Sharon, our ESP office manager and perhaps the nicest boss anyone could ask for. (And I'm not just saying that because she might read this....^_-)
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Happy Halloween!
Since it's been so long since I updated, reports of my demise have started to circulate among the net community that views this board. To counter these unfounded rumours I have decided to update this blog! (Feel free to cheer. ^_^)
So, last Saturday I attended a Halloween party thrown by a co-worker and his fellow foreigners room-mate which was quite the success. I apologize that I don't have any pictures from it (yet, some were taken by others and lord knows if they might filter back to me.) but I can proudly report that Rob represented Ontario well by winning his first ever bobbing for apples competition in front of 25 or so people. It was great fun, and good times were had by all!
More generally, I'm more busy now than I have been since I came to Taiwan all those 10 or so months ago. I currently teach at 10 different locations, 6 days a week, and am running all over the city like a chicken with my head cut off. Just to give you a rundown, my week currently looks like this:
Monday: Teaching a mixed level Lunch class at Edom Software company (local firm) and Night class teaching the senior executives at Abbot Taiwan, a local division of one of the world's largest medical equipment companies. Edom is very close, Abbot is on the other end of the city in an area called Yong He.
Tuesday: Lunch class at Tomen Taiwan (the Japanese branch of a Japanese chemical company I have taught at since I started at KoJen) and Evening Class is teaching another class in YongHe, at a company that makes LED components and light sensors called Edison.
Wednesday: Lunch class at Edom again, and Night Class at a local Law Firm teaching the senior partners.
Thursday: Back to Tomen at lunch and back to Edison at night.
Friday: Early afternoon class with the general manager of Geant here in Taipei, Geant is a French grocery superstore company not unlike Price Club. They're building a new megastore near my home, and so I meet him at a Starbucks nearby my home to help him practice his English. In the evenings on Friday I teach a bunch of University and High School students writing for a couple hours at the GongGuan KoJen branch, a great bunch of kids and probably my favorite class of the week.
Saturday: Saturday mornings I get picked up at my home by the general manager (who by co-incidence is my neighbour a few buildings over) of Rotary Taiwan, a medical equipment engineering company and take to their office for a morning class to teach their crew of engineers, managers and marketers English. Their English is terrible, but their spirits are good. The opposite is my afternoon writing class of teenaged students at the NeiHu KoJen branch, they don't want to be there and it ends up being me drilling them on writing in English for 3.5 hours on Saturday afternoon. While there's a few good kids in the class, I can't wait until it ends.
And Sundays are movie days with Connie, who I can only see on Sundays because of our busy schedules. Something I'm not at all happy about, I might add.
Right now the rest of the week tends to be taken up by me reading, preparing, marking and watching what little anime I can squeeze in. I'm also working my way through The Count of Monte Christo, by Alexandre Dumas. I have to say it's one of the best books I've read in my life, and I'm glad I finally took the time to read it, regardless of how big it is!
Until next time! Best all!
Rob
So, last Saturday I attended a Halloween party thrown by a co-worker and his fellow foreigners room-mate which was quite the success. I apologize that I don't have any pictures from it (yet, some were taken by others and lord knows if they might filter back to me.) but I can proudly report that Rob represented Ontario well by winning his first ever bobbing for apples competition in front of 25 or so people. It was great fun, and good times were had by all!
More generally, I'm more busy now than I have been since I came to Taiwan all those 10 or so months ago. I currently teach at 10 different locations, 6 days a week, and am running all over the city like a chicken with my head cut off. Just to give you a rundown, my week currently looks like this:
Monday: Teaching a mixed level Lunch class at Edom Software company (local firm) and Night class teaching the senior executives at Abbot Taiwan, a local division of one of the world's largest medical equipment companies. Edom is very close, Abbot is on the other end of the city in an area called Yong He.
Tuesday: Lunch class at Tomen Taiwan (the Japanese branch of a Japanese chemical company I have taught at since I started at KoJen) and Evening Class is teaching another class in YongHe, at a company that makes LED components and light sensors called Edison.
