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Published: April 25th 2006
KIDS...
Lots of em...So, a funny thing happened to me last Thursday. While I was preparing for a demonstration in front of all the students' parents, I was summoned by a fellow Chinese teacher to quickly run up to the 6th floor. There, I was instructed to hide as our small little school was getting RAIDED by the Taiwanese government.
The official law prohibits foreigners from teaching English to Kindergarten-aged children. They believe that children should have the benefits of learning Chinese first before they start learning English. So...this law has been around for a while, and is almost never enforced. Today there are roughly 8000 foreigners teaching Kindergarteners English! The law is very outdated, and the Taiwanese government is slowly starting to make it easier for foreigners to teach kindergarters.
But...anyway, the way my school gets around this is by having an "an qing ban" or a "bu xi ban" school attached to the kindergarten. These are schools for older kids, usually an after-school program of sorts...So what us foreign teachers are really here for is to "teach the older kids"...while in fact all we do is teach the kidergarteners. When police come and check on us, we say that we
KIDS...
Lots of em... are here to teach at the bux i ban...and it works, because this is not illegal.
So back to the story... here I am...up in a cramped, abandoned classroom, while the parents of my students are patiently waiting for their teacher to come teach them some new songs. For 2 hours I waited. It was quite interesting, because there were Chinese teachers running through the halls ever 10 seconds, trying to hide this and hide that.
The whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth. The last thing I want to do is break the law...of course. But when I really think about it, I know it is not a bad thing that I am doing. After my TEFL class in Prague, I learned that becoming fluent in a second language becomes exponentially harder as you grow older. Your brain tends to translate words from the first language to the second language as your grow. At a young age, like the kindergarteners that I teach, they can learn the Chinese and the English roughly at the same time...and it is much easier in the end. Along with the fact that there are not enough Chinese teachers
KIDS...
Lots of em... anyway, I am very comfortable with what I am doing here.
Oh yeah...and I have a NEW blog...its more a daily dairy/my way to convey my opinions kind of thing...check it out if you like. worldproblemssolved.blogspot.com
See you later...
TS
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mom
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These children are so precious. I can see them now saying, take my picture Teacher Ty! Did the parents have to wait 2 hours until you came out of the closet? How did the school get advance warning that they were coming that day? So very interesting. We love your blogs son.