Initial Training in Taipei

This was a post that I put on my original blog about Hess initial training. It's long and strays from the point but I thought I'd put it on here.

(please note: at the time I wrote this I had been told by a co-worker that Hess employees regularly scanned the internet for bad information about Hess- since I was still in their employment, I didn't write down all of my impressions of the initial training. That's why I'll write more about initial training on the next post.)

(another note: I do think that they actually found this blog- There were comments from people in Hess main office that lead me to believe they had read it and weren't pleased.)


The Wonderful World of Hess (or C, C, cuh cuh cuh, this is a cult…)
Ah, Hess glorious Hess, that’s all that I live for…

I’m grateful for a lot of what Hess has done for me, especially for what the individual people who work for Hess have done for me. They’re good people, even if they work for a huge ungainly fire-breathing beast of a company.

Regardless of the kindness of individual Hess employees, I realized somewhere in the midst of my second day of training in Taipei that I may not have made the best decision. What does it take, really, to teach children a new language? Lots of exposure, to be sure, and that’s what I thought I’d be doing. Just standing up there, talking. Hangin out, you know, being fun so they’d want to communicate with me in a language I could understand. That’s all I did in Italy, I just hung out and magically the little tykes learned English, perhaps purely out of frustration that their overgrown playmate could not understand simple instructions in Italian. “Ascolta, giocare come questa. Guarda. No, guarda! Hai guardato? Fai lo stesso. Fai come me. No no no, ascolta…! Okay fine you idiot, I’ll speak English!”

yeah seriously, they learned that fast! Amazing! That’s how it is with little kids though- their brains are like tiny grey sponges. When I arrived in Italy, the six year old child I nannied for couldn’t speak a lick of English. By the time I left we were having complicated arguments about the rules and ethics of soccer (and he usually won the arguments!)

So I thought teaching here in Asia wouldn’t be much different. Boy was I wrong. I mean, there I was in Hess training, trying to learn to be a good teacher, which apparently involves chanting ludicrous statements over and over and over again with a group of similarly glazed-eyed, slack-jawed

*quick interruption- I am currently in my apartment in Luodong, Taiwan, and some sort of vehicle with a tinny speaker system attached to it is playing (I kid you not) the wedding march, and in a firm, resolute voice, a woman is addressing the world in Chinese. It is the oddest sounding thing in the world. What are they saying? Is it a political campaign? Public service announcement? Disaster warning system? This is not the first time I’ve heard this- it happens often. I just try to ignore it, and I think that eventually I will ask someone what it is later but I always forget, because by the time I run into someone who speaks both English and Chinese, so many other weird and random things have happened that I want to ask about that I forget all about the wedding march and the resolute Chinese woman. But why the wedding march?

Another word about Chinese, the language. I don’t know if it is the tones or the sounds or the way it is spoken, but something about spoken Chinese invokes an acute emotional response in me- I begin to feel anxious. I never felt that way about Italian, or Hawaiian (rather, Hawaiian, spoken by someone who knows how to speak it is like being sung to sleep by a choir of heavenly angels.) Chinese is kind of like the red-headed step child of the language world- spirited, mischievous, and altogether terrifying.

Back to Hess – so yes there I was, chanting like an imbecile in a room full of other chanter’s, yodeling asinine statements over and over like one of those mechanized children’s toys.

“A, A, ah ah ah, this is an apple, B, B, buh buh buh, this is a ball. C, C, cuh cuh cuh…”

While we say this in unison, over and over and over again, a wildly effusive Hess trainer is standing before us, waving her arms, hair flying in every direction like medusa’s snakes, doing actions. For A she throws her hands up like the village people, for apple she holds her hand out as if holding an apple, for B she’s doing jumping jacks so limber that they would make a cheerleader grimace, for ball she’s throwing and catching an imaginary ball with such enthusiasm, such vigor, such joy of life that I’m almost embarrassed to be in the same room with her. And we’re supposed to mimic her! It would have been weird enough already, but we were also competing with the other trainees for points with the promise of a grand prize at the end. The thing is, I do get a little competitive sometimes, and this ‘competition’ had exactly the desired effect on me. I was very nearly standing on my chair, waving my hands menacingly at my fellow trainees.

