IFYE Program Newsletter

Chung Lu Village is part of Kaohsiung County in the far south of Taiwan. "Chung lu" is Chinese for "middle road". Middle Road Elementary School is a two-story white tile building toward the edge of town. It's principal is proud that you can hear birds singing here and that the computer room is one of the best in the area.

A low wall surrounds the school grounds. Look out over it and you see rows of small fruit trees and fields of sugar cane growing twelve feet tall. Middle Road Elementary School has 384 students, ninety percent are from farm families. On this Friday in late October they have one foreign visitor.

I arrive on time at 7:30 in the morning. Kids park their bicycles and cross the street to enter the school gate. Mothers pull up to unload as many as three kids from their motor scooters. There is no school bus.

In the city, students wear uniforms, but this is a rural school. The children wear whatever they want. Most of them come in t-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. Some of the girls have long hair. They will have to cut it above their shoulders before they start junior high school.

At 7:45, a loudspeaker reminds students that it is time to work, but they are already outside sweeping the walkways and cleaning up around the gym track. Seeing me, they stare, point me out to their friends, scream, or pick up their brooms and dustpans and run. Once in a while I hear a "Hello How do you do?" from someone who remembers his English lesson.

An 8 a.m. bell lines them all up for a 15-minute assembly. I am officially explained by the principal and assigned to one of the third grade teachers.

At 8:30, Zhu Laoshi ("Teacher Zhu") instructs her third graders to finish up their breakfasts and checks to make sure they have all clipped their fingernails. One girl stands to read a story to her classmates. The kids in the front rows pay attention. The other kids look at other books, draw, or look around the classroom.

Teacher Zhu's classroom is on the second floor. Two doors open outside onto an open air walkway. There's no air conditioner, but there are five ceiling fans. The windows that line two walls are screened, barred, and open to let in the breeze. The floor is red tile and the lower part of the walls is the same white tile as the walls outside. The children's hand towels hang on a rack near the wall.

Three rows of five desks crowd towards the blackboard. Two students share each of the long desks. The desks and chairs are wooden, dark, and scratched with age. The first class of the morning is math. This year they have started multiplication and division. I want to stay and watch, but am whisked off to the music room.

I leave my sandals outside with the first graders' sneakers and sit down near the door. The blue and white walls of the music room are grimy and the portrait of the nation's founding father is faded, but there's a new rubber pad on the floor and enough maracas, bells, or castanets for everyone. One little boy stands up and shakes his hips to the rhythm of the bells, making even the teacher laugh.

At 9:30 I head back to Teacher Zhu's room, but the 4-H Extension agent finds me and escorts me to the tiny auditorium. Sixth graders have assembled to tell me about their 4-H activities. A lady from the Farmer's Association who learned English in Australia has shown up to help. This last addition makes my jaw go tight. I so want my Chinese to be good enough that I feel irrationally frustrated at any sympathetic person who shows up to translate.

I ask the sixth graders to guess what we grow back home. The first guess is rice. I have to tell them no, no rice. Eventually they come up with beans, wheat, onions, and tomatoes. Afterwards, the girls crowd around me. They give me tiny presents: a handmade bracelet, an elephant-shaped locket from Thailand, a piece of coffee flavored candy. They take me across the road to see the garden they planted with 4-H. Back in the third grade classroom,

Teacher Zhu gives me a glass of bitter medicinal tea and the kids take some deep breaths to begin class. They are ready to learn today's Chinese characters. Instead of making words out of a combination of letters like English does, Chinese uses symbols to stand for each word or syllable. These symbols are called characters.

For example, the Chinese character for person (pronounced "ren") looks like an upside down y. Instead of writing p-e-r-s-o-n, they write the upside-down-y character.

Some characters are easy to write; the character for person requires just two lines, or "strokes." Most characters are much more complicated. "My home" in Chinese is pronounced "wo de jia." To write it takes three characters which are made up of seven, eight, and ten strokes each.

Teacher Zhu speaks through a small microphone as she puts the eleven characters in today's lesson up on the blackboard. The students count the number of strokes in each character out loud, tracing them in the air with their index fingers. They can't sound out words like we learn to. Instead, they have to memorize the meaning and pronunciation of each character.

The third graders' desks are littered with water bottles, textbooks, and pencil cases. They keep the rest of their textbooks in their backpacks, propped up behind them on their chairs. They each have a dozen or more of the magazine-sized textbooks, workbooks, and notebooks. Most of the kids have covered their books with plastic to protect them.

The kids bend over their dictionaries. Teacher Zhu is asking for examples of when each character is used. Kids raise their hands, then stand to give their answers. Afterwards, Teacher Zhu has all those who participated to stand. She counts the number in each desk row and adds that many points to a poster that has plus and minus columns for Rows 1- 3.

The students have a five, ten, or twenty-minute recess after every class. The teacher doesn't have to watch them. They just run outside and they are at the playground. A couple of the girls help me find my way to the bathroom. The bathroom has a separate little building all to itself. Boys and girls share this same bathroom; there are urinals along one wall and stalls along the other. The toilets are squat toilets and a few green potted plants hang down from the walls. There's no toilet paper in the stalls. Students are expected to bring their own.

Our last subject before lunch is Social Studies. I spend most of the period trying to figure this out. Later I find out that Social Studies doesn't include much history and geography until the upper grades. In the lower grades it is more about community, and as the Farmers' Association's translator tells me, common sense. One of today's topics is "practice makes perfect".

Lunch is rice, tofu scrambled with tomatoes and peppers, two fish balls per person, and sweet soup made from tiny green beans. Four kids dish it up from a cart wheeled into the classroom. Another passes out chunks of honeydew melon in plastic baggies. I especially like the scrambled tofu and go back for seconds. School lunch costs each child the equivalent of sixty U.S. dollars per semester and everyone eats it. Each child brings their eating equipment from home: two stackable metal bowls and a short Chinese spoon. Everyone finishes eating by 12:30 and we still have fifty minutes of free time left.

At some Taiwanese schools, the kids put their heads down on their desks and nap during this time, but no one here seems sleepy. They wander off to sing, dance, play in the computer room, or just sit in the classroom and draw. In the afternoon, we have gym followed by health class. Gym is held outside. The two classes of third graders warm up, race around the track, then spend the rest of the period trying to juggle a feathered weight called a "jianzi" with their feet. I can't juggle it more than twice and most of the third graders can't either, but they are fond of making me try.

Health class is a cartoon video on how long different foods can be stored without spoiling. At 3:00 p.m., my third grade classmates fasten the straps on their short, wide backpacks and hurry home. It's Friday, so the first through fourth grades go home an hour early. Wednesdays are even shorter because everyone gets out after lunch. And there's no school this Saturday. They only have class two Saturday mornings a month.

Windsong

Special thanks to the Jefferson Co. Leaders' Association, the Jefferson Co. 4-H Foundation, and the Ridge Runners 4-H Club for their generous help with trip expenses.