Great Weekend: Great Weather, Food, and Company

This was one of the last weekends I have left completely to myself in Taiwan for the year. Next weekend we have graduation on Saturday and the weekend after that the students leave on Saturday at noon. It has gone so fast and the end is literally right around the corner- when did that happen?!

Good thing this weekend was fairly epic as far as fun and relaxation goes. The weekend started off great with my friend Rachel's art show opening party on Friday night. That night also turned out to be a late one because a few of us girls decided to check out a new nightclub in Taichung and ended up staying out dancing all night (it was worth being tired the next day because it was ridiculously fun).

Saturday was a lazy day, for obvious reasons. By the time evening time rolled around, we all headed over to the art museum area to attend the annual Food and Music Festival. I didn't really listen to the music but I ate a lot of good food! Then the night again took a turn and we went dancing at the same nightclub AGAIN but with a bigger group of friends. It was again, lots of fun as you can imagine.

Today, Sunday, has been more productive than the rest of my weekend. Laundry, cleaning, planning for the week, and lying on the roof sunning since it is 85 with bright blue skies here. It is weekends like this that make me realize how amazing my life is living abroad, but also how good of friends I have found here. I consider myself a very lucky girl to have found such a great bunch of coworkers in this school.

Now one more week of teaching before finals testing!

My Inability to Identify and Buy a Mango

The saga of my mango search continues. If you read one of my previous blog posts, you would know that I started this quest about a week ago, knowing that mangos are in season in Taiwan. I went to a fresh fruit market and came back with a papaya instead (you can see a picture below).

Yesterday I decided to give it another shot. This time I had to come back with a mango, right? Wrong. I went to the fresh fruit market and looked around a little more this time. Finally I came across a bin of fruit that I was convinced were mangos. I picked one up and sniffed it: sure spelled like mango. Bought three and hopped back on my scooter to bring my "mangos" home.

As soon as I got home, I youtubed how to cut up a mango and sure enough, the fruit the man was holding in the video looked vastly different from the one I had picked up. An impostor fruit again! I cut it up anyway and just had some for breakfast (SORT of tastes like a mango, but not the texture), but was still curious as to what I had come home with.

After 30 minutes of google searching phrases like "exotic fruits inex" and "things that taste like a mango but aren't," I still have no idea what it is. If google doesn't know what it is, does anyone??? I picked up some crazy Taiwanese fruit I think...

Orange You Happy to be Learning Geometry?

In my geometry classes, I have been teaching my students about geometric solids- prisms, cylinders, cubes, cones, spheres, pyramids. Yesterday we learned that the surface area of a sphere is 4 times the area of a circle with the same radius. My students asked why it was 4 and not 3 or 5 or 7. I told them to wait...until today!

I bought a bunch of oranges and brought them into class this morning. Each group of students got a tape measure to estimate the circumference of their orange and then find their radius. I instructed them to construct 6 circles with that same radius on a sheet of paper. Then we peeled our oranges (and made my classroom smell great in the process!).

I told the students were were going to fill our circles with peel. They made predictions on how many circles should be filled with the orange peels and then started filling the circles. The point of the activity is to provide a more tactile example of why it is 4 times the area of a circle and not 3 or 5 or 7. By the end of the class, some of my students gave me great "ah-ha moments" when they realized what we were doing. Great activity for geometry students! (especially ESL students...)

Best Birthday in Asia Yet

I write this post on May 19th, a day after my 23rd birthday. It was the first and only birthday thus far that I have spent away from friends and family from home. However far away from home I may be though, it was possibly the best birthday I've had in a while!

The day started off with my 1st hour class playing a joke on me. As the bell rang to start school, my 10C class was mysteriously replaced with the 11A class. I had no idea what was going on and the students were not very helpful (as you can imagine). After about ten minutes or so with the wrong class, my coworker Kate came up to my classroom and told me 10C was down in her classroom waiting for me.

Of course, when I walked in a loud rendition of "Happy Birthday to You" sounded in both English and then in Chinese. Not only that, but they had ordered a cake for me too! They gave me a card with all of their pictures and notes written from all of them that they made themselves (the pink heart shaped one you see in the picture). It was a great way to start my birthday.

At lunch time, my advisees were likewise sneaky. They hid everything from me and as lunch ended, they led me out to the picnic tables outside of school where they had ANOTHER cake for me waiting. While eating my second piece of cake, they gave me cards they made themselves and a few gifts (including a really pretty pair of earrings from my advisee Angel!).

My last class of the day wasn't much different, they acted normal until one boy asked to go to the bathroom and came back with a HUGE card/sign (the big yellow one you see in the picture) that he made himself. The whole class signed it and wrote little notes which were pretty adorable (most of the messages asked me not to give homework on my birthday).

I never really expected my students to make such a big deal out of my birthday, seeing as how I generally don't advertise it much myself. But it really did make my day. As if the students adorable displays of affection and gratitude weren't enough, the package that my parents sent arrived at 5 p.m. on my actual birthday. What good timing postal service of Taiwan!

Even though turning 23 is somewhat unimportant, my students and family wishing me happy birthday from home made it exceptionally special. So thank you to all of you who wished me happy birthday, sent me a card, or skyped me yesterday. You made my day! (well you, and tons of Asian students giving me presents...)

Tropical Fruit

One of the major advantages of living on a tropical island, besides the weather obviously, is the tropical fruit that goes with. It is mango season in Taiwan and I love mangos. I tried to buy a mango at a fruit market the other day but got home and realized it was either a genetically modified mango (it was gigantic compared to what a mango should be) or it was not a mango at all.

