The Dead-Fish Stare: we've all seen it and come to dread it, perhaps more frequently in Taiwan than in our previous teaching venues. We have just finished a brilliant and novel explanation, slamming concepts playfully together as fast as the diligent subconscious can shovel them up, delighting in the many subtle implications that have spiralled colorfully off into space like so many Catherine wheels. This is IT, we think, this is the peak of the intellectual life, this is what makes the years of grad-school poverty and peonage worthwhile, this is something no pedestrian administrator could ever understand, this is REAL TEACHING. With imagined echoes of applause from our own previous teachers and perhaps even from hallowed historical figures still echoing in our heads, we come back to reality. We ask for questions or comments, only to encounter on the faces of most or even all of our students ... 

Well, now: something has clearly gone wrong, hasn't it? The immediate reaction would be to blame any instructor caught in this plight. How self-indulgent! And isn't it always completely the communicator's responsibility to ensure that the message is communicated? Like most first reactions, it is, as Mencken said in another context, simple, obvious, and wrong. The job of teachers is to teach, but the job of students is to learn, and students in Taiwan present some unique challenges in this regard. I will examine these, reject one common solution, and offer my own admittedly tenuous possibilities for further speculation and experimentation. 

As with so many of the world's difficulties, the problem starts with language, in two different ways. First and more obviously, when teachers and students share the same language, it is more or less transparent, and what is said is usually mostly understood, at least denotatively. However, speaking to students for whom English is a second language is far more problematic; words become opaque, obscuring rather than transmitting meaning. Many students arrive at my university (which for obvious reasons must remain nameless) with a command of English roughly equal to that of a fifth-grade native-speaker. In time, the teaching of English in middle and high schools MAY improve, but based on what I now see, it is woefully inadequate. There may be excellent people in some of these positions, but they seem to be quite few. As a result of poor early instruction of English, my students are simply not equipped to deal with literature as literature; every class tends to be dragged down to language instruction instead.

Far more destructive to a university classroom (and only one part of a much larger problem), is the way Chinese is taught and learned. Because there is no real way to connect the written language with the sound pronounced (apart from the occasional guess based on a word's radical), the only way to master it is by brute memorization, lots of it, beginning very early. Not a bad thing in itself, and it is quite amazing that any brain can master such a complex language (all the more so here since it is quite unlikely the government will ever adopt the mainland's simplified characters). However, minds trained early to learn in one particular style to the exclusion of all others will tend to be locked into that style forever. The teacher writes the character on the board, and pronounces it; the students copy it down and pronounce it as a group; repeat 3,000-4,000 different times for basic fluency, and another 5,000 times after that for upper-level competency. Obviously, this type of training follows the "Me teacher, I talk; you students, you shut up" model. This will absolutely squash any original or enquiring mind, and it is a person of rare toughness of spirit who is going to recover even many years later. While this model of learning is comparatively easy on educators (none of that silly research nonsense, and why bother updating your class notes from ten years ago?) it robs students of any native ability they might have to think for themselves, or indeed any desire to do so. As a result, when students arrive at Anonymous U. and I ask them to think for themselves, most of them have no idea what that means, let alone how to do it. NONE. If there is one thing the world does not need, it is more sheep; but Taiwanese primary and secondary education gives us hardly anything but.

Superimposed on this fatally-crippling problem is another layer of difficulties caused by the bane of Taiwanese high school students' normal life (to say nothing of their happiness), the Joint College Entrance Examination. Talk about pressure! ONE test, with ONE set of RIGHT answers, which will either put you on a track to a prestigious university, delay your entrance for a year while your fuming parents shell out for 20 hours of cram school 6 days a week, or even cast you into the pit of the irredeemably ignorant for the rest of your life. The JCEE represents systemic child abuse, as damaging as it is well-entrenched. Not only does it make students miserable for years before it takes place, but it is even more damaging afterwards, arguably more so for those who succeed than those who fail. A student who fails at least has a very clear goal and a very clear idea of how the next year is going to be spent. Those who pass and get admitted to a university, however, think they have achieved the loftiest peaks of Parnassus when in truth they are barely standing in the foothills. No doubt you all have heard the sadly more than semi-serious transliteration of "university" -- "you ni wan si nian," or "you can play for four years." Even the doddering Qing dynasty eventually got rid of the official examination, and its survival here (to the complete exclusion of other, gentler, more realistic ways of evaluating high school students) shows that the education establishment on Taiwan is completely fossilized.

These are the very large difficulties facing university educators on Taiwan; each one alone would be daunting, but taken together, they are a three-headed beast which robs our daily lives of satisfaction, and incidentally robs the island of any future brighter than its dreary third-world present.

