Humorous Begininnings

The names Grow... Dave Grow. I am 26 years old and I have a Masters Degree is Business. I have been teaching English in Taiwan for over a year. I was born in 1982, the year of the Rooster, and come from New York, where police officers still ride horses. I may or may not be a spy for the Taiwanese government. This is the persona I have taken on for work and the sake of my students... except I lied about 1982, it was really the year of the Dog.

My first official week of classes has come to a close and I have learned many a valuable lesson. Valuable lesson number one: Taiwanese humor is quite different from mine. Due to the fact that Chinese is a tonal language, there are a huge number of words that sound almost exactly alike. So, Chinese humor is largely based on puns, and my sense of humor is therefore rendered insignificant to a group of students with a limited knowledge of the English language. However, we are all learning from one another (language from me, puns from them) and eventually we will meet somewhere in the middle.

For instance, today's lesson was modal verbs and how to make a suggestion or give advice. After we get through most of the lesson, I become slightly disinterested in listening to students repeat the same suggestions about what to take on a camping trip over and over again. I ask students to think of good advice or life suggestions that they can make to one another, and I give an example I think of on the spot. "In America, people will often say to one another 'You shouldn't eat yellow snow.'" In retrospect, a little planning and a better suggestion would have made my life easier.

First, I had to remind my students, all of whom live in a tropical climate, what snow is. Next I had to explain that snow is usually white, and as many of them thought, it's not pollution that makes it yellow. Third, I had to explain that it's a bit of a joke, between kids. This is certainly not the wisdom of the sages. Like I said, though, we will find a middle ground. And if they don't laugh at my jokes, they will certainly laugh at my terrible drawings on the board.