As July starts to creep up on me, I’m realizing more and more all of the things that I will miss about Taiwan. One of the biggest things that I’ll miss is teaching my sixth graders. They are amazing: hilarious, smart, sweet, mature, kua zhang, cute, crazy, and everything in between.
On Sunday, Deborah and I set out on a mission to try to use as many forms of transportation as possible to get us from Grace, Charles, Kristin, and Kaitlyn’s apartment in Kaohsiung to the HI-Sukhimvit hostel in Bangkok. So, within one day, we took a scooter, rode the MRT, HSR, HSR shuttle bus, taxi, plane, airport shuttle bus to hostel, and walked on foot. When we finally arrived, we treated ourselves to some yummy mangoes with sticky rice and then called it a night.
So after I finish teaching class every day, I usually stay in the classroom to grade my student’s workbooks. Meanwhile, another teacher come in to teach an after-school program for first graders. Most of it involves review for the students or them doing their normal homework. But I think the cutest thing ever is when the students were practicing their Chinese.
They sat there repeating over and over again, “nu sheng…nu…nuh yu…san sheng…nu…sheng…shi…eng…yi sheng…sheng…nu sheng” (This breaks the Chinese word down to its bopomofo counterparts and identifies the tone). It was so cute how they broke apart every word and chanted it out. I guess it’s the Chinese equivalent of our spelling bees in America and how we drill spelling the first few years in elementary school.
Then, I began thinking about language acquisition in general. Like how it amazes me how I can understand much of what these first graders say but then by the time they’re sixth graders I definitely can’t understand the vast majority of what they say and they pretty much understand anything in Chinese (to a certain extent). How amazing is it that kids can just acquire language and how we study it in school too.
I wish I could be a Taiwanese first grader and learn Mandarin. Hehe.
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