Performances

How to Plan a Performance for Kindergärtners – Advice for the Foreign Teacher in Taiwan

Kindergarten performances in Taiwan usually take place in December and around Mother's Day. It is a time when the students (age 3-7) showcase their learning. It's also an enrollment boosting promotion for the school. After surviving two of these spectacles, I feel qualified to give teachers advice on 'How to plan a Kindergarten Performance in Taiwan'.

First, hear about the performance from your managers, about two months in advance. The requirements are simple. Each child must speak one or two lines in English. There should be a song and a dance. Pick out costumes (and who could resist those adorable costumes laid out so neatly in the catalogs!). Write a script and submit it for management approval. Sit back, eying your script, marveling at your brilliance. Think to yourself, 'I've missed my calling! I ought to have been in theater!'. The script is witty but not sarcastic. Humorous, but thought-provoking. It will give your students a chance to build their confidence and show them for the brilliant, adorable, fun little ones that they are. Smile. This is gonna be awesome!

Then, listen with growing anxiety as you catch the rumors- your school is in dire need of a stellar performance. They are losing money. We really must boost enrollment, or people will lose their jobs. Your co-teachers are worried. In this economy, it will be difficult for them to find another job. You are worried- could the school really shut down? What about your visa? What about your beautiful students? Work harder on the script. Realize, far too late, that the script is definitely too complex for your students. Though they are brilliant, they are at the age where sitting down on stage, removing their shoes, and examining their own toes is still a fascinating and viable educational activity. They don't get the stage directions, which are in a language that they still largely don't understand. And why did you think they could master the Charleston when most of them only recently learned to walk? Revise the script. Simplify it. The wit and banter is lost, but some of the brilliance remains.

Three weeks before the performance, management will watch it for the first time. You've had plenty of time to practice, so it should be about ready, shouldn't it? Children who knew their lines only yesterday stare at you blank-faced. Little Johnny and Suzie fight over the microphone. Linda solves the dilemma by kicking Johnny, who immediately begins to howl. You are laughing, until you see that management is stone-faced. Later, the verdict is in. The performance is terrible. It makes no sense. The props are amateur. The choreography is uninspired. The song (an 80's big hair band ballad which was still a hilarious choice only yesterday) is weird. Revise. Revise again. Listen to their criticism then calmly threaten to quit your job. Cry as often as needed, but preferably not in front of your students. Throw up your hands and decide, a week before your performance, that you can't change the script anymore. Wake your students up early from their nap to practice. Forget the rest of the curriculum. Practice, practice practice. Bribe with candy. Praise freely. Try not to resort to violence.

The day of the performance arrives. You will be a basket-case. Your stomach will be full of butterflies and you will guide your students through the performance like a patient with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You will remember nothing moments after it is over. You look at your students, taking a precarious bow under the footlights. They are adorable and wonderful and so uniquely themselves. You look at the parents, who's eyes are moist and hearts are bursting with pride. You look at management, which gives you a forced smile and a stiff thumbs up. You think to yourself, maybe it was all worth it. The next day, you begin to plan the performance which will happen in six months. Rehearsals begin Monday.

I began teaching at Hess in mid-August of 2008- In December of that year, we had our first performance. this was by far the absolute worse time working for Hess, and probably the thing that really solidified my negative feelings about the company.

Christmas and Mother's Day performances for kindergarten are a huge deal in Taiwan. The school purchases elaborate costumes, there is dancing, singing, stage props, speaking parts, etc, all for kids aged 3-7 (kindergarten in Taiwan is generally a 3 year experience- kind of like preschool+ kindergarten in America)


About two months before the performance was to take place, the management at our branch asked us to develop a script. Each child was supposed to have at least one speaking part and it would be good if there was a song and a dance. This is about all of the direction we got so at the time I figured it wouldn't be a huge deal. I started on a script and picked out costumes and began to make props.

