Thankfully, we had one free day before resuming classes after the Social Study Trip, because I was EXHAUSTED from all that running around! However, I’m still incredibly thankful I had the ability to get outside of Taipei as part of my language program this summer, since I was too unconfident in my language skills to \u8cb7\u9ad8\u9435\u7968 \/ navigate a new area by myself when I was doing ICLP last year.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Week 5 is where I really started experiencing burn-out. I was already not getting enough sleep since the first week of the program, but combined with not having enough time for proper meals and nutrition (every single night, I would cycle between the same 3 ready-to-eat meals from 7\/11 because I didn’t have more than 20 minutes for dinner if I wanted to read as much of the lesson as possible before the next class), my body really starting shutting down on me. I started falling asleep in class, and once, even came to school with my shirt turned inside out. This was a sign I needed to start prioritizing sleep above all else, so I made a very difficult decision to cut back on how much I was preparing so I could guarantee 6-7 hours of sleep per night instead of 3-5. To be honest, it didn’t make much of a difference in my performance during class because I was lost either way, but at least I was actually lucid and awake while my teachers were lecturing.<\/p>\n
For people reading and wondering what was taking me so long, here’s how I explained it to my friends who asked me about ICLP this summer: ICLP has way more actual homework — an assignment for each class, and altogether, even when auditing a class, 3 assignments took me 4-5 hours to complete — but what you need to prepare to say or do in class each day is a lot less. However, it’s basically the opposite at HTA. We only had 1 assignment per day, and the homework was not necessarily hard, but preparing the lesson took forever because the teachers genuinely expected students to memorize about 60 vocabulary words per night, on top of remembering the minute details of each part of the lesson (usually a poem, short story, or piece of social commentary in 4th-year Chinese). Therefore, the homework itself did not take me long, but reading just 1 page of the lesson could easily take me 30 minutes. When there are 7 or 8 pages of a lesson, that really starts adding up. Again, if you have a normal, grade-level reading ability, reading the lessons will not take you as long as they took me, but for someone who cannot read at all but can speak and write, this system was pretty torturous. I started just cutting myself off at 4 hours, and while it limited my participation in class slightly, truthfully, it’s not like we had much opportunity to speak in class anyways so things mostly stayed the same: I listened to the teacher lecturing from the PPT, every 4 minutes or so they would ask 1 student a question, and they would start lecturing again.<\/p>\n
I think it’s around this time I started feeling a lot of resentment towards HTA because I could sense my Chinese speaking ability regressing due to the lack of time classroom dedicated to oral practice. I entered as one of the top speakers in the entire program — and easily the top speaker from the non-Chinese students — and by Week 5, I was forgetting really basic words and grammar structures from lack of use, exactly like what I experienced in Williamstown last year while taking 300-level Chinese. It was so disappointing to experience this while living in Taiwan, and even more disappointing that when I met up with my Taiwanese friend for dinner when I could spare an hour this summer, she instantly pointed out mistakes I was making that my teachers just never bothered to fix or acknowledge for some reason. At ICLP, whenever you say something incorrectly, your teachers force you to repeat yourself until you say it correctly (or, at least, all of my teachers did). This method helped me improve my fluency insanely fast. I’m still so flabbergasted that when I said “\u6211\u4e0d\u5728\u4e4e” (mistakenly thinking it meant “\u6211\u4e0d\u4ecb\u610f”) directly to my HTA teacher, they didn’t pull me aside and mention how inappropriate that was to say to a teacher — my friend had to tell me the actual tone of \u6211\u4e0d\u518d\u6703 after the summer ended. I still feel so embarrassed for saying that to my teacher, and am bummed I didn’t learn the issue with what I said in time to apologize to them, but I am even more confused that every time I made a mistake in my natural speech this summer, my teachers just never gave me any corrections. Isn’t that the beauty of the language pledge in a residential program, for the teachers to hear your natural speech and correct it so that you get used to saying things the correct way? What’s the purpose of the language speech if we don’t receive corrections? At that point, all of us were just reinforcing our own mistakes for the majority of the summer. I wish the teachers had been much more (or even a little!) strict about correcting us when we spoke incorrectly. Even if I wasn’t learning much in the classroom, that would have helped learners like me who learn aurally still progress over the summer just from our out-of-class informal instruction.<\/p>\n
I also have other issues with how HTA enforced the language pledge — namely, NOT enforcing it. I think I heard more English on my SST trip to Tainan than I heard the entire rest of the summer. It was clearly in earshot of the teachers because they sat at the table directly next to the group of students speaking the whole time in English and we were at a tiny restaurant where noise carried. That group of students was also being very disrespectful to the teachers in other ways that I’m not going to get into here, but for the ones that are reading this — just know that literally every other student heard you badmouthing our tour guide, many of us discussed it later, and it reflected very poorly on you. Despite all the gripes I have about HTA (and it probably sounds much harsher than it otherwise would only because I am extremely jet-lagged right now while trying to get these blogs out), it was still a privilege to be on the SST trip and to have the opportunity to be in Taiwan again as a low-income student. This summer has just cemented my plans to move to Taiwan after graduation — although the teaching methods at HTA were not suitable for a student like me who learns aurally, it is undeniable that each teacher was doing their best and suffering a lot more than any of us students were (the poor 4th-year teachers were constantly falling asleep in office hours, getting ill, and grading things at 1 or 2am at night), and I will always be grateful for their efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thankfully, we had one free day before resuming classes after the Social Study Trip, because I was EXHAUSTED from all that running around! However, I’m still incredibly thankful I had the ability to get outside of Taipei as part of … Continue reading