For those who are lucky enough to celebrate this day with your family (father and children), here is one of my favourite songs for you.

Dance With My Father - Luther Vandross (with Lyrics)




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Dear Friends and Family,

Yes, I would like to go home to visit my mother and all of you in July! 
However, I have not been able to secure a flight ticket yet. I will not be able to leave until July 11 because I have signed up for a few workshops. If you are able to meet up with me in July, please "take the number" and let me know by sending me an email. I most likely will stay in Xin-zhuan, Taipei with my mother. I MAY go to Tai-zhung to visit my sister, a few relatives in Chiayi or I-lang and a few friends in Kaoshiung. 

Remember, other than your email addresses, I don't really know your current residences, so please leave your contact phone numbers and addresses. (Gosh, I feel like a celebrity arranging my own tours and dates. Hehehe...) Anyway, I will be super busy till June 25. Keep in touch!! I want to meet up with you all if I can get a flight to go home! BTW, anyone who wants to date my sister, please also take notes of this matchmaker's (moi) schedule. Let's have an interview. How's that?

If you need anything from Canada, please let me know as early as possible. Remember, I hate shopping with a passion and I may not have time to look for those rare items that you hope to get for your girlfriend/boyfriend or your great-grandmother. 

The bottom line is - - I have to get a ticket first!

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I have been extremely busy lately. I don't really have much time to write. However, these are the latest artwork we did at school. The dragon heads are my students' work of art, which are on display at an art gallery. (See my album) All the heads were made with recycled materials and junk. The hot air balloon panel is for our commuinity fun fair. I borrowed ideas from a few pictures and finally came up with the final design for this panel. People will pay to have their photo taken. Let's hope we will raise a lot of money for our school. Hehehe...

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I always like a song called Long Night by this Canadian band, Rawlins Cross. They wrote this song Long Night for one of their dear friends who passed away. The song was written for the “wake” for their friend. What is a wake? You can check it out yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(ceremony)
Whenever there is a death, friends and family always get together to remember the deceased at the funeral. Thousands of deaths in Myanmar and Sichuan did not have the opportunities to be remembered. In fact, some could not even be found. A tragedy such as these large scaled disasters somehow has brought people closer together and truly shown humanity that was rooted deeply in every one of us. (Well, most of us, I guess.)
Here is the song for those whose lives were lost and those who lost their loved ones.

Long Night
By Rawlins Cross

Long night
So this is what it all comes to
Oh long night
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Don't be alarmed by the title! I think if we want Taiwan to have a better education reform, we do have to take a good look at the other education systems and learn from the best of the best systems. A while ago, my friend Thomas in Germany asked me about the Ontario education system. I was very surprised to hear that he was not too happy with the education quality in Germany. In fact, he was more than disappointed that Germany is no longer in the top five European countries with quality education, and he has a daughter in the public school system right now.
 
Finland happens to be one of the top countries he mentioned to me. Johan from Talking Taiwanese has a new article about the fundamental problems we are facing in Taiwan and in the latest Taiwanese education reform. In this article, Johan suggests that we should look at how Finland has reformed their education system to reach the top rank in Europe. Finnish system may be the model that Taiwan should copy for the future reform.
 
To the readers out there who are concerned about our quality education in Taiwan, you are more than welcome to go to his blog and leave him your comments. I am pretty sure Johan would like to hear from you regarding your thoughts and ideas. Here is the link to his blog. 
Talking Taiwanese
http://johangijsen.blogspot.com/
 
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Having the pain of losing my father at his prime age, I often care much about those children who are growing up without a father figure. Unfortunately, that group of children has been increasing every year somehow. One year, more than half of my students came from single parent families. I don’t blame those parents who sought divorce as the resolution for their family because, in truth, there are too many reasons for a marriage not to work out. Unhappy marriages would lead to unhappy families. It is certainly not a great idea for children to grow up in an unhappy family with two miserable parents or in a conflicting environment anyway. It is just sad that those children can only live with one parent at any given time.
 
I am in touch with so many wonderful divorced parents who are trying their best to provide the best opportunities they could offer to their children. More and more parents would share the custody of their children and work out a schedule for their children to live with both parents in two different households. I have to give them credits for trying hard; however, there is a group of parents whose behaviour really irks me! The other day one child was acting up in class because his father never showed up for his weekend visit. It reminded me of another boy and his story a while ago. Here is the little story to give you an idea about this group of absent parents.
 
JD was not a student of mine but he was in a class next to me. I knew his older brother because he was in trouble a lot ever since Grade One. The older brother was later identified with special needs and got a lot of extra help at school. (Apparently, he is doing better now.) JD was different from his older brother though. He was a gentle child but also required remedial academic support.
 
One day JD was very excited and announced to his teacher that it was his birthday that day and his father was coming after school to take him out. That was such big news to him because his father did not usually have spare time for him and his siblings according to JD. It turned out that JD’s father had more than five wives and was unmarried to all of them. He had at least fathered 18 children with those mothers but he did not live with any of the women. He simply just slept around! (Talk about irresponsible! I am fuming.)
 
The day after JD’s birthday, he looked unusually quiet like a deflated balloon, which did not sound like a boy who just had his birthday party. His teacher asked him what he did for his birthday. He replied that he waited and waited all afternoon for his father to come but his dad never showed up to take him out for his birthday. He told his teacher, “My dad is too busy. He has too many wives and kids. He does not have time for us.”
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Other than the incident during my first year of teaching, I had never doubted my decision to teach in Canada except about four years ago when I had another interesting incident happened in my class.
 
