Tagged with teachingenglish

How I saved $10,000USD teaching English in Taiwan

I saved $10,000USD in my year in Taiwan, but it wasn’t all easy. Here’s the real lowdown on what you can expect to save an earn by teaching English in Taiwan. Please note this is excluding flights to and from Taiwan.

The first thing you need to realise before you come to Taiwan is it’s not that cheap it is far more expensive than Thailand, Vietnam and the rest of S.E Asia.

Here’s a breakdown (100twd: 3USD: 2GBP)

Produce:

Rice and grains are very cheap, fresh produce is where you’re going to be in trouble. Shop at local markets and shop food that’s in season, or you’ll be paying for than in the West for vegetables. If it’s in season, it’s cheap, if not, you’re looking at Western prices. Fruit and veg are surprisingly expensive and will push your food budget up. 60twd for a head of broccoli?! 80twd for a large mango?!

Eating out:

A meal at a local place will set you back 50-150twd depending on the area of Taipei. However, there’s a good chance the cheaper you go the oilier and more unhealthy it will be.

To eat at a Western place, you’re looking at average 200-400twd for just a main course.

Alcohol:

A cocktail in most places or a nice beer/glass of wine will cost you around 300twd (9USD!) so not much difference to the west there. Taiwan beer, the cheapest beer, will sometimes be as little as 100twd on tap.

As with anywhere, if you want to save money limit your nights out and drinking or don’t drink at all. Which leads me to…

Nights out:

Cover of your standard places is usually 300twd with a drink token. Fancier clubs like Myst and Omni are 600-700twd with 2 tokens. Taxis cost about 200-300twd if you don’t live miles away.

Tea and coffee:

Are ludicrously expensive in Taiwan unless you buy them from the convenience stores or a hole in the wall place. If you want to go to a nice coffee shop, you’re looking at, wait for it, about 160-200TWD for a coffee or tea. To put that into perspective a Venti Starbucks latte in Taiwan is 140TWD. Coffee places in Taiwan are more expensive than Starbucks, and around the price of a mid-range meal.

Ludicrous. Pro tip: get a flask and make it at home, but if you’re a coffee shop dweller like me this will be a hit to your past times. A confession is I spent far too much at Starbucks in my year in Taiwan, I think on average I was buying 3 or 4 coffees there a week. It was the only place to chill at on my lunch break that did soy and wasn’t my school. Could I have saved more without them? Probably. Would I have been as sane? Probably not.

Rent and bills:

Here’s where you’ll save compared to other countries, although if you’ve researched Korea you’ll know that you’re given an apartment. If you live outside Taipei you’re going to save a lot more, but in Taipei you can get a bit of a run down place for 6000-8000twd, a nice place for 9000-11000, and a studio apartment for 11000-16000 if you want to live alone (very variable on size and location). Living in New Taipei will save you money, but if you live around the brown line/Guting/Taipower/Fuxing (basically the areas you want to live to be near things) you’re going to be paying the above amount. I was paying 11000twd for a good sized room in a flat with 3 people in an excellent location in the heart of downtown (Zhongxiao Fuxing) the flat was in excellent condition and had a kitchen. Halfway through I moved to the smaller room in the same flat and my rent changed to 9000twd. Score!

Bills come to between 1000twd and 2000twd a month. We had a maid split between us for 300twd each a week, and she did everything. It was wonderful and a huge bonus of having flatmates!

Transport:

Expensive, don’t be fooled! Well, it’s not Western Europe prices and if you just toddle round Taipei and stay on the slow trains you’re not going to spend too much. The high speed rail will set you back a lot more, as a one way from Taipei to Kaohsiung with a reserved ticket is 1,630TWD. The MRT in Taipei costs 16twd-54twd a trip, for most journeys you pay 20-24twd. I spent 1000TWD a month on transport.

Cell phone:

I got a prepaid sim and topped up in 7/11s every month. The great thing with this is that you can top up data and calls separately, so I would top up data every month for 300twd (2.2GB) and then calls and texts every 5 or 6 months for 600twd. This was great because it meant my phone was a very minor expense, and it’s definitely what I recommend. 2.2GB would last me 20 days to a month with streaming music, hotspotting, and pretty constant internet use.

