San Sing Sports Day

So professional sports aren't huge here, but Sports Day is. Track events, tug-of-war, cotton candy, sunshine. What more could you ask for? Here are some pictures from throughout the day.

Green Expo Field Trip

"What are you doing next Wednesday afternoon?" the Dean at Xin Zhong asked.

"Teaching at San Sing. Why?"

"Come on our field trip to the Green Expo. We'll call the principal. You're coming with us."

So on Wednesday, I found myself boarding a bus with the seventh and eighth grade students, homeroom teachers and administrative teachers to visit the Green Expo in Suao.

The festival is currently being held at the Wulaokeng Scenic Area -- the same place where we went to the International Rain Festival in August. As everyone headed off the bus, we would our way through the exhibits of flowers, past pavilions illustrating tales like Cinderella, and under an arbor supporting pumpkin vines. Near the crest of the hill were a couple of pavilions that more closely resembled the county fair: the "Happy Cow Pavilion" which featured all things cow, including real cows. (It is the year of the ox, so the cow is really big in Taiwan right now!) The next pavilion was devoted to farming equipment from around the world, past and present. I was surprised to find that many of my students had never seen a tractor before. They were intrigued as we walked amongst them.

Wulaokeng is situated on a hill, so we worked our way up, sticking to homeroom groups. Sara, Cathy and I were with 203, Cathy's homeroom, as we went through the exhibits. We kept a pretty tight schedule up the hill, with Sara blowing a whistle every so often and announcing that our homeroom would keep moving to the next pavilion. The last stop (the base of what was a water slide during the Rain Festival) was the pavilion dedicated to Isaac Newton. After experimenting with some physics properties for a few minutes, Sara grabbed my arm and pulled me aside, looking for an exit. "Now we have a special teachers' meeting," she said.

We grabbed Cathy and headed out of the pavilion to the "teachers' meeting." We had closely chaperoned the students up the hill, only to seemingly abandon them at the top, leaving them to amuse themselves by dropping things and playing with gravity. So as we headed back down the hill, I was amused to find that our "meeting" actually involved the principal buying snack foods for the teachers.

We were soon joined at the food tents by a slew of students -- if there's one thing that the Taiwanese love, it is 小吃 of "small eats" -- and for the rest of the field trip we leisurely enjoyed a smorgasboard of snack foods.

The field trip was a particularly great experience, as it gave everyone a chance to interact outside of the more rigid confines of the classroom. We just spent time together, looking, eating, strolling and taking pictures. So while I appreciate that the Fulbright program brings us into the classroom, I also relish opportunities like this that take us out of the classroom. Because those are the interactions -- unscripted and unplanned -- that will probably leave a bigger mark on my students than a lesson about adjectives.