School in Taiwan teaches you everything from math, social science and music over cleaning, acting correctly in the traffic and military stuff to sleeping. I have been to school every day since Monday now and that has indeed given me a look into Taiwanese culture.
When I say that the youth in Taiwan study a lot I mean a LOT. People meet at school at 7 o’clock even though they are not supposed to be there before 8. Why? To read and study in the morning. From 8 until 12 o’clock they have lessons, but their lessons are not like my lessons in Denmark, because even though we are 44 students in my class, nobody raises their hands during the class – they are totally quiet. Only the teacher speaks (mostly into a microphone) and he or she does not give the pupils much time to think – they just keep on teaching new stuff for the entire class. So as you probably can guess “group work” is an unknown word here which makes the school really boring if you don’t understand what the teachers are saying (which I don’t).
The school is though not bad because there are a lot of curious and nice (and random :p) students contacting me all the time because of the fact that I am blond! The conversation mostly goes like this:
“Ohhhh look (hi hi hi), hey! Welcome to Taiwan! You are very beautiful!”
“Ehhm thanks xie xie”
“Where are you from?”
“Wo she Dan-mei ren”
“Uuuuuu (hi, hi, hi she speaks Chinese!), bye bye!”
“Well okay, bye bye, see you!”.
As you can hear most of the people just speak to me to speak to me… Just because… I guess it is cool? Well anyway everybody is really sweat and the other day I had a headache, so I went downstairs to a-i (auntie, which we call the staff that is not teachers or policemen) and asked her for a pill, but as they are not aloud to give medicine to the students she took me to a place with three beds, where I could sleep. A lot of the a-i’s came and asked me how I was, but the important thing was, that I actually got better.
Some of my teachers are extremely sweet too. My Chinese teacher for instance has bought me two “Chinese for beginners” books, and on Monday I am going to go to the city together with her to have lunch and visit a temple!
All the Chinese makes me a bit tired though. Today I have been to language school in the morning. Then I went to my senior high school where I studied the books that my Chinese teacher gave me. And at four o’clock I went to the library to have a Chinese lesson with my personal school counsellor. But I try my best all the time because everyone is so kind to me, and actually I shouldn’t complain as I study much less than my Taiwanese friends. They even go to school in the evenings. Not because they want to, but because everybody does – that is just the culture. Danish students could definitely learn something from that. To hand in homework late is for instance very, very seldom seen.