I was the "Little Class" teacher- I had a class of 22 three year olds. Twenty two. 22 three year olds. twenty two 3 year olds. Roll it off your tongue a couple of times. That's a lot of kids. But I didn't care because I adored every last one of them.
Anyways I later found out that little class is not traditionally supposed to have speaking parts during a performance, either in Hess or in Taiwan itself. Usually little class just sings and dances and looks cute. I wasn't told this. My kids probably weren't developmentally ready for speaking parts up on stage in front of a large audience. Still, I did the best I could and so did they.
The problems began about a month before the performance. Our branch lead us to believe that they were losing money and we needed stellar performances to boost enrollment. Our Taiwanese co-teachers had had the fear of God put into them by management. The stress that they were under was readily apparent. Every day there was a new report about how terrible our performances were and how our co-teachers were afraid that the parents would be very angry. There was a constant appraisal and criticism and rating system of our performances.
"Little class has more speaking lines than middle class, the parents will be very angry!"
"Big classes performance is too boring, why isn't it more beautiful?"
"Little class has the best performance, big classes is okay and middle class is worst of all!"
Somehow I had emerged as the darling of the performance planners. This is not due to me at all (my performance turned out to be the worst of the three!) but more due to my co-teacher being very very chill, accepting and supportive. She told management that I was doing fine, and they believed her.
My co-workers, Brian and Melissa, were not so lucky. They were getting terrible feedback everyday. Brian was being yelled at by his co-teacher, and Melissa's co-teacher would break down in tears at the drop of a hat. We were all extremely busy with our regular teaching load and then the performance on top of it. Every day, during our break directly after kindergarten, Melissa and I would walk to the 711 and get ourselves a hurried lunch. On the walk we talked about the performance. I so looked forward to these talks every day because we couldn't talk freely at the branch. We were both incredibly stressed.
I felt like all of my free time was performance related- making props, tweaking the script, making cue cards, and then, for the few precious hours I had with the kids each day, we were practicing, practicing, practicing. Of course we still had our normal lessons so practice had to be fit in wherever we could do it. This usually meant 'fun time'. But then there was the problem of the stages- there were only two stages to practice on and one of them was too small to fit all of my kids in their performance formation. There were fights over who could use the stage when, how we would lay out the lines of tape on the floor that told the kids where to go, etc. There was also the constant evaluating and criticism, pitting us against eachother and rating our performances. We were miffed and frustrated and stressed- how could they be judging us and criticising us so heavily when we'd never even done something like this before? None of us had a background in drama and we hadn't even known that this would be expected of us! How were we supposed to be teachers, script writers, choreographers, and prop makers? Especially when the criticism and direction we were getting was often through rumors and in broken English.

To think that all of the stress that the teachers were going through didn't effect the children is a joke. Those were dark times for those kids, I think. yeah I can hear some people laughing- but it's true. Once I found myself yelling at a group of frightened 3 year olds and I thought, what the hell is wrong with me? These kids just got POTTY TRAINED for god's sake, and I'm yelling at them cause they aren't taking stage cues? I'm mad at them for not using the right inflection when speaking their lines? What is WRONG with me? so I stopped putting pressure on them- it wasn't worth it.
I'm not going to criticize the co-teachers- I love those women. But they were so rough with those kids sometimes, screaming at them, pushing and yanking on them, reducing them to tears when they did something incorrectly or started laughing on stage. the kids knew this was serious business as well as we did. We were being criticized by our management and were in turn criticizing the kids. It was like all of the stress coursing through our bodies needed somewhere to go. It went into the bodies of those tiny little kids.
The criticism we got from management was rarely specific. I've always had a hard time with people who criticize but don't say how something should change (kind of like me in this blog haha! I will be making suggestions later). It just seemed like we were getting a lot of general attacks but no ideas for improvement.
To be fair to Hess, alot of this culture of criticism is just Taiwanese culture. I still don't feel qualified to talk about it- I don't feel that I know the culture well enough. But it does seem like there is a lack of what we'd call 'encouragement' in Taiwan, and the feeling that your supervisors generally find you lacking at all times. It reminds me of how some religious sects tell you that you must be perfect- the standards are always slightly higher than you can reach. There's never such thing as a real 'job well done' in Taiwan, it seems.
It's tempting to call it wrong or backward, but it is just a different culture. Any time I'm tempted to criticize Taiwanese culture, all I have to do is look at our multitude of problems in America to shut myself up.

Anyways yeah, two weeks before the performance both Melissa and Brian were publicly threatening to quit their jobs. I was just laughing because I'd been threatening to quit the whole time.

Meanwhile, I was going in unpaid whenever possible to practice with my kids, making elaborate cue cards, props, etc. I rarely saw my home at that time, only to fall in bed, exhausted every night.

My performance still bombed in the end, but what can you do? I'm proud to report that the mother's day performance I did right before I quit was stellar. Honestly, I don't need anyone else to tell me that- the kids were fantastic and I feel like I lead them to victory.
A lot of that might have had to do with their development. 6 months makes a BIG difference in little kids.