Chinese lessons:

Are between 300 and 700twd an hour for private tutoring. I recommend learning enough to help you get by and not feel completely isolated from the city. Towards the end I was doing 1.5 hours 3x a week, which was the perfect amount for me but was costing me around 6000twd a month.

And what are you earning?

Okay, so all of this isn’t that expensive by Western European or North American standards, or at least most of this isn’t (I still haven’t got past the coffee prices, eeeeesh, and they make you order too!). But what you’re earning wouldn’t last you one week in a Western city. In one year, I earned roughly 18,000-20,000USD. There is simply no way I could have lived as well as I did in any Western city on that much, or saved as much as I did. Now lets look at the salary breakdown, the schools who you might get employed by, and how much you’ll need to work.

Hess

Hess is the biggest chain school in Taiwan, and they also have branches in China. They recruit you independently and put you in a huge month long training course where you’ll meet a lot of other excited newbies and can make some friends. You’ll also get your TEFL through them and be taught a lot of rousing songs. You won’t be paid as much as if you get employed with other schools (570twd an hour starting salary) but you’ll probably be able to rack up a lot, and I mean a LOT of hours.
As for experience, some people love it, some hate it. It’s so dependant on the schools. You get 10 days of leave a year, and I think you also get a contract completion bonus.

Pros: a lot of hours, you can make friends on the course and bond with other newbies.
Cons: possibly a hellish school, you can be sent anywhere in Taiwan, small wage, unpaid training for a month.

Shane

Shane schools also recruit independently and put you on a training course. I don’t know much about them but I know a few people who worked for them and got out fast after the first year.

Reach to Teach

Aren’t a school, they’re a recruiter. The schools they recruit for pay 600TWD an hour and up. I went through them and although I can’t say the school was the school was the best (split shifts and incredibly inefficient working hours, and some questionable working conditions) my experience was generally positive. I didn’t manage to get them to sort out my school underpaying me for 2 months (breaching the contract), but turns out I needed to make more of a fuss and go to Carrie, head of Reach to Teach who just sorted out the same situation for my replacement. Overall, I recommend using a recruiter if you want a decent (but probably not amazing) job sorted before you come to the country.

Other schools

Will pay a starting salary of 600-650twd. If you have experience you can get 700 or maybe even a little more if you’re lucky and can negotiate. The important thing to remember, though, is that the job market in Taiwan isn’t as good as it used to be. In the past 5 years or so, cost of living in the city has dramatically risen in the city but salaries for English teachers haven’t risen at all.

The majority of my friends were on around 20 hours a week which is around 50,000twd dollars a month before taxes, which are 18% for your first 6 months (most of which you get back, eventually). Living well but not extravagantly will set you back about 25,000 – 30,000twd a month. This is with a nice meal out once of twice a week, Chinese lessons, and the occasional night out. I was on 25.5 hours a week and it came to 55,000twd a month after taxes but I only earned that for about 9 months of my 13 in Taiwan. As you might expect, this was a problem and was not something I was warned about.

So how do you save?

Set yourself a goal every month from your salary. Mine was to save 25,000 every month (that I earned a full paycheck). Most months I hit this, some months I saved a little less, some a little more, but I could see my balance every month increasing by 25,000.

If you arrive before the 1st of July you’ll get your taxes back from this year. This is very important, if you arrive after you’ll be losing out on up to 50,000twd. You can then get your taxes express taxed if you leave 1 year later. You can only do this once every 5 years – otherwise you have to wait until summer the following year and then go back to Taiwan and collect a cheque.

Quite simply, the way to save is private students which will earn you anything from 700twd to 1500twd an hour. Try and negotiate being paid for 10 classes upfront by offering a discount – this will give you more reliability. Also try to make the classes 90 minutes minimum as you will usually have to go to them and you don’t want to be spending more time travelling than teaching. Again, offer discounts for 2 hour classes. It will pay off in the long run. Set a cancellation policy – I learned this after having a student who would cancel on me as I was on the way to a class, and another who would halve the time we were having together when I was already there. Make sure they pay you for your time. I consistently got frustrated by the lack of respect from my students that this was how I earned my living. Having said that, though, private tutoring was one of the most fun and rewarding things I did, as it allowed me to teach adults which is what I’m actually trained for.