Wednesday: Lunch class at Edom again, and Night Class at a local Law Firm teaching the senior partners.
Thursday: Back to Tomen at lunch and back to Edison at night.
Friday: Early afternoon class with the general manager of Geant here in Taipei, Geant is a French grocery superstore company not unlike Price Club. They're building a new megastore near my home, and so I meet him at a Starbucks nearby my home to help him practice his English. In the evenings on Friday I teach a bunch of University and High School students writing for a couple hours at the GongGuan KoJen branch, a great bunch of kids and probably my favorite class of the week.
Saturday: Saturday mornings I get picked up at my home by the general manager (who by co-incidence is my neighbour a few buildings over) of Rotary Taiwan, a medical equipment engineering company and take to their office for a morning class to teach their crew of engineers, managers and marketers English. Their English is terrible, but their spirits are good. The opposite is my afternoon writing class of teenaged students at the NeiHu KoJen branch, they don't want to be there and it ends up being me drilling them on writing in English for 3.5 hours on Saturday afternoon. While there's a few good kids in the class, I can't wait until it ends.
And Sundays are movie days with Connie, who I can only see on Sundays because of our busy schedules. Something I'm not at all happy about, I might add.
Right now the rest of the week tends to be taken up by me reading, preparing, marking and watching what little anime I can squeeze in. I'm also working my way through The Count of Monte Christo, by Alexandre Dumas. I have to say it's one of the best books I've read in my life, and I'm glad I finally took the time to read it, regardless of how big it is!
Until next time! Best all!
Rob
This is the foyer of the Neihu District branch of the KoJen English Cram School chain that I was doing some substitute classes in. The man in the blue shirt is Chris, the head foreign teacher of this branch from England and a really honestly good human being. He's soft spoken, but very determined in what he does, and just radiates goodwill towards those around him. It really reflects in the office culture of the branch, which is very laid back and relaxed and almost "West Coast" in it's feeling and style. Not that they're slackers, everything gets done properly and carefully, but it's not a high pressure environment at all. I have to say I really enjoy working at this school, and still teach a writing class there on weekends.
Monday, October 31, 2005
The NeiHu Kojen Branch, in order to encourage a spirited atmosphere, has a short party and prize draws on the nights when all the adult classes for the late summer/fall session reach their conclusion. Each teacher takes time out from their busy schedule to draw a name or two, and of course Rob got into the spirit of things! (Not managing, however, to drawn any names from his own class...)
So, here's the lucky five students who came to the last class ane were lucky enough to have their picture taken with Rob. They are (from left to right) Scott (an engineer), James (med student), Rob (handsome teacher), Janet (University student and future resident of Germany), Betty (office worker), and Ruby (future Lawyer).
So, about 6 weeks from the posting of this picture, my class at Well-Tech, a furniture import-export company, ended. It was one of my very first classes, teaching 7 giggly and perpetually late office ladies every Saturday morning. Well, six months later we were down to three students, the others having been fired, and so the class came to an end. Although I didn't like getting up and journeying an hour on Saturday morning to get there, I did enjoy chatting with the girls and will miss them. For our last class Joan (pronounced Joanne, pictured here) and Ivy (next pic) took me on my first motocycle ride to a riverside resort area called Bi-Tan in Southern Taipei.
Bi-Tan was pretty much dead thanks to a storm that had just rolled by, but like troopers the girls still showed me around the area and we walked along the closed boardwalk. Behind Ivy here you can see a tea house which looks like it would have a very beautiful view of the boardwalk behind the camera. (Sorry, it wasn't my camera so no shots of the boardwalk side.)
Among other places, Ivy and Joan were kind enough to take me into the cluster of buildings you can see over my shoulder. There they showed me a temple with a gold monk, literally. It seems this man was so revered that when he died they mummified him, and then covered him in gold to literally turn him into a statue of himself! Taiwan is always full of surprises!
Monday, August 29, 2005
Update!
Well, there have been a few changes since I last updated my Blog.
