A Teacher's Tale by Mr. L
Twice to Taiwan in two months - the home of jen ju nai cha (pearl milk tea), and the host of various adventures for many 7th & 8th grade Korean students. I led an overnight field trip to Seoul in between as well: spring was an intense time for us at KIS! The end of the year also featured a visit from our favorite two seniors SMIC (Shanghai) who paid us the honor of spending their graduation trip with us here on Jeju at the beginning of June :). You may have noticed a suspicious absence of any blog posts around this time of year as we worked hard to keep up with our many responsibilities. You may have also noticed several Instagram/Facebook posts of spring Fraddleboarding - we all have our coping mechanisms during hard times… ;).
I have the pleasure of regaling you with tales of one of our favorite things our school provides our students: a global perspective on life and opportunities for service.
The first trip to Taiwan was designed as a week-long service/culture/adventure trip, and took place at the same time that Em was on mainland Korea with the 6th graders, while other grade levels travel to other countries to experience new cultures and get involved with making their world a better place.
The first trip to Taiwan was designed as a week-long service/culture/adventure trip, and took place at the same time that Em was on mainland Korea with the 6th graders, while other grade levels travel to other countries to experience new cultures and get involved with making their world a better place.
Our primary service was given to a Christian Taiwanese orphanage, built for the minority tribes in the central mountains of Taiwan. We painted new safety boards with aboriginal designs, lacquered up some wood in need of repair, designed and painted a mural, and assembled some bikes before we spent some time just playing with the orphans - basketball, frisbee, soccer, etc. Some of the students who had practiced Chinese and written letters ahead to specific orphans got to meet them and spent some time connecting one-one.
It was pretty cool to see just how many other groups and individuals had invested in this orphanage so that their students were getting a very high quality experience there - programs included a culinary school, a music program, and a traveling choir! Their facilities were surprisingly nice for a mountain orphanage, and we were glad to do what we could to make the place more beautiful, healthy, and colorful.
Our days there were mixed with adventure - hiking, river tracing, kayaking, beaches (one of which is much cleaner for our having been there), indigenous dances & history, night markets, national parks, and jeep riding - this last adventure was by far the highlight of the trip for many students. The most successful part of the trip was the reflection that took place during our debrief times, hearing stories of eyes opened and perspectives broadened to cultivate both gratitude for what they had and a heart for helping to create a brighter future together. However, the most fun part of the trip was definitely the jeep riding - haha. Looking around at the students faces, you could just see pure joy radiating from the experiencing for tearing around the course, floating on the peaks and careening down the hills at high speeds.
Another unexpected highlight was the chance to meet up with an old friend…Kerry Meehan! Nothing could have been a better fit for our personalities and past experience than to meet up one morning and go cliff jumping! We were staying in a beautiful, beach-side youth activity center in Kenting - the southern resort city of Taiwan. I happened to have the final morning of our trip off, and Kerry was able to drive out and meet me for some cleverly named Shark Bites Toast breakfast and an early morning swim. I then biked up the big hill to see the national park that the students had bussed their way up to earlier that morning. It was an intense ride! But worth it - I got to spend some time journaling atop the lookout in the center of the park, listening to the birds and enjoying the panoramic views set before me. It was one of the most refreshing, enjoyable solo times I’ve ever experienced.
The activities in themselves were all actually really enjoyable; the week was well-planned to be action-packed - from panoramic views on the hillside to climbing up waterfalls, playing frisbee with students, drinking pearl milk tea and eating Taiwanese apple fries (mmm…), we had a great time! I even saw of troop of Taiwanese monkeys clamber across the treetops above me at the national park! The only real dud was river kayaking, haha - we had only inches of water in some places, beaching the kayaks mid-river. Not to mention that some of the students just couldn’t figure out how to turn and work together to paddle upstream, haha. I even towed a couple girls for a while - it was that bad.
Of course, I missed Emlz very much throughout our week of separation - the only appropriate response was to try and take as many photos to document that fact as possible ;).