We teachers always have different strategies as rewards in the classroom. Teachers use all kinds of incentives in the classroom depending on different circumstances, the individual classroom management style and routine in the class. Some are internal rewards such as verbal recognition, leadership opportunities, or a pat on the shoulder. Often, we use external incentives such as a sticker, a certificate or a small treat to reward students on special occasion. I don’t like to use the same external rewards because when the teacher uses external rewards too often and too frequently, they would become an expectation by many. I believe any reward should be for some extraordinary acts or to recognize special performances; for example, when students perform their personal best with evident improvement or personal excellence beyond expectation.
 
Anyway, four years ago when I taught a grade two class, I had a candy jar filled with different kinds of treats in my room. I didn’t usually put the jar on my desk but students know that the jar was where I kept my treats. Once a while, when my students least expected, I would reward them for their impressive performance or the behavior they had shown me. The occasional rewards with candy certainly worked wonder for that group of students.
 
One hot summer day, our classroom had reached that unbearable temperature that we all had to retreat from our add-on porta-pad classroom to a cool location in the school concrete building. You see, we don’t have any air-conditioner in the school. We can not close the school unless the room temperature had reached 45 degrees Celsius which is the maximum temperature for health and safety concern (It’s really stupid but that is the regulation. As far as I am concerned, when it is over the 40 degrees C, the children’s bodies are literally "cooking". Their brains can’t really function properly.)
 
Our porta-pad classroom was like a steel-box microwave oven in the hot summer afternoon sun. I finally took my class out to the end of the hallway where we could sit on the smooth concrete cement floor to work. The hallway was on the other side of the concrete wall, which was sheltered from the sun then. It was also peace and quiet there away from the other classes. The polished concrete floor was just smooth, cool and comfy. Before the recess bell, I gave out freezies (frozen ice in a plastic tube) to my students for their outstanding cooperation under that kind of heat.
 
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Kids say the darnest thing sometimes. I often wish that I have written down every interesting thing that kids said to me. Those words along with each and every incident happened may seem trivial to you readers, but they are really priceless in my view and it is great fun to recall some of those incidents. JZ is one of those students who I will never forget.
 
JZ was a natural performer who possessed excellent articulation skills. He was so full of “street smart” that you couldn’t tell that he was a child with learning difficulty. It took some skills to motivate this child to tap into his academic potentials because he pretty much believed that he was good at nothing at school. I was in touch with JZ’s parents soon after the first few weeks of school. His parents, as well as JZ’s grandmother, aunt and uncle who were taking care of him after school, were really on board to support me. We kept close contact with each other on the daily basis.
 
JZ often told me in class that he had done his best and there was simply nothing more he could do. Sometimes, trying to motivate him could simply become another power struggle between him and me. In fact, for children like JZ, he himself was really his own worst enemy because he believed that he couldn’t do anything right, refused to nothing more and then simply gave up. JZ might not be confident about his academic performance but he actually thought quite highly of himself.
 
JZ had many friends and he was very friendly to all his classmates. In fact, he was a great leader and quite willing to defend his friends when something was up. Friendship was such an important part of his school life. The only problem was that JZ was involved in the wrong crowds sometimes. So, when something did not work out between JZ and his friends, we certainly could hear about it and see it on JZ’s face right away.
 
One day, JZ had some run-ins with his up-to-no-good pals outside. When the class came in, almost everyone rushed to tell me about how JZ got into the argument with the other students. To be honest, the argument was really the secondary problem of my story. The main problem was JZ came in with a chip on his shoulder and already showed me his big attitude before I even got to him.
 
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There were a few times that I was almost ready to quit teaching all together. Here is one of those stories that happened to me years and years ago when I just started out in Canada. Things have changed so much for the better that I think it is about time for me to write down some of my interesting encounters.
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After I had started teaching in Ontario for about a year, the education sector began to feel the funding crunch from the government during a recession. At first, I thought I had hit the jackpot to finally get a teaching job after three long years of unemployment, but the good time did not last. There I was about to be laid off a year later. I, along with more than 400 other new teachers, was given a lay-off notice in the spring. Fortunately, the bad news only lasted through that summer. I eventually got called back by the Board to a substitute position a few months later in September. Although the supply job was not a permanent position, it was definitely better than doing nothing at home.

The school I was assigned to was in the same neighbourhood where my old boss resided. It was such a coincidence that I happened to be placed in the very same community school where his children went. My old boss had warned me in advance about the school and the principal before I even started my new teaching post. He claimed that the principal was “a racist”. My boss was of South Asian descent and I knew for a fact that, my boss already had a few interesting meetings with the principal when I was still working for him. However, I kept telling myself that I needed to go to my new job with an open mind.


The school had a large ESL student population. The principal treated me all right when we first met. He was friendly but did appear to be a bit eccentric and a loose cannon when communicating with others. Sometimes he would blurt out something that might not be appropriate for his position. I also heard rumours saying that he would only hire tall blond teachers. In fact, I was told by some staff that if I were not assigned to that post due to my contract with the board, the principal wouldn’t have hired someone ethnic like me. As a minority teacher, I used to hear comments like that, but I would usually listen with a grain of salt and keep my thoughts to myself. The truth is that you can not simply believe everything you’ve heard!

 

A few months into my teaching at that school, I gradually got to know the people there better and how the school’s dynamic operated. However, I did not know all the students and parents well enough even though it was only a school of about 600 students. Certainly, not all the parents knew me well, either.

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