Here we're at.

Worried as hell. Wormwood the result of worms of anticipation and dread slugging their way through my soul. Ugh.

I'm settled into a host family here, the Cai Jia. Last night I had beef hotpot with my host family and my coteacher Danette. Then played basketball with them and the neighbors. Mostly got whupped except for my height. I don't play hard against girls, and I haven't practiced making baskets in a long time.

The day before yesterday I cleaned a dorm room, read the first chapter of Millard Erickson's book on eschatology, and was taken out for hotpot with the KaiShiuan school staff.  I'm blessed.

I'm worried that my sister is going to die, and I can't do much about it.  I'm cursed.
Spending time researching her medical condition awakens my research gene and puts my teaching gene to sleep. Blink.
Help is on the way, and none too soon. Soon I can tell more. We can never rezar too much.

I'm worried because payday and transportation are not conveniently known and close.

I'm worried about what I can do to get my C1 class to understand and pay attention in class. Every time I teach them, I have them for multiple periods, and the first one their Chinese teacher is always gone. They don't listen, because they don't understand me. And because I start them out in the big auditorium, the ones in the back talk among themselves, and the ones in the middle fight or clown around, and the ones in the front get the brunt -- unless I walk around, in which case the ones in the front can't turn around and see me because the seats are so high.

This is the price I pay for acculturation. Those who wish for language immersion don't notice this price.  An openeyed faith is not part of this price, but it is the gratis sine-qua-non that I hope is rapidly growing.

I'm a little annoyed, too, that all my kids call me Naifen, a nickname that means powdered milk. Don't laugh, you'd be annoyed too, after a while. Guess I'll have to get used to it.

Every once in a while, my little friends trip through the office and cheer me up with "what's your name!"

How to make the jump from no English to enough English to converse? I've made it a principle not to use Chinese myself during class, unless it is to suggest something to someone, to talk to the Chinese teacher, or repeat something someone else says.  So, my expectations might be too high, and they might need to stay there. I will use lots of real objects, and tell some picture stories. I will go through the book as quickly as possible for them to pick up the vocab and still not feel lost. Do some games along the way... and mark out time for the following items:
(1) Telling stories with big-picture books.
(2) Free-writing. I "very very like" (in my host-sister Susan's words) this article on early EFL writing in Taiwan's 1st-grade classrooms.

My previous experience with English camps and the Taoyuan English Village has prejudiced me against noise and against understanding learner native-language talk in a positive way.  That has got to change a little bit. Read the EFL writing article above, pp. 5-6, to see what I mean.

I got encouragement today from Quin and Merv's posts. God is good.
It seems easier to find good things lurking when full of worry than when full of okness. It keeps me from imploding.

I saw my more prolific self in a mirror yesterday. (His name is J.K. Gayle) Stroll over and look before he quits blogging next month.

I have two new heroes:
Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times reporter who persuaded a young webcam performer to leave his business and become a federal witness.
Lloyd Reynolds (1902-1978), a self-taught calligraphy enthusiast from Oregon who mentored Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, who wrote the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series published by Portland State University, the handwriting curriculum that I sort-of learned from growing up.

Goodbye.

Humboldt on Language Learning

I posted this on Facebook this summer while I was reading Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT, 1965). It's a strange, mystical quote with a lot of reassurance. It also humbly approximates the findings of psycholinguistics.

From page 51:

Applying this rationalist view to the special case of language learning, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt (1836) concludes that one cannot really teach language but can only present the conditions under which it will develop spontaneously in the mind in its own way.

Dropping some lines from Kinmen

Hi from Kinmen. 

I neglected to post that I was coming here, so now you know. I'm part of a new bilingual program at a small school in Kinmen, ROC. Basically, I'm here to teach first-through-sixth graders and give them the motivating conditions for learning to listen, speak, read, and write in English. Students who have exposure to only ten-or-so foreigners within a distance short of boat or plane. That's a big, and cool, task, which my friends who have volunteer-taught here for years have prepared them for in some ways, but such an intensive program of English (8-10 hours per week per classroom) is breaking really new ground here.

I just arrived yesterday about noon, settled in with my hosts, the Tsai family, within walking distance of the school. Most of all, I'm overwhelmed with the nice place they've got for me. It's a new 3-story house with granite floors, I have a good-size room on the first floor. The family has 2 girls and a boy... the eldest girl, Yicheng, and the boy, Bingcheng, are in Jr. High, and had a math tutor and an English tutor over last night from the college. The youngest girl, Susan, is one of my students. She's really outgoing, and is the most willing of any of them to communicate in English.  Mr. Tsai is a roofer and a carpenter; he builds roofs for temples and such, and he also makes or installs doors, and makes furniture out of wood.  Mrs. Tsai is really welcoming, too.

The kids at school don't speak hardly any English at all... most are at a first-grade level of English. They're a lot of fun in Chinese, though, once they know you understand some of what they're saying. Most of the girls are telling me I'd look more handsome if I shaved my beard. Hmmm.  And now they were just making fun of my because I was tilting my head to one side while I was typing. "Hold your head straight!" (in Chinese) haha

I visited Teresa yesterday afternoon. She, and everyone there on the team, was very sleepy from such a stressful week last week. She's looking pretty skinny, but she's eating and that's the important thing.  She was happy to get the health-food I brought in my suitcase, since she's become allergic to so many things. It was really natural, and still really a welcome thing, to see her for the first time since this spring.

I start teaching tomorrow, so I've got to get some lesson-planning done. Catch ya later!

Joe Dallas, Answering the "Gay Christian" Position. Christian Research Institute, Article DG238.
Highly, highly recommended.