What to do?
 What NOT to do, I suggest, is to follow the line of least resistance. Spoon-feeding is what our pupils are used to, so let's give them more! Let's have them turn a classic short story into a skit! Let's share life experiences! Or -- my own personally most-irritating choice, as my office is right next to a classroom -- LET'S SHOW A FILM! Evasions of pedagogical responsibility one and all, and not likely to be of very much help in rousing students from their torpor. Instead, I propose a path which is steep and thorny, but which may not only help us get through our careers with integrity intact but which may actually benefit some students and this island as well. To wit:

1) Refuse to play the role of Omniscient Bringer of Wisdom. On the first day of every class, I let my students know that the rules of the game will be different from anything that they have ever encountered before. I say that I am willing to do a fair amount of lecturing, but that there will be times when I will throw them a question, and I that I will expect an answer, or even a discussion. This usually puzzles my students a bit, and it puzzles them even more when I actually do it. I'm not sure whether it helps or hurts when I further add that some of the questions I'll be asking have no right or wrong answers, and that I'm looking for process, not product, but I mention this anyway. Naturally, it challenges one's patience when a deep, sophisticated, probing theoretical question such as "Did you like this play?" receives no reply from anyone. I wait. . . and wait . . . and ask again . . . and almost always end up putting individual student on the spot. After this occurs five or six times, the class generally gets the idea, and I may even have a volunteer. Now that I have been at my university a fair number of years, I have students in some of my upper-level classes who know how I work, and (believe it or not), once or twice, I have actually been able to get a lively discussion going.

2) Give warm huggies whenever appropriate. If nothing else, it's amusing to watch students' synapses struggle to cope with actual KINDNESS from a teacher, not at all what they are used to. Right after I discuss point number one in class, I follow it up by saying that no one need fear imperfect English, and that I will not correct their usage or pronunciation in front of their classmates, ever; and I stick to that rule rigidly. I also tell them that NO ONE's English is perfect, not even my own, and that the focus of the class will be on ideas. When I hear one that is novel/provocative/well-articulated (in any combination), I absolutely slather the person who produced it with praise before asking a follow-up question (which the student more often than not will bat back to me with skill). Even after seeing their peers receive gobs of high praise, many students do not get drawn out of their shells, but some do; and that may be the best we can hope for. 

3) Take the long view, and point out to students that the real world is harsh and unforgiving place, not the plush rose-colored fairyland most of them think it is. Although their innocence is one of their most charming traits, they will have to lose most or all of it if they are to have a chance of survival. Fortunately (?) examples of what happens when people DON'T think are literally an everyday occurrence. To begin with, there is the horrific driving situation, with which they all have personal experience ("Rules? What rules? We don't need no stinking traffic rules!") As a laboratory in which one can observe bad decisions regularly being made, and occasionally their gory consequences as well, Taiwan's roads are hard to beat. Above and beyond this, there are the other accidents that seem to happen here on a higher per capita basis than other places; the scaffolding that collapses because no one considered how much weight it would have to bear, the gas-line explosion because the welder doesn't turn off the main before firing up his torch, the boats that collide because the captain was inattentive, etc., etc., etc. A bit of melodrama is not out of place here; probably a dangling participle or a disagreement of verb tense will cause fewer fatalities than the above-mentioned examples, but (and I drive this point home with the hammer of Thor) THE PRINCIPLE IS THE SAME. The mindless adults of today were the mindless kids of yesterday, and they have made Taiwan the safe, sane, courteous (and discourtesy is a kind of mindlessness) place that it is today. Changing the culture will be a huge job, but if it is to happen, my students will have to take the responsibility. In all my classes, I give each student the celebrated IBM sign, "THINK." If only one of them actually does so, it will have been worthwhile. 

4) Be prepared to spend lots of time on practical, detailed correction. I have taught second-year students who have come into my Composition course not knowing that a period follows a word directly. Once I get over my incredulity (what on EARTH have their previous teachers been TEACHING them??????), I set them straight on such basics. If we are lucky, by the end of the first semester, most of my students can write three consecutive sentences without a fault, and I am occasionally able to touch on matters of structure before time runs out in the spring semester. I would like to move much faster, but the retention rate is not very high; some points need to be repeated many, many times (at the rate of one full-page closely-graded composition a week) before they are grasped. This is like reclaiming a city from enemy hands, street by street, block by block, house by house. It's grueling work to be sure, but the sad truth is that the students who enter Anonymous U. need it desperately, and in fact are not ready to profit from more sophisticated advice. 

5) Finally, befuddle the students with a combination of rigor and friendliness. It has been well-documented that students of whom much is expected do tend to perform better. I let it be known early and often that I have very high standards, and that there is no reason Taiwanese cannot perform as well as Japanese or Singaporeans. Each spelling error costs my students 10 points, and each fragment or run-on sentence 5. After one or two pieces which have received negative grades, most of my writers come around (although there are always one or two hard cases). Simultaneously, I always smile at my students inside and outside of the classroom, give full and detailed explanations of points I think they need to know whether they have asked a question or not, make myself available by phone and email, and maintain an open-door policy in my office. 

Teaching conditions here are, as we all know, far from ideal in many respects. Despite the difficulties, the above guidelines have gotten me through many a day. They have helped me fulfill my responsibility to teach, and I hope that they have made clear to my students that when all is said and done, it is ultimately their responsibility to learn. I wish all my colleagues in this difficult struggle the very best of success.