In the last few weeks, my classes at Green Seasons Biotech, American Pacific Lines Shipping and NuSkin Cosmetics all finished. (You can see the NuSkin pictures below.) As a result of that, my number of hours per week of teaching dropped like a rock, especially considering that there doesn't seem to be a lot of companies calling us at the moment. (Just a lull I guess...)
So, I accepted teaching jobs at local KoJen cram schools to fill the income gap. As long as they're adults and (at least) teens, I don't care too much, I just didn't want to teach young children again.
As a result of this, I acquired 3 new classes, one of which will start this upcoming Saturday.
The first class I took on is at a branch school nearer to my home than most. Located at the NeiHu Branch of KoJen, it's a conversation class for advanced teens and adults who want to improve their already considerable skill with English. Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday nights, I teach for 3 hours at a time. Of course, I'm actually at the school for 5 1/2 hours at a time because I show up 1 1/2 hours early for each session so the head teacher Ainsley can prep me and tell me the lesson plan. He's a very skilled teacher, and has the whole thing down to a science, so I don't mind teaching from his lesson plans as I'm learning new techniques for working with more advanced conversation students.
The NeiHu branch (NeiHu is the name of the suburb of Taipei where I happen to live, but my home office is in another district) of KoJen is actually a pretty darn nice place. The building is new, the people are friendly and good natured (they gave me quite the welcome when I first showed up, even though I'm only a part-timer there) and miracle of miracles, I'm not the only Londoner there!
The first thing that happened when I told people I was from London (Canada) was they told me their resident wiseguy Tim was also from London. Quite surprised and happy, I wandered over to introduce myself and told me how happy I was to meet another Londoner here. He gave me a bemused smile and told me that in fact in his experience, there are as many Londoners running around Taipei as there are people from Toronto. I guess since I don't spend much time in the foreign teacher circles I was unaware that London ships out quite a few of it's educated youth to become ESL teachers here in Taiwan. He's still the only one I've met, but now I won't be so surprised if I run into more. (I wonder if I'll meet anyone I know? Will wonders never cease?)
My other new class is at my home branch school in Gong-Guan district, and it's a writing class for intermediate level students who want to improve their writing skills. For that class I'm coached by Nigel, my school's head teacher, although he's much less hands-on than Ainsely, giving me the handouts and the written plan with just a quick "here's what you should do" rather than Ainsely's highly detailed plans. Of course, the writing class is also much less complicated, since the focus is giving them sentence patterns based on certain ideas and having them run through them. They spend most of the class sitting at the desks writing, although I like to slip in as much conversation activities as I can to balance things out. (Often ones borrowed from my NeiHu classes.)
Of note about that class are two young women, although not in the way you might expect. Both of them are quite unique, one (Anny)is extremely short (about 130cm would be my guess) and the other (Ivanna) extremely tall 187cm (I'm 183, for comparison). Both of them are really nice women, but Anny is quieter than a churchmouse (and cute as one too, being 16) and Ivanna is indeed larger than life. Funny how their heights reflect their personalities in a lot of ways. I actually took Ivanna aside and asked her how she felt being so tall in Taiwan, where most people are about 155cm tall. She said when she was growing up (she's in her 20's) it used to bother her a lot, but after she spent a year studying English at a University in the United States, she came to realize it wasn't so bad to be tall. Attagirl! I still feel a little bad for her, though, as the other students gawk at her a bit, but hopefully they will stop soon.
Rob
In the last few weeks, my classes at Green Seasons Biotech, American Pacific Lines Shipping and NuSkin Cosmetics all finished. (You can see the NuSkin pictures below.) As a result of that, my number of hours per week of teaching dropped like a rock, especially considering that there doesn't seem to be a lot of companies calling us at the moment. (Just a lull I guess...)
So, I accepted teaching jobs at local KoJen cram schools to fill the income gap. As long as they're adults and (at least) teens, I don't care too much, I just didn't want to teach young children again.
As a result of this, I acquired 3 new classes, one of which will start this upcoming Saturday.
