooms, set up our materials, and explained our lessons to our Taiwanese friends.  Sometimes, materials would get a little lost in translation.  I needed frosting for one of our lessons, and I was told I had 100 grams.  Many metric conversions were made during the day as we tried to figure out the ingredients to all of our recipes.


We finished by 6:30 PM and headed out to dinner at a restaurant overlooking the canal in Tainan.  After a Japanese-style lunch, this meal was very traditional to Tainan.  The meal consisted of more dishes than I could count.  We had rice fish soup, noodle soup, fried shrimp, fried squid balls, eel and noodles, coffin bread, and a milk-like desert with red beans.  Needless to say, we are well-fed!  I'm not a big fan of fish, but it is very popular here since Taiwan is an island.  I stuck to seafood, and most of it was quite good.  Eating noodle soup with chopsticks was amusing, but after three meals, I'm starting to get the hang of it.


We ended our day with some practice in American games for our lesson the next day.  We're teaching them Phase 10, Apples to Apples, Sorry, and a few more.  Then, it was time for bed so that we could be ready for a week of school.  See you tomorrow!

Up, Up, & Away

Hello, everyone!  A few time zones ago, I set off on a journey to the other side of the world.  For the next ten days, I will be visiting Taiwan to teach middle school students.  I'll share more of what I'll be teaching in later posts, but there is so much to tell you about our journey today.  By the time you get to the end of this entry, you'll feel like you have a whole reading log entry completed as well as a lesson in mathematics.  Therefore, I have a deal for you.  Each person that reads and comments on every blog post that I write over the next 10 days will receive a week without a reading log during the first week of school.  Stayed tuned at the end for directions on how to comment.

Remember Google Earth?  I am that little plane flying around the globe today.  Before we get there, let me back up a bit.  I was awake bright and early to meet at CUW (Concordia University Wisconsin), my alma mater.  (There's a vocabulary word for you!  Find a dictionary and let me know what it means by posting a comment.)  The sun was just coming up over the horizon as the nine of us left, and we won't see it set for over thirty hours since we're traveling with the sun today.  We had a few rain delays in Chicago, but we finally managed to board the giant 747-Boening jet in Detroit.

How many of you have ever been on an airplane?  This one is like nothing I have ever seen before!  When you first go to walk on the plane, you have to be careful to enter through the correct door.  First class has its own entrance for this large plane.  As you come in, you see a set of stairs leading to a second level.  I headed towards my seat on the main level 64 rows back.  On the way, I passed three banks of bathrooms, three "kitchens" to prepare the three meals we get on the plane, and three projectors for the four movies we are watching in-flight.  If that wasn't enough, there were still another bank of bathrooms behind us.

First-Class Seats

One might wonder why we need over 10 toilets on an airplane.  As I counted the row of seats, I realized that there are 10 seats in each of the 65 rows.  Let's have a little math lesson.  How many people will fit on this place?  10 seats times 65 rows equals 650 people.  650 people divided by 10 toilets equals 65 people per toilet.  To be clear, this plane was not very full, and each bank of bathrooms removed about 15 seats.  I believe there are about 500 people on this plane, but that is still an awful lot!

All this talk of toilets and movies might seem exciting, but my first order of business was sleep.  You see, Taiwan is 15 hours ahead of Arizona.  Look at the clock.  (More math!)  If it is 2:00 PM in Arizona, add three hours.  Now, you should be at 5:00 PM.  Then, add 12 more and you come to 5:00 AM the next morning.  To add a little more confusion, I was three hours ahead of Arizona when I boarded in Detroit.

Are you feeling a little lost in time zones?  Don't worry; I am a bit confused myself.  Here's the bottom line: When I got on the shuttle at 5:30 AM Chicago time to get up for the day, it was 6:30 PM in Taiwan and almost time for bed.  I had to force myself to go to sleep for as long as I could in order to be able to sleep by the time I arrived at 9:00 PM in Taiwan.  When your brain thinks the time is different from where you are, it's called jet lag.

My sleep was a bit interrupted with shuttle rides, plane changes, and meals, but I finally got enough to make it through the next day.  Unfortunately, I still have about 8 more hours of our 13-hour plane ride to sit through.  That is a whole school day of sitting on a plane!  You get a bit stiff, but there is more room to stretch on this giant plane in comparison to the planes we fly in the US.  The ceiling is as high as our classroom, and we could easily fit three classrooms in this plane.

I also keep peaking out the window.  If you get on to Google Earth, start in Detroit and head west towards Alaska.  We flew over all of southern Canada and saw the rich, green forests.  We continued to Alaska's sunny summer season to see the beautiful, flowing rivers and clear, blue lakes.  As we went further west, we found ourselves in Siberia in Russia, which is marked by its snow-covered mountain peaks. Finally, we'll land in Tokyo for a hour stop to refuel and clean the plane before another 3-hour plane ride to Taipei, Taiwan, the country's capitol.  From there, we have a 4-hour shuttle ride south to Tainan, the city we will be working in for the week.

Japan down below.

As I write this, I still have about three more hours on this flight.  It feels like one in the morning and I want to go to sleep, but I need to stay awake.  I'm off to take some pictures of the plane for you, so here's some notes on your assignment.

Each comment must have:

3 Things You Learned

2 Things You Can Use

1 Question That You Have

Here's an example:

I learned about recovering from jet lag, traveling across time zones, and the interior of a 747-Boening airplane.

I can use my information about jet lag to stay awake when I teach this week, and my knowledge of time zones will be helpful as we start our global classroom project this year.

I want to know what is on the top deck of a 747-Boening airplane.

Leave a comment on each entry, and you'll earn one week free from reading logs.  The comments don't have to be made on the same day that I post, but I recommend that you don't try to read them all at once.  There's so much to learn that you'll never remember it all!