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The Fulbright program sets up an extra “co-school” to work at for a small period of time in the spring, as a means of giving us ETA’s increased variety and different school experiences, as well as letting us touch more students’ lives. For the month of March, I will be at Dongshan Elementary in Dongshan (冬山).

Teaching at Dongshan every day involves taking the train every day, and I’m fully psyched about that. I was first quite worried as there are, according to the online trip planner, only three trains a day that go directly from Nan’ao to Dongshan but this has turned out to be false. It still does mean at least an hour a day on trains, but I’ve got my iPod with wonderful podcasts, and I’m pretty sure my class schedule lets me avoid transfers.

I’m also excited about taking the train so often as Dongshan has the newest train station in Yilan county. It’s a beautiful new modern design of tasteful glass and steel.¹

The school itself is much larger than what I’ve been used to, with five classes per grade of about 30 students each… therefore about 700 students total. A special characteristic of the school is kites… the school has a kite museum and students make kites and fly them. The English classroom closet was also filled with kites.

On the teaching front, I’ll be teaching grades 2, 3, 4, and 6. I’ll be teaching all of those classes once a week, focusing on storytelling. Today I told Jump, Frog, Jump! to second graders. I’ve never had the chance to really use the same lesson plan over and over, and I already can see that I’ll be able to learn a lot through the iterative process.

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Tags: coschool, Dongshan, Fulbright, iPod, kite, Nanao, podcast, storytelling, Taiwan, teaching, train, train station

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This entry was posted on 火曜日, 3 月 4th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.