The first class I took on is at a branch school nearer to my home than most. Located at the NeiHu Branch of KoJen, it's a conversation class for advanced teens and adults who want to improve their already considerable skill with English. Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday nights, I teach for 3 hours at a time. Of course, I'm actually at the school for 5 1/2 hours at a time because I show up 1 1/2 hours early for each session so the head teacher Ainsley can prep me and tell me the lesson plan. He's a very skilled teacher, and has the whole thing down to a science, so I don't mind teaching from his lesson plans as I'm learning new techniques for working with more advanced conversation students.
The NeiHu branch (NeiHu is the name of the suburb of Taipei where I happen to live, but my home office is in another district) of KoJen is actually a pretty darn nice place. The building is new, the people are friendly and good natured (they gave me quite the welcome when I first showed up, even though I'm only a part-timer there) and miracle of miracles, I'm not the only Londoner there!
The first thing that happened when I told people I was from London (Canada) was they told me their resident wiseguy Tim was also from London. Quite surprised and happy, I wandered over to introduce myself and told me how happy I was to meet another Londoner here. He gave me a bemused smile and told me that in fact in his experience, there are as many Londoners running around Taipei as there are people from Toronto. I guess since I don't spend much time in the foreign teacher circles I was unaware that London ships out quite a few of it's educated youth to become ESL teachers here in Taiwan. He's still the only one I've met, but now I won't be so surprised if I run into more. (I wonder if I'll meet anyone I know? Will wonders never cease?)
My other new class is at my home branch school in Gong-Guan district, and it's a writing class for intermediate level students who want to improve their writing skills. For that class I'm coached by Nigel, my school's head teacher, although he's much less hands-on than Ainsely, giving me the handouts and the written plan with just a quick "here's what you should do" rather than Ainsely's highly detailed plans. Of course, the writing class is also much less complicated, since the focus is giving them sentence patterns based on certain ideas and having them run through them. They spend most of the class sitting at the desks writing, although I like to slip in as much conversation activities as I can to balance things out. (Often ones borrowed from my NeiHu classes.)
Of note about that class are two young women, although not in the way you might expect. Both of them are quite unique, one (Anny)is extremely short (about 130cm would be my guess) and the other (Ivanna) extremely tall 187cm (I'm 183, for comparison). Both of them are really nice women, but Anny is quieter than a churchmouse (and cute as one too, being 16) and Ivanna is indeed larger than life. Funny how their heights reflect their personalities in a lot of ways. I actually took Ivanna aside and asked her how she felt being so tall in Taiwan, where most people are about 155cm tall. She said when she was growing up (she's in her 20's) it used to bother her a lot, but after she spent a year studying English at a University in the United States, she came to realize it wasn't so bad to be tall. Attagirl! I still feel a little bad for her, though, as the other students gawk at her a bit, but hopefully they will stop soon.
Rob
Birthday Time
Today was Connie's Mother's Birthday, so yesterday she, Connie, Connie's Cousin, His Wife, his son Han-Han and I all went out for dinner at an Italian restaurant called imaginatively enough: "Pasta". The food wasn't bad, but the service was very slow for everyone except me, I guess the girls there liked me (or maybe that's why the chef kept winking at me from the kitchen window...Kidding!) because I was the only one who got timely food.
After the exhaustive process of feeding ourselves and Han-Han, we went back to Connie's cousin's beautiful appartment and had a small party with fruit and honeydew melon (which is apparently quite expensive here for whatever reason). We watched the second half of Legally Blonde II (it was on TV, on their giant expensive liquid crystal TV...) and chatted, then her cousin drove us home for the night. A fun relaxing time.
Here's a few pictures!
Rob
After the exhaustive process of feeding ourselves and Han-Han, we went back to Connie's cousin's beautiful appartment and had a small party with fruit and honeydew melon (which is apparently quite expensive here for whatever reason). We watched the second half of Legally Blonde II (it was on TV, on their giant expensive liquid crystal TV...) and chatted, then her cousin drove us home for the night. A fun relaxing time.
Here's a few pictures!
Rob
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