The First Drop in the Bucket

Exploration, expanding your horizons, experiencing all there is to learn from the world; this is what a good college education is all about. My name is Aaron Young and by the time I graduated from Drury University in May of 2008 I was ready to get that exploring thing underway. I had spent the last four years doing research and writing papers, it was finally time to get out in the world and see what there was to see. Now what was I going to do? This is, of course, the eternally illusive question which all college graduates face. With my crisp new English and History degrees under my arm and a fervent wish not to write any papers for at least a year, leaving the country seemed like the perfect option. I had been toying with the idea of teaching English in Asia for awhile and with the support and advice of a couple of my professors those vague hopes came that much closer to reality and I began to seriously consider Taiwan as a possible destination.

It was one summer and seven thousand miles after graduation that I finally arrived in Taipei, Taiwan. This blog will be a compilation of insights and observations about teaching English and living in Taiwan as experienced by both myself and my fellow English teacher and Drury graduated Kayla Phillips. Taiwan is a unique country with a wonderfully complex cultural background. There are countless sights to see and one will never regret making the effort to see them. It is, however, the people that really make a teacher’s story come to life. As teachers we have the opportunity to meet so many diverse and interesting people that it’s impossible to mention all of them.

As native speakers we use words already knowing what the desired outcome is and can form our sentences as we go. To a non-native speaker the meaning of every single word is important to consider in order to create a grammatically correct sentence while at the same time understanding exactly what they are going to say on a conversational level. This is a process which takes time to perfect and it is where a foreign language teacher’s job really begins. I teach mostly in the 8 to 13 year old age group so body language and, let’s face it, clowning around help me not only keep my student’s attention but also convey more complex grammatical concepts. The idea of prepositions can be a daunting one when seen from a strictly grammatical standpoint, especially with younger students. It is however one of the most amusing lessons to teach. The fact that the teacher can be ‘on’ or ‘under’ the chair provides almost unlimited laughs for my lower level classes.

One of the most interesting and frustrating problems I faced when I began teaching was just how much, as a native speaker, I didn’t think about how little I had to really think about using the English language. This may sound funny at first but we can all recognize it at a very basic level if we look at something we use in everyday speech, often without thinking. The use of idioms is an obvious case in which there is an understood base level of knowledge required to use them. Many idioms, on closer examination, are quite ridiculous; however, we accept them as givens in conversation. One of the hardest lessons I have taught involved explaining ‘It’s raining cats and dogs,’ to a group of eight and nine year olds. There is always something new to learn even as you teach.

I hope that the stories and insights that you find here are enjoyable and helpful, maybe they’ll even get you interested visiting Taiwan. What ever the case may be, keep an eye on us and see what happened as we try to explore and understand a small part of this much bigger story of postgraduate life in Taiwan.

--Aaron