After a few minutes on the google machine, I realized I had indeed bought an impostor fruit: papaya. I wasn't all that upset however, this huge tropical fruit cost me no more than $2 and I'm sure it will be likewise delicious. Next time I will be more careful in my mango searching though!

Busy May

First of all, let me say sorry for my lack of posting recently! I know that some of you cannot possibly function without a new post on "Taiwan of Bust" to start their day (clearly joking), but I've been busy. This May is shaping up to be the busiest month of the entire year!

With the end of the school year fast approaching, May is the month in which everything that still needs to be done gets crammed in. Art show, choir concert, hiking trip, senior trip (to Guam! I'm not going, don't be too excited), graduation, the list could go on forever! And those are just the weekend activities that I will need to attend in the coming weeks. On top of those, I need to write my finals, finish the grades for this term, teach for two more weeks, and wrap my entire year up. Yikes!

I knew that the end of the year would go quickly, but I didn't think it would go this quickly. With this crazy schedule in May, I am going to be home before I know it. As the count stands right now, it is 30 days until I board a plane in Taipei for home this summer. Minnesota look out, I'm going to be back before you blink twice!

My Favorite May Weekend

This past weekend was as close to perfect as any weekend has ever come for me. Friday night was a good meal out to eat with friends and then a really fun time at a local bar we frequent to celebrate a coworker's sister's birthday. Pretty standard Friday night after a long week.

Staying out late made Chinese classes on Saturday morning a little rough, but luckily we were all tired so we all got a little silly by the end to say the least- it's amazing what lack of sleep and trying to learn a foreign language will do to a person. Then that entire afternoon I spent out and about with two coworkers.

My one coworker, Kevin, has lived in Taichung for over 3 years and is completely fluent in Chinese. So of course we made him show us around for an afternoon! It was really nice because he can accomplish lots of little tasks for us much quicker than we can ourselves since he can communicate. I put minutes on my phone, made some stamps, got mango shaved ice (as delicious as it sounds), and bought new speakers for my computer/iPod. Such a success!

Saturday night we accompanied Kevin to a night market for some street food and people watching which is my favorite part about living in Asia. And after staying out late on Friday night, it was nice to be home by 10:30 after we had enough fried squid.

Sunday was the ideal icing on the cake of this weekend: pool day. We recently discovered a public pool that is pretty cheap near our school. Two coworkers and I got there at 11:30 and stayed for three hours or so. It was the perfect weather for a pool day: 85 and sunny. I finished up my weekend by watching a movie in my apartment with a bottle of wine. Who can beat that?!

This weekend leaves me completely recharged for Monday morning. Who wants to learn about geometry! Only three more weeks of learning children, then it's review for the finals. Oh how this year has flown by!

First Day of Project Presentations

Today the geometry game projects were due. I collected all projects from the kiddos and started the groups on their presentations. I expected to get through all of the groups in both classes because I honestly expected the groups to stand up, explain their game, show how to play it for a few minutes, then sit down.

Oh how I was wrong! In both classes we only got to see one group present! Not because it was terribly bad or something really wrong happened, but because both groups were awesome! My first hour, Tommy and Howard, used my projector to display their board. Then using the Nerf Gun I purchased a few nights ago, their game had a pretty simple concept:

What was really great about Tommy and Howard's presentation however, is that shooting Nerf darts at a board wasn't the whole thing. Oh no, they made an entire review game out of it (score for us teachers!). They split the class up into two teams and made people face off on geometry questions from the entire year. If you answered correctly, you could shoot a dart at the board and try to score some points for your team.

Obviously this went on all hour because they had enough questions and the class was reviewing for the final in the process! I never told the boys to do this, they just decided to. It rocked.

My second class of the day is always a little more interesting than my first hour. I struggle on a daily basis to control them and they are somewhat notorious in the school for having behavioral issues. Today with them however, you would have never guessed that.

One group of girls decided to put water balloons on a styrofoam board and throw darts at it. Great idea because they had different sized water balloons to account for geometric probability. Also a great idea because it was different and we could go outside to do their presentation:

What was also awesome about this activity, is that it kept these particular 9th graders entertained for the entire hour. The girls brought enough water balloons for everyone to go several times:

Ms. Pint even got a chance to throw a dart or two:

And of course, when there were extra water balloons left at the end of class, Ms. Pint got hit with not one, not two, but three water balloons! I wasn't mad however, because I was also pelting my students with water balloons so it was not unprovoked :)

All in all, a very good first day of presentations so I am excited to see what tomorrow brings!

I Love Geometry Projects

Every math teacher has a preferred area of mathematics. My coworker/friend Kate loves trig and calculus, my boss likes algebra, and I just so happen to love geometry. I think what I like about it is that everything has real world applications. The pictures help visual learners make sense of things and it seems to be more of a hands on type of math for some reason.

All of those reasons, AND I get to do some really cool projects with my geometry classes of course! Geometry just lends itself to cool projects because there are so many cool things you can do with shapes, area, angles, you name it.

This week I have started my geometry kids on a new project: the Geometry Game Project. Each group has to make a game based on geometric probability, like darts, and be able to play it with the class when they are due at the end of the week. Lucky for me, my students have totally gotten into it and I think some of these projects are going to turn out very cool.

I will just say this, I am now a proud owner of a Nerf Gun (for geometric purposes only, I swear!). These projects are going to rock! Stay tuned for how they are going, this is what they look like so far:

Best Geometry tool I have purchased thus far.

Two girls are making a game sort of like Plunko- how cool is that?!

Lots of cool looking posters with geometric shapes and calculations on them. Can't wait to hang these on the classroom walls!