One of the 7th grade teachers described my contribution to the team during this trip as the voice of reason and sound advice - God led me in a couple of very specific, pointed, and direct ways to help the students get their heads wrapped around the vision of service, developing a habit of thankfulness for the experiences they have been given in life, and showing respect to others - it was cool to really surrender myself to His truth and to see Him act through me to begin to transform attitudes, hearts & lives through this service trip.
Speaking of transformation, “Transform Our World” was the theme of the MUN trip we took to Taiwan the following month - a much smaller contingent of 7th & 8th graders joined us to the northern part of Taiwan this time, featuring heavily the two-day conference that our students participated in while Em got to go off and explore the greater Taipei area. If only we could explore Taiwan together…
Well, we did! A trip downtown was cordially coordinated by the host school’s transportation director! We got to go up to the top of the Taipei 101 and see the fascinating towers giant sphere-shaped damper as well as panoramic views of Taipei at night. We even tried some dumplings from the world renown Din Tai Feng restaurant - a bit overrated, if you ask me ;). We prefer the Taiwanese food we had for three years in our Taiwanese community in Shanghai - in both my trips, I never tasted anything that was quite as delicious! Of course, I wasn’t in charge of the menu most of the time either, so I choose to believe that we were given the mass-quantity buffet-style food most of the time, and that delicious Taiwanese food is still out there somewhere. Which is a shame, really, since most of our Korean students went home thinking that Taiwanese food is no good - which simply is not true! Oh well…I was able to get many of them hooked on pearl milk tea at least, so we’ll call that a success ;). I was happy that their taste buds recognized the clear superiority of Taiwanese milk tea to Korean milk tea as well - I was a little worried that they may have been corrupted beyond repair by lesser nai cha!
While the annual service trip to Taiwan is planned for G7 this year, we will see if this 2016 brings me back again once, twice, or not at all! There is a service trip for students who stay behind on Jeju as well, so we’ll see where I am placed this year. The conference was very much enjoyed by exactly one of our students, but the high focus on developing and debating the resolution side of things was not to the liking of most of the rest of our MUN Club, so we may simply be looking for non-THIMUN-style conferences elsewhere.
And now I’m back again! Teaching for the 2nd year in Social Studies, Psychology and Ethics, MUN, and coaching tennis. I was reminded this week both of the great challenges and joys of teaching - students can be SO lazy and apathetic at times. And at other times, they can be full of so much wonder, laughter, awe and curiosity that it makes me want to cry out of pure joy. Seriously, that happened during my last class of the first week of school - as I taught the intro to Sensation and Perception this week, I had students shivering with goosebumps from awe, jaws dropping with disbelief, and exclamations of shock at just how fascinating the human mind and behavior is. I was having so much fun teaching them as their explosive reactions washed over me that I almost started crying - multiple times. For the rest of day, I almost cried whenever I even looked back to and thought about those moments in class. And that’s what makes us thrilled to be back here for another year: to cultivate a passionate love of learning, to open their minds, and to create compassionate actors in our world. May God equip us with the patience, perseverance we need to cultivate those qualities amongst our students. We pray that He fills us with his Spirit that sheds light and truth and laughter amid darkness, difficulty, and despair. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
P.S. Taiwan isn’t the only place I’ve gone back again this year…I’m proud to say that this year is a LOTR year once again - it’s time to immerse myself in the land of Middle Earth - get ready to be inspired.
P.P.S. Did you know that there are places in the world where FIRE is constantly coming out of the ground? We saw some eternal flames in Taiwan and my mind was simply blown. The methane gas just bubbles up to the surface and fire starts shooting out of the earth! However, the pictures were blurry and so you will have to just go and see for yourself ;).
P.P.S. Did you know that there are places in the world where FIRE is constantly coming out of the ground? We saw some eternal flames in Taiwan and my mind was simply blown. The methane gas just bubbles up to the surface and fire starts shooting out of the earth! However, the pictures were blurry and so you will have to just go and see for yourself ;).