I earned between 9,500 and 20,000twd extra every month from private students by listing myself on tutoring websites. I think one month I hit 30,000twd from privates, but I was exhausted and drained and it stopped being worth it. I tried to limit myself to two private classes a week, one on Saturdays and one in the evening after work. I could have done more, but leaving my apartment at 9am and getting home at 10.30pm after an entire day of teaching isn’t sustainable for more than one or two days a week, for me at least. If you can do that, great. And of course, the more hours you’re earning, the less you’re spending. Because I tutored at the weekend, the number of weekend trips I went on was limited.

Remember, 25-30 hours of teaching a week might not sound much to someone who’s used to a 9-5 40 hour work week, but you’re on your feet and talking constantly. You’re also expected to do unpaid preparation time and marking in pretty much every job, about 10 hours a week average if you have a 30 hour work week.

Final tips:

Keep a budget app. I loved Monefy, because the interface was extremely nice to use.

Meal plan I saved the most when I still had a kitchen (before my stove broke 6 months before I left) and I would do all my cooking on a Monday evening, then take it to school for lunch and a mid afternoon meal. My school had a microwave (which then also broke…) so I would heat things up there. Bulk buying and cooking and using a lot of dried beans bought cheaply saved me a lot of money, and I was eating well for around 100twd a day. Plus an extra 60twd or so for my breakfast smoothie and a light meal at the end of the day.

Do a mixture of day job and privates, or kindy and buxiban I know I’ve said this already, but this really is where you’ll make bank in a way that you simply won’t with just buxiban (afternoon cram school). If you can get an all day kindergarten job (usually 9-3/4) then find an evening cram school job or tutoring, that’s the best.

Avoid a Western lifestyle if you go out every weekend, if you drink, if you hang around in coffee shops, and if you hunt down the Western food you will burn through your earnings very, very fast. Eat noodles, rice, local market produce, and from local places and you’ll find it easy to put away money.

And most importantly, enjoy! I could have saved a lot more, but I’ve very happy with what I did save and I had fun, learned Chinese, took yoga classes, went out about once a month, and travelled around a little. I lived a single lifestyle where I was rarely home, and I at times spent more than I maybe should have. I struggled from time to time, but when I left Taiwan it was with a lot of positive feelings.

You can save a lot in Taiwan, or nothing at all. It’s completely up to you how hard you want to work and how hard you want to play. Just don’t think that it’s cheap just because it’s Asia. Good luck!

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Taiwan, and the demise of my self-esteem

“You have a lot of pimples, are you on your period or just tired?” was the first thing my Chinese teacher said to me when I walked into Starbucks one day. I just wasn’t wearing makeup.

Recently, I have been fighting an ongoing battle with pinkeye. It’s now 7 weeks and counting. When it first developed I immediately went to the doctor before it could get worse (clearly that worked). Having had a bad experience with a clinic previously, when a doctor insisted my dislocated rib was a pulled muscle and refused to even feel the large, hard lump sticking out of my chest, I decided to go to the hospital this time round. And to make sure there would be no understandings, I took my friend who studies Chinese philosophy, who speaks Chinese.

Google ‘pink eye’ or ‘conjunctivitis’ and you get a page of stomach turning images of green gunk filled, swollen, red eyes. That is exactly, eye for eye, what my left eye looked like. I could only just open it. It was not, emphasis on not, a hard diagnosis.

So you can imagine my confusion when I was sent to the optometrist and tested for glasses. Almost in tears, I insisted that I couldn’t see out of my eye and stop trying to make me see tiny letters on the distant wall.

“If you can’t see, then you need glasses,” the girl said.

I pointed at my red, oozing, swollen eye in disbelief. “This isn’t something I need glasses for!”

Thankfully, my friend convinced her to be less trigger happy about prescribing me a pair of lenses. After more logic-less healthcare and five hours of my life gone, I left with two bottles of eye drops and a weird longing for the NHS.

The doctor had given me the all clear to go straight back to work, but I took the next morning off anyway because conjunctivitis is extremely contagious when it’s oozing still, and giving it to all my small children would not make me teacher of the year.

