Speed Dating

My fellow Fulbright ETAs and I have been Speed Dating with the Local English Teachers (LETs) for the past week or so, trying to find our perfect co-teaching match. Today was our last day of madness with a harrowing, 2 hour, 12-round speed dating session with all of the LETs before ranking our final choices.

I must admit, the whole ordeal has made us super-competitive. There are a few teachers who probably topped everyone's list and a few who ended up at the bottom of everyone's list. It feels like a big popularity contest--those of us ETAs who are more well-liked will probably get our top picks, while those of us who made a less-favorable impression (which is different from a bad impression) will have to make the most of their matches.

In short, there are 12 neurotic, competitive, over-achieving recent college grads anxiously awaiting the results of the matching process. To make matters worse, we just received the following email from Dr. Phillip Elliot (aka Dr. Phil), our program adviser:

Dear all,

Amanda, Chris and I finished matching you with your LET(s) at about 8:40pm this evening. Joy joined us as well, for dinner and discussion.
We hope the matching will be acceptable to you. We will inform you of the results tomorrow morning at 11am at San Min.

Dr. Phil

Now you may be asking yourself, Why don't they just tell you your matches over email? Yeah, I've been wondering that myself. I hope this means we'll find out about our matches by having our co-teachers pop out of individual cakes or something like that. But I try not to hope for too many things.

To add to the suspense, my flatmates and I are playing a game: we each made a list of who we think will be matched with whom. 1 point for each correct match, and 5 points for correctly guessing who will be matched with a teacher we'll call Mildred, the perceived least-favorite of the bunch. The four of us have agreed not to open our guessing lists until after the coordinators reveal the matches and we eat lunch and sing karaoke to celebrate the upcoming year of teaching. (If you think this sounds like a really "Asian" thing to do, you're correct--in approximately 12 hours, I will be in Asia, singing an off-key duet with my new co-worker.) The three losers each will buy the winner a McDonald's Caramel McFlurry, all in one glorious, gluttonous trip to everyone's favorite slice of Americana. Hopefully hilarity (or tons of vomit) will ensue.

Stay tuned for contest results and possibly some terrible KTV MP3's, if you're lucky.

--The Chao

Panda Eats, Shoots and Leaves

It was the best of days, it was the worst of days. I won't get too far into the bad stuff because apparently people can get in trouble for what they post on the internet, but it has all the elements of great literature: youthful strangers in a strange land, local politicking behind closed doors, racism, culture clash and tears--throw in an extramarital affair and we'd be all set.

And onto the good stuff: the 12 Kaohsiung Fulbright ETAs (that's English Teaching Assistants) will visit each of the 13 elementary schools where we could be placed by the end of Thursday. *aside: The process of placing us with an LET (Local English Teacher) also involves "speed dating" where the ETAs form an inner circle and the LETs form an outer circle and we rotate every minute until we meet all of our potential co-teachers. Why the foundation has decided to adopt such an awkward environment for social interaction is beyond my comprehension, but it's kind of funny so whatever.* We visited the first three schools today, and they made great efforts to woo us into making them our first choice school. A teacher at the first school argued that their school had the nicest facilities since it was only built 6 years ago AND tried to set me up with the national badminton champion gym teacher (you may think I'm joking... I wish you were right). At the second school, the principal boasted that his school was the oldest AND bought us bottled water and a laundry basket full of dragon eye fruit. The third school bought us iced coffee--a welcome treat on a searingly hot day.

And when we arrived at a fourth school (also a potential work site though not part of the day's official school tour) for a conference, the principal gave us buttons that he picked up in Beijing the previous week. Here's the one I chose:


Here's to a new tomorrow, hopefully one with more gunslinging pandas and fewer unpleasant encounters with messy, hidden politics. Cheers!