Why I hate middle schoolers, part 2, and more on the last few days

Hello all, and greetings again from Taiwan. The last few days have been mostly uneventful as I have basically just getting into a schedule and finding my routine. A few things have happened, though, that were noteworthy, for better or worse.

For starters, on Thursday morning, I got lost in a building. This was not my fault, I will have you know. When I went to Taipei for the second half of my (optimistically named) training class with Cleo, I was following her to the building where our class was held. We go in a door that I am not sure looks right, but it's early and my coffee hasn't kicked in just yet, so I could be wrong. We take the elevator to the 5th floor... and it doesn't look right. We go to EVERY floor in the building and can't find where our class is supposed to be held. Finally Cleo asks the guy at the front desk, and turns out, our building is three doors down. We rule.

That same day, I discovered, yet again, why I hate middle schoolers. This time, it was my Level 10 class that, last week, the part time teacher had not shown up for and I didn't know what unit they were on. So these kids already LOVE me. Over the course of one hour, they chatter, talk back, throw one of my teaching props out the classroom window, and generally drive me crazy. I wanted to throw the evil little miscreants out the window after the ball, but I decided deportation wasn't worth it. Close call, though. However, there are two redeeming qualities to this class. One is that they actually are very smart, they're just teenagers. They catch on quickly and seem to actually do well in class. The other is that one of the girls in the class felt bad about picking on me and drew a chibi (a cutesy style of anime drawing) picture of me and left it on my desk. That was sweet. Oh, and as a side note, one of my students, Angel, actually has a Sailor Moon anime girl voice. It's REALLY funny.

Yesterday was similar. I had several really good classes and I had fun teaching some little kids to say please and excuse me. I had a fairly unpleasant meeting with my boss, who said I was going too fast for some of the kids, but then I taught my last class of the day with Anne, another teacher who I adore, and she said I was doing very well. So we'll see.

Anyway, two very, very funny things did happen yesterday. One is that, while I was teaching Anne's class, who are all 10-12, one of the boys swore in English. The thing is, he used the word incorrectly, which brought me to a completely hilarious impasse. Obviously, as the teacher, I should tell him not to use that word, particularly not at school, but should I do him a favor and at least correct his usage first? Hahaha. Ultimately, I ended up scolding
him and reporting him to Anne (she had stepped out of the room), but it was just about the hardest thing in the world to not bust out laughing in the middle of class.

The other funny thing that happened was much later, when I went out to buy my dinner. There is a beautiful restaurant diagonally across the street from the school that I pass just about every day, and I had been curious about what it was, so last night I decided to dip in there for late-night take out. Turns out, it is a Thai restaurant. I love Thai food, so I was very excited. I look at the menu, which thankfully was in Chinese and English, and order the green curry with coconut milk that I always get in the US. Kind of as an afterthought, I ask the waitress, who was Thai, if the food was very spicy. "Not really," she says, and, being me and tired, I took her for her word.

WRONG. This food was so spicy I drank about a quart of milk and still disintegrated my taste buds. My mouth was on FIRE. I could not smell or taste until well into this morning. And then I remembered... right. I am in Asia. Of course the Thai food is actually authentic and therefore is going to be insanely spicy. Duh. That said, though, the food was very good. It was just crazy hot.

As for today, I have been pleasantly lazy, doing laundry, cleaning the apartment, and generally being a bum. I plan to go out to the night market a little later and explore what it has to offer. That should be fun. One note on today's insanity. In Taiwan, we don't really have dryers. We have washing machines, but all clothes are essentially hung to dry. So, with that being the case, after I had washed my clothes, I brought them up here to the apartment to dry in my little closet that seems to exist solely for hanging up clothes. Thing is, I had more clothes than my current clothes line (which is a doubled over length of blue plastic chain) would hold, so I had to improvise to come up with another one. After some rummaging, I came up with a neon green internet cable. I tied one end to the grate over the window in the closet and the other... well, where would I tie the other? The chain has a hook on the end, so it conveniently hooked into the window sill in the bathroom, but what would I do with the cable? Inspiration struck, and I used the suitcase I had packed to send back to the US as a counterweight for the line. Necessity is the mother of invention, but this was pretty funny. See:





















So, with that fabulous image, I bid you farewell, and hope you all have a wonderful Valentine's Day, Singles' Awareness Day, or whatever the pagan Roman holiday was back in Caesar's time. All my love, and I'll post again soon :)