I love the workshops and in-service training I occasionally do
in Taichung public schools, but not when the two are mixed as they were at
Shuang-Wen Middle School yesterday.
I was told that it
would be a workshop for students trying out their Readers' Theater
presentation. I was expecting to work with the students on delivery and make
suggestions. It started out that way. My wife and I took a taxi to the school
in Da-Li. We were met at the gate by a student escort. He was very friendly. I
asked him if he was in the Readers' Theater troupe and he said 'yes.' I asked
him the name of the skit and he said "The Frog Who Became Emperor." I
told him that, In the USA, we have a skit called "The Pig who Became
President" and he laughed all the way up to the workshop room, even
sharing the joke with his classmates and teacher.
After greeting the
three or four teachers and seven students, I listened and then gave a few
suggestions. Then, one teacher spoke to my wife and asked her to tell me to
stop talking until others came. We assumed the others were students, but there
were another fifteen teachers who entered and sat around the u-shaped tables.
The children were asked to repeat their skit. Then, the Taiwanese teachers
attacked and criticized them. The children's faces turned solemn after
the laughter they exhibited with me earlier, and they listened to the teachers
put in their two-cents and berate their performance.
I was left to
whisper with my wife wondering when the teachers were going to stop talking.
When was I going to be asked again to workshop with the kids? For more than an
hour, I sat. Once, the gentleman teacher who, I learned, was the new
coordinator of the readers' theater initiative (the very pregnant teacher who
did so well last year organizing a contest victory for the kids was on
maternity leave) had the audacity to approach me and ask how a particular
sentence in the script should be intoned. The whole script was in need of
intonation modification but directly with the students, not with the
face-saving coordinator.
In fact, the script,
for which the students had very basic body language or acting, was vague at
best, for a plot that made no sense. It made me wonder: where on earth they had
found it? My wife checked on Google and found a video of a Jewish westerner who
had adapted the story from a western approximation of a 'classic Chinese
story' not found anywhere in Chinese history. The moral, "Never give
up," had nothing to do with the plot. For the life of them, not one of the
twenty Taiwanese teachers could identify the Chinese idiomatic expression that
tales from Chinese history usually moralize.
With plot twists
like the alien birth of a frog to human parents, a frog who could predict the
future, a frog that swallows hot coals to spit heat, a frog that disguises
himself as a stranger to catch a ball so as to marry the princess who he then
reveals his frog-ness to, and the emperor who knows the frog's secret in the
line before the frog actually tells him (perhaps clairvoyant, too) the secret
that wearing the cloak will give him eternal life, without explaining the side
effects of losing his emperor-hood to the frog who then becomes the new
emperor. This is the moral? Never give up? I gave up.
At 2:45, fifteen
minutes before my wife's cousin was to pick us up and get us home, the
Taiwanese cache of teachers asked me to comment, and so I did. I told them that
the children were saddled with a non-comprehensive story that they couldn't get
into for lack of coherence and they would surely lose the contest this year
unless there was major surgery done on it.
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