Today:
志工感言 (Reflection) >> Hawaii
# Center
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17 Hawaii
Sung, Justin (宋昱宏)
I originally decided to participate in AIDSummer because a) I needed something to do over the summer, b) volunteering seemed to be a good idea, and c) maybe it might be a way to help me “talk in a straight line” and keep the same focus in one sentence. Also, as most of my family lived in Kaohsiung, I wanted to explore other parts of Taiwan.
After getting accepted to the program and being assigned to Nei-Hu Junior High School in Hsinchu, I felt excited but also nervous: Even though I had “taught” an English class at a senior center previously, the class was mostly led by the students; all I really needed to do was drop a subject and the class would talk for hours. That nervousness only grew throughout the first week, when previous AID-ers told us that they planned too little and had to improvise five hours after only two hours of planned classes, or when teachers constantly reminded us to talk more slowly and simply when we thought we sounded like idiots already, or when we were pretty much bored to tears in the freezing lecture halls. It wasn’t all too bad, as the games we learned were really useful: we eventually used variations of the fly swatter game (hit the word on the board) nearly every day to review the topics; however, the one thing that kept me going was a comment from one of the teachers at 6:00 AM one morning, saying that our students would love us no matter what happened. I wasn’t exactly sure how accurate she was, but it did help a bit.
Eventually we finished our teaching plan, opening ceremony dance, and self-introductions, supposedly ready to teach. And the first day we were completely knocked over by students that didn’t really talk or do anything. When they did talk, they either followed the exact format (e.g. there is no answer outside of “fine, thank you”) of the sentence or they spoke so quietly that we couldn’t hear (cue in my mom’s “are you a mosquito” comment). They didn’t really respond to our games and looked like us during training week: constant bored face. The ice slowly melted after 7 hours a day with our students, as the connection gradually changed between the hard teacher-student relationship to something more resembling friends (at a more “equal” level); it changed from students trying to avoid us during breaks to playing Hangman in the mornings and dueling with fly swatters. Eventually everyone knew that Kevin was afraid of spiders, Meek liked SpeXial, Henry liked Bruno Mars and blue. We laughed along when they joked that Neal and Winnie were “uncle and little sister.”
After the 2 weeks ended, it felt as if something had been ripped apart; I didn’t want to leave the place; saying goodbye was too hard. Maybe I had not completely been able to talk in a straight line during the two weeks, but both we volunteer teachers and the students found something positive. One of those things for me was re-found confidence. Maybe I’ll be able to talk in a straight line one day. And I know there will be people I can talk to.
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