Cram School Teaching

For the past couple of days my life has been teaching at a "cram" school and cleaning house. Not bad. The teaching at Annie's "My Sunshine Station" cram school is nice because the class is small - only 8 students - and because the students English is pretty good. Taiwanese send their kids to cram schools after regular school, weekends and when regular school is out on break like now. Kids here have a life of school, school and school.

These kids are 6-9 graders and most of them want to learn. Today I gave them a lesson about characters, setting and plot. I then had them blindly choose the particular setting charactors and plots for their own story. For example, one group of girls had the moon as a setting, charactor is bus driver and plot is a battle. They wrote a nice story about the bus driver and his girlfriend and her old boyfriend.

Two of the boy groups wrote stories about gays...what is that about? I don't really know. I do know that the six grade boys at the other school that I teach at also write a lot stuff with gays in them.

I teach them two more times. Each class is 9:30-12:00. Today I also used UTube in the lesson. UTube is great! Since it's also Lunar New Year coming up, I showed them a film of holiday greetings from the UTube world. You know, I noticed that everyone on that video is White. There were no Asians or Blacks. UTube is a great resource though. Makes me want to get a video camera.

Last night, I also got to watch Deadwood last night for the first time in about a year. What a great show.