“Eyes? Red eyes?” chorused my six year olds when I entered, first class back. Their English is very limited so my co-teacher explained to them that they couldn’t come too close to me. In unison, their hands went over their eyes. “No!” I shouted, “that will make it more likely to infect!”

“Why are your eyes red?” asked one of my twelve year old girls. I proceeded to explain what had happened and we talked about whether it hurt. Two minutes later the boy in the seat behind her asked, “teacher, why are your eyes red?”

“See?” I replied. “This is why you need to listen and not talk Chinese. We just talked about my eye.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Really.”

“So, why are they red?”

“TEACHER, YOUR EYES, THEY’RE SOOOOOOO RED, AND SOOOOOOO SMALL,” shouted one of my eight year old students the second I walked into the room. By far my biggest cram school class, all seventeen of them gathered round to stare, laugh and point.

I wish there was a happy ending to my battle with pinkeye, but thanks to the climate (hot and humid is a breeding ground for bacteria) and my babies (a room full of toddlers is also a germ factory) it keeps coming back, just thankfully not as bad as the first time round. Salt water is helping more than the eye drops, and I’ll keep fighting it.

The eyes are just part of the picture, though. Since I got here my hair has turned into a frizzball of a totally different texture that gets drier instead of greasy the longer I’ve gone without washing, and my skin broke out so badly it was my teenage acne years all over again. A year in my face has cleared but my chest hasn’t, and I’ve cut my hair off to a level where the frizz is more manageable, but I still wouldn’t say I feel like ‘me’.

And the thing is, this is not British or Western culture. Personal comments here are a sign of caring, and it’s relatively normal to comment on weight gain or loss however minimal, on pimples, and on hair and general physical appearance. In the UK if I was having a breakout, sometimes what would get me out of the house would be the thought ‘it’s okay, no one will notice, it’s just me that it’s obvious to.’ What you realise here is that, everywhere else, they’re just being polite.

I know I’m a soft touch, which definitely exacerbated the following events, but a few days ago my 8 year old girls decided to massage my shoulders when I was writing communication books. Before, they liked braiding my hair and saying “Mei mei!!” which means little sister. Apparently I have bad hair, because it’s curly. I interpret this as being my hair is bad, because it’s different. After a moment of pummelling my shoulders, they started flapping my arm fat. I have no more than the average woman, and less than most, but still enough to amuse 8 year olds. Then they called my eyes small, and my nose big. And have I thought of surgery? Everyone gets it here… Then they asked me “teacher, do you think you’re fat?” That’s where I drew the line and told them you don’t ask people that. They said okay and sloped off.

Did I know about plastic surgery when I was 8? Maybe, because I grew up next door to a clinic, but I wouldn’t have known the details or known enough to tell someone to get it. The comments were a strange mixture of childish rudeness and cultural gap. I like the girls who made them a lot: they’re good kids, and I can’t imagine that there was anything malicious or hurtful intended in them. They do what I ask and are usually respectful. It had me wondering, what actually counts as disrespect here?

The only comment on my aesthetics that’s ever provoked a negative reaction from a Taiwanese coworker was when I was teaching colors in kindergarten. “Brown!” I flash-carded them. One of my Korean toddlers shuffled forwards and pointed at my quite-tanned arm. “Brown!” he shouted out.

“Brown!” The face of a toddler confronted with a blonde-haired green-eyed Westerner.

My coworker looked shocked. “He doesn’t mean it!” she said, placating me as though he had just pointed to me for the flashcard ‘ugly cow’.

There are some curious culture divides.

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Happy Holidays from Taiwan

As I may have mentioned here before (with a slight tinge of bitterness) holiday time here is something non-existent. Last night I Skyped a friend who’s been living and teaching in Beijing since last May. It was our first time catching up. “How much annual leave do you get?” he asked. I held up a balled fist to the camera. It took him a moment to realise. Because I private tutor too – one session a week adds significantly to what I save every month – I work Saturday mornings. My school also has me working the occasional Saturday, and once, in December, a Sunday.

