A True Teaching Moment

I haven't posted in a while, but I recently remembered an incident that occurred during my first month of teaching here that I wanted to share. In school they always talked about turning things into "teaching moments," where you can impart some bit of knowledge to a student through almost anything. Although this is one of the more obvious ones, it's also one of the cutest and funniest.

One of the boys in the Moon class, Titus, is around 8 years old. He's very talkative (too much so, sometimes) and always has something to share. On Mondays the kids have the opportunity to tell me and the rest of the class about what they did over the weekend and Titus is usually one of the first to get his hand in the air. On this particular Monday I called on Titus and he excitedly told us "I have go to a mitten and I have sleep in a tree." Titus tends to have a bigger vocabulary that some of the other kids, and a very active imagination, but no one in the classroom could figure out what he was talking about. There is a "no Chinese" rule that the kids police themselves very strictly on, and, whereas Adam would have just gone with it, I took this to be a good opportunity for vocabulary building and a mini-lesson on circumlocution.

First, I drew a picture of a mitten on the board. I then wrote the word next to the picture and explained that a mitten was something that you put on your hand to stay warm, and usually they come in pairs. I asked Titus if he went to one of these, to which the whole class laughed hysterically (because they're at an age where almost everything is funny). He chuckled, and said no, then made an upside down V with his hands to show what he meant. "Oh, a MOUNTAIN!" I quickly realized, and drew a picture with the word next to it on the board. After the whole class practiced pronouncing the two words with audible differences, we moved on to the second half of a puzzle.

I asked Titus if he really slept IN a tree. He realized that must not be right, so he modified it to "a tree house." In my head, I immediately thought "that must have been awesome! I want to go sleep in a tree-house for a weekend. This kid's parents must be really cool!" At which point logic and reason kicked in and my next thought was "Oh, right. There's no way his whole family climbed into a tree house, not to mention a shortage of rental properties in trees." So, I drew a picture of a tree house on the board, the kind perched on a limb of a tree, complete with rope ladder. Again I asked Titus if this was what he meant, the whole class laughed (including Titus), and I got another shake of the head. He tried explaining that the house was on the ground, not in the air, so for some reason my next thought was that maybe he slept in the hollowed out base of a giant tree, like a redwood. I know that not everyone would have had that thought next, but apparently I was really thinking outside of the box that day. I drew a picture of a house in the trunk of a tree, got more laughter (possibly just at my poor drawing skills that time), and another negative response. Finally, Titus had a stroke of inspiration, and showed me using hand gestures that the house was made out of lots of trees, and the trees were lying down, not standing up. Eureka! A log cabin! I drew yet another picture on the board and was rewarded with a resounding "yes!" The name and concept were explained to the rest of the class and we all gave Titus a round of applause for not giving up.

Yes, we had spent all of the allotted "sharing time" on the one story, and we didn't get through the planned lesson for the day, but it was SUCH a good way to show the kids that even the largest communication gaps can be overcome. This story might have lost a bit of its magic and humor in the writing, but trust me, if you'd been there, you would have known how great a moment it was.

First Post of November (Blame Law Schools)!

Thirteen law school applications plus full-time teaching equals long days, short nights, and no time to blog. That's what the past four weeks has taught Devin and me.

Evenings find me glued to my computer, revising application essays and phoning law schools in the United States. Thanks to the end of daylight savings time, Taiwan is now 13 hours ahead of Eastern Time, 14 hours ahead of Central Time, and 16 hours ahead of Pacific Time. So my "evenings" go very, very late. I now know that Hsinchu is deathly silent at 3:42 am.

Devin has been instrumental in the application process, and she repeatedly proved herself a wonderful source of encouragement and excellent editor. She's also been working on developing songs and short plays for our school's Christmas show. She'll write more on that later...

The weather here has been beautiful. Sunny and dry, with temperatures in the high 60s. Anybody jealous out there?

Stay tuned!