Initial training part 2

So I arrived in Taipei and there was a van waiting for me at the airport- a van big enough for my surfboard. So far, so good. I was stoked- incredibly excited to be out of the states and into Taiwan.
Hess had us hooked up in a reasonably nice hotel called The Golden China for the training. They even paid for our accommodations. Awesome.

Training took place at Hess main office, a couple of blocks away from the hotel. The first day of 'training' was a tour of Taipei- they took us to some monuments and temples. I'm not a big fan of guided tours, but it was pretty awesome anyways.
It was on the second day that I started to have my doubts.
Let me be clear about this- it is great that Hess has training. And I still use some of the things I learned there to this day in my teaching. If you come to Taiwan and find your own job, you will probably just observe a couple of classes and this will be your 'training'.

Hess shows proven games to play in class, classroom management ideas, etc.

That said, good god. They do treat you like two year olds through out the training.

Fine- I could handle that, it just meant that I spent all of the breaks in the bathroom gazing forlornly out the window. I'm a person who enjoys some good quiet alone time- there wasn't much of that for 10 days.
My second big issue was the amount of information. There are people more talented than me with better attention spans- and even they probably checked out mentally after a couple of days. It was just so much information, with no real-world application at that point.
(I find that the same problem applies to the lesson plans that Hess students learn- It goes like this- they present a new learning concept, play a game to practice it, and then move on to something else, but there's no real way to link the new thing you learned to the real world, or any way to see how or why it's important. Then they rush on to teach you something new. At the end of it, they give you a test on what you've learned- but right before the test, they basically give you all of the answers, so only an idiot could fail the test. Then they've covered all of their bases- to the parents, they can say 'look, they know the information, they passed the test'
That's why you can walk up to a star Hess student, who's been doing Hess Language School for 3 or 4 years, and say "Hey, what did you do today?" and you will generally be met with a blank stare.)

Here is my excuse for not paying the best attention in training- I had been assured that I was only teaching kindergarten, right? So if they were talking about kindergarten, I paid attention. But when they started talking about the other classes (and there are a lot of them) I was light years away circling the universe.
I might be a little adhd, but I got straight A's in my final year and a half of university. It's not like I'm retarded. It was just a LOT of information. And the games and the mindless chanting! Agggggghhhhhh! There were forty of us- I felt like we were sheep or cattle or something.
A couple of days into the training there were also...crap I can't remember what they called them, but they were basically teaching demonstrations. Maybe it was the way they were introduced or something, but I remember we were all incredibly stressed.
This was the first look I got at a Hess lesson plan. All I remember thinking was "HOLY FREAKING CRAP I am so glad I'm only teaching kindergarten!!!!"
More on the lesson plans later.
It took us trainees the better part of one night to plan the lessons, and everyone seemed nervous but we probably shouldn't have been. By the end of the training only 3 or 4 people had been 'dismissed'.
Speaking of being dismissed- one day I was walking between Hess main office and the hotel and a guy pulled me aside- a foreigner like myself- and he was obviously agitated. He was difficult to understand but I thought he was saying something about how my country had messed with his visa. I think I said something like "Hey man I know a lot of people hate what America is doing in the world but you've got to know how to separate the governments actions from the people's." or something like that. (I think a lot of experienced American travelers have an argument like this at the tip of their tongue. Turns out you don't need it in Taiwan. Most Taiwanese people seem to love America and Americans- probably partially because America is in a large way responsible for Taiwans continued independent existence- through providing arms and support against China. But that's a subject for a different discussion.)
Turns out the guy was saying my 'company' had messed with his visa- he was a trainee who had been dismissed from the previous training.
There were only a few people dismissed from training, but in my estimation, a few is too many. These people had spent hundreds of dollars on health checks, visa stuff, and plane tickets, and would now either have to go back home, or start the whole visa process over again with a different company. I think it goes back to a disconnect between the recruitment department of Hess and the actual schools themselves. I'm not sure how much the recruiters make per person, but I'm going to guess it's a fair amount and they probably sometimes send people they have doubts about- you know, you fling enough stuff at a wall, some of it's going to stick.

Anyways, my teaching demonstration went by with out much of a problem. It seemed like everyone got three positive and three negative comments, and most people got scores in the mid range.

I found out later that the trainers were also rating us on our performance every day and writing comments about us- and these papers would be sent to our branch. Not a huge deal, but it still struck me as a little weird.