This was a strange award ceremony on the 4th floor of a cinema in a remote part of the city, where the kids doing well in English got to watch a film, and then a colleague and I were brought in to hand them awards on a tiny raised podium. Trying to manoeuvre around ten children standing on a 4ft by 7ft raised platform to put medals over their heads wasn’t easy, and I nearly fell off or knocked a child off a couple of times. Then I had to have a picture taken handing them a certificate. Tip: if you’re coming to Taiwan, learn how to have the perfect camera smile ready to pop out at any moment. I don’t have one. Mine was a pained and awkward grimace. What made this whole event particularly surreal was that the music they had chosen to play sounded like ‘riding over hills’ generic video game music from ten years ago. I was pretty sure I remembered it from Legend of Zelda.

I had to press ‘Insert link’ to get this image on the page, get the pun? (Nerd reference).

The Saturday I worked in December was a ‘make-up day’ for having two days off at New Year. This wasn’t just my school, this was every company across the island. Because New Year was a Thursday, Thursday and Friday were off school. But two days off in a row??? Who heard of such a thing? The country will collapse! So we had to work Saturday the 29th to make up for not working Friday the 2nd. Some companies ignored this of course, they gave the Saturday off but not the Friday, and some gave both, but most schools held to having the make-up day. All of this meant that in the whole of December I was not working for… 3 days. I’m burned out. Because of the make-up day and the cinema award ceremony, I was working for 13 days straight, with Christmas towards the tail end of those days. By the end of this period, I bore an uncanny resemblance to this rabbit:

Me in December

My coping strategy towards dealing with missing Christmas, and one that I’ve heard repeated by other expats, is to tell myself that I’m just saving Christmas up for next year. I was homesick at the time, but now that it’s over and it’s 2015 it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Something that is celebrated is New Year’s Eve, though.

When I left work on Wednesday night, the city had changed. Small nightmarkets had popped up where they’d never been before. People, people were everywhere! Although, for a capital of Asia, Taiwan is pretty small and empty of people, it’s still far more densely populated than most European cities. But because everyone is working all the time, I never really realised this until so many people appeared.

The biggest event in the city is the fireworks at Taipei 101. One of the tallest buildings in the world in a relatively small city, it looks odd standing out so high about the city with very few other buildings that even reach 1/3rd of the way up it. People appeared about 4 hours early to get a good spot, and I’m pretty sure I saw a few tents set up. By about 11.30pm it was hard to move. We found a patch of ground to sit on, and waiting for the fireworks. They started at midnight, and lasted for three minutes. They were nice, but not that impressive.

The most impressive thing was the amount of people videoing it. My newsfeed now has many, many pictures that all look exactly the same. Something like this one.

Taipei 101 lit up

Taipei 101 lit up

And when I turned around to look at people’s faces, this is what I saw:

Smart-phone fever

Smart-phone fever

It doesn’t really show the amount of people on their phones, but I think it was every other person watching the fireworks though their screen. I wondered what the point of even being there was. Oh well, welcome to the future. Even though the MRT was running until midnight, there were lines around the block to even get it, so I walked home. The internet on all phones had stopped working several hours before, so meeting up with any other friends wasn’t going to happen. All in all, a mellow NYE. And then four days off. In which I’ve been sleeping, and writing, and staying up too late. It’s glorious.

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The New Year resolution revolution.

Today a woman stopped me in the street on my way out of the metro, as I was trying to cross the road to get to my apartment, and food. “Do you know how to be happy?” she asked, smiling unnaturally and handing me a flier. I’ve been homesick all week thanks to working Christmas, I haven’t had a day off other than Sundays in several months, and I’m going through an ‘I hate my job, I’d rather be anywhere else but here’ phase. It will pass, but strangely enough when my blood sugar is on a downward spiral and there’s a strange woman keeping me from my food… that’s not something I remember.

I think I may have muttered ‘no,’ rather offishly, and looked pointedly at the lights willing them to change.

She handed me a leaflet: ‘Keys to a Happy Life.’ As I walked up the stairs I realised she was a Jehovah’s Witness. They’ve made it to Asia now? Where do I have to move to escape them?

Which, of course, has me thinking about happiness. My personal happiness project has slipped a little this month, thanks to aforementioned burn out and lack of festive spirits. I’ve been mainly focusing on getting out bed in the morning, and on not crying at work when a kid makes my life difficult on Christmas day, and I look on Facebook to see friends and family having Christmas as it should be. Whatever, it’s been hard, but it’s not like I ever thought it would be easy.

Onwards and upwards, and here comes 2015. There are many arguments for why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. The easiest comparison to make about them is that they’re like diets. They’re a short-term fix rather than a lifestyle change, and people quickly slip and pile back on the pounds, or the broken resolutions. Here’s a link that will send you to a study on New Year’s Resolutions, with the statistics that 60% of them fail, mainly after the first week. A plethora of articles across the internet advise making small changes that are attainable. This seems logical enough. But I’m going to go back to the Happiness Project here for inspiration, or what I termed my ‘Buddhism Project‘.

Sure, setting a small goal may be easier to keep, but it’s also easier to discard. I like the idea of stepped changes. Like Gretchen Rubin adds a new set of changes every month, I like to have an end goal that is fairly considerable, but broken down into manageable steps. Losing a total of 40 pounds can be broken down into 3-5pounds a month, for instance, which is achievable and also allows room for failure on one or two of the months.

Another article, published only about 15 hours earlier than this blog post, says that New Year’s resolutions are procrastinating something you should be starting today. Sure, if it’s losing weight or quitting smoking maybe. I personally like the idea of a concrete date to make a change, though, and here’s where the revolution aspect of resolutions comes in: using the last few days of the old year to properly take time to reflect on your life is valuable time to think over what realistically needs changing, and how to do it. I like the word revolution for its double meaning: typically we think of revolutions as an uprising against a political power, but the word originally come from the Latin ‘revolutio,’ meaning turn around. A new year is a fresh start, a revolution, or a turn around. A reason to look at what hasn’t been working, and what has been working but could work better. I like to think of it as a chance to refocus: to look at where I’ve gone off track this year, and to work on pulling things back in.

For me, this year has been somewhat stale. This may seem odd as I’ve graduated and moved to Asia in 2014, but in terms of having a direction in life I’ve actually backtracked. This was mainly due to a messy break up and my somewhat rash decision to flee the country when, excuse the phrase, I was so confused about what was happening in my life that I couldn’t tell my arse from my elbow. Suddenly I was in Taiwan going ‘how did I get here? What?’ Strangely enough, this is a common story here. In many ways this year has been a huge turning point in my life, but most of it has been spent trying to figure things out, remembering how to be alone, getting good at being alone again, losing the ability, regaining it, and dealing with a full time job involving lots of very very small humans who don’t speak my language.

In conclusion, I’m currently working on my list of New Year’s resolutions. Nowhere does losing weight feature, or quitting smoking. I don’t smoke so that’s a no-brainer, but you get the principle. My main challenge is to be more productive with my time, so that I can manage to fit a life of my own in around my job. I’m starting with getting up earlier. Not much earlier, just an hour or so. Then I’ll try and be productive in that hour. Then I’m going to get up a little earlier still until I can fit in a decent amount of exercise, or a blog post, or some Chinese. I’ve been working on phasing out TV series’ (on my laptop, I haven’t watched an actual TV in a long time) for a while. It’s going pretty well, but then it’s an ongoing process, not sudden cold Turkey.

While there’s no reason not to do this throughout the year, I personally like the concrete milestone provided by the New Year, and the inevitable reflection on the past year that we all find ourselves doing. I don’t believe New Year’s resolutions are worthless, or procrastination. They’re a way of starting as you mean to go on, of staging a revolution against what isn’t working, and of turning around and refocusing the things that are but could do better.

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Tales from the classroom #1: reflections on teaching

Teaching day in, day out, can get pretty tiring. So something I’ve started doing at the end of each day is taking time to remember my favourite moments. I’m nowhere near diligent enough about doing this, as sometimes the last thing I want to do in the evenings is remember that I teach children and I’ll have to see them again soon. Nonetheless, it is a good practice to keep, and in the spirit of keeping it, here are a few of my favourite anecdotes.

Taiwanese children and shoes

There have been a series of shoe incidences in my older and younger classes. Walter (2) who can’t speak a work except for ‘uh oh!’ when disaster looms (or when he’s just tipped out someone’s water bottle everywhere) will break ranks to toddle up to me when I’m teaching, expressing his emotion with a mixture of crying/moaning/wailing/shouting. Naturally, I assume something is horrendously wrong and I stop the class to deal with this crisis. The crisis is that the heel of his shoe has slipped off. Mia (also 2) spent the first 2 months of my class not listening at all, but solemnly taking off first one shoe, then a sock, then the other shoe, then the sock, then putting one sock back on, then one shoe, then the other sock, then the other shoe, then taking the shoe off again, then the sock, then the other shoe… You get the idea. It was a process that required a lot of concentration and sometimes help from the other children. Timothy (also 2… Sensing a theme yet?) is one of the newest students in my class and spent the first two weeks being exceptionally distressed about his mum not being there. His response to this distress was, instead of clutching a comforter or soft toy, clutching his shoes as he barrelled (he is by no means small, I call him the kettlebell kid) around the classroom wailing, and occasionally breaking out and dropping his shoes into the bathroom sink.

Meanwhile, in Bushiban, I introduced my children to the game 20 questions. Instead of trying to narrow down their options, they prefer just to attempt mind reading by shouting out answers. The 20 questions pass by very fast. One of my favourite moments was when Dean (approx.8) shouted out the first question of a new round. Except it wasn’t a question, what he shouted at the girl with the answer was: “IT’S A SHOE!” As I pointed out to him, of all the millions and millions of objects and plants and animals in the world, why, just why, did he have such conviction that the answer was a shoe?
Peein’acdotes

When working with small children, bodily functions are unavoidable. Be it rediscovering the hilarity of a fart with a room of 5 year olds, or the constant exposure to pee and poop when working with toddlers (thankfully diaper changes are handled by my classroom assistants) there is no avoiding the messier side of the human body. When I started, the majority of my children were still in diapers. Now the majority (not the vast majority, but a lot more than at the beginning) have been toilet trained and will get up in class, clutch themselves in the relevant places and shout “PEEPEE!” Whereupon they will get rushed out, stripped from the waist down, and thrust against a urinal/onto a tiny toilet. Sometimes they put the pants back on afterwards, sometimes not. I havent established why redressing their nether parts is optional. This process of potty training has not been without hitch. The attempt to potty train Nolan has, at last check, been aborted. I don’t think it lasted longer than a week, because the poor kid kept appearing by me or my c.a and making a helpless noise, gesturing to the pee that drenched his pants and trickled onto the floor. At one point he was going through three pairs of pants… Not three pairs a day, but three pairs in my class, which is 90 minutes long. Eventually, after this had happened for the third time and Nolan was in his final pair of pants, his upbeat spirit gave out. The pants were too large for him, and kept falling down, leaving his tiny buttocks exposed to the elements. He broke down, and helplessly wept, climbing onto my knee and clinging to me for dear life. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a kid who keeps wetting himself.

Sometimes, wetting of pants can provide more hilarious results. Joon, one of my three Korean toddlers, trotted up to me during our Monday play session where I turn them loose to run off their Monday morning steam. He gestured to his pants, which were soaked, and I handed him over to Rachel for a change. So far so good but, I realised, the puddle was nowhere to be seen. Where was the scene of the crime? The mystery was soon solved when I heard “Laoshi, laoshi!!” (Teacher, teacher) being shouted from the play house. When I looked through the door, four of my toddlers were trapped inside by a pee puddle that neatly spread from one side of the doorway to the other, completely trapping them inside.

The final pee tale is one of gender defiance. Sofia (2 again) is my shyest, sweetest girl who spent an entire month being terrified of me and fleeing behind the nearest Taiwanese person whenever I approached, sometimes literally thrashing across the floor for more speed. Fear has now turned into a sort of awed reverence, and she follows me around, shows me her nail polish, and the other day stood watching me write communication books and kissing every one. Sweet. Anyway, I was standing in the bathroom one day when I saw her pull her diaper and panties down. I assumed she was preparing for a pit stop on the toilet, and for some reason didn’t think to question it when she walked towards the urinal instead. It was only when she hiked up her dress and executed an expert hip-thrust forwards that I clued onto what was going on. Clearly, she had watched many a boy use the urinal and she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Not having the right equipment be damned! she thought. It would have been an admirable gender barrier protest, but she hadn’t hitched her skirt up far enough, and instead of hitting the urinal she just, like so many of these stories, soaked herself. I could have stopped things, I know I could, but I was standing laughing. It wasn’t my finest moment as a caregiver.

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