“I CAN CHANT B, B BUH BUH BUH THIS IS A BALL BETTER THAN ALL Y’ALL, MOTHER #%$@*%$!!!!”

Now I realize that our trainers were trying to train us in the manner that they wanted us to teach the children- meaning lots of enthusiasm, repitition, actions, visuals, games, competitions and headache inducing madness. But was it ever enough for them? No! Was it really necessary for them to turn our brains into mushy balls of slop? NO! And does anybody in their right mind willingly sign up for 10 days straight of this nauseating lunacy? NOOOOO! And yet, there I was.

I think one of my fellow trainees hit it right on the head when, cradling a cheap bottle of Taiwanese beer woefully in her white-knuckled grip, eyes glowing dully with a hint of neurosis, she said, “I think we’ve joined a cult.”

Yes, I think we have.

Which brings me to another, loosely related, possibly boring and not worth your time, philosophical rant…

Sometimes I wonder how people muster up insane amounts of enthusiasm for their jobs. I mean, these Hess trainers for example. When they’re not up in front of the training room, ensuring group stupidity, they seemed like cool people. The kind of person you’d meet at a party or a club and go ha cool person, I’d hang out with them again. They’re normal, nice, even good-looking. Right? You’d never guess that they spent a vast majority of their waking hours screaming “B, B, this is a ball….OOooooooh. Nice. Job. Team. Eeeeelehhhhven. I. see. Your. Good. Actions. You. Have. Earned. A. point!”

(It is hard, in print, to mimic the way they talk. Let’s just say they enunciate to the point that you almost cannot understand them because it’s. such. An. Unnatural. Way. Of. speaking.)

These people are enthusiastic. And it doesn’t seem to matter that they’ve got an English speaking, adult audience right in front of them. They still talked to us as if we were Taiwanese 6 (or possibly 2) year olds. They’re that passionate about their work.

Or are they? Did I fail to notice a firing squad in the back of the room? Would they have been shot if they stopped behaving like maniacal clowns?

Or are they just being paid so well by Hess that they can justify this sort of behavior?

I remember one of my first jobs. I was 17 years old and I was a technician at a lazer tag place. All in all, a super fun job. My friends and I would throw on our own music and dance in the black lights as midgets ran around us shooting each other with plastic guns while wearing electronic vests. Definitely fun.

But nobody at the lazer tag place could understand why I worked so hard during my downtime. Even my managers asked me to calm it down because I was making them look bad. When it was slow, I would go clean something, and not just ‘clean’ it, I would super deep clean whatever it was to the point that it was shining. My co-workers would ask me, “why are you doing that? You’re only making $5.75 an hour.”

And I would respond, “I heard once that if you want to make a million dollars an hour, you should work as if you’re already making that much money. I want to make more money.”

So yeah I was a bit of a show off but who’d have thought it, a couple months down the road I asked for a raise and went from $5.75 an hour to $10 an hour. I was making more than some of my managers!

Anyways though, I ask myself now, where is that sprightly, eager little 17 year old with good work ethic? Did she just up and leave? How is it that I ended up with her body? How come my work ethic now doesn’t compare favorably with that of a slug? Why is it that now, if I can get away with doing less at work, I’ll do less, in fact I’ll do the bare minimum of what I can get away with in order to keep a job…? What happened to me?

I think the change occurred somewhere during that crazy year and a half when I was working 60 hours a week and going to school full time, averaging 3 hours of sleep a night. Somewhere along the line I realized that working so much made me stressed and when I was stressed I hated life and spent a lot of money – which just about brought me back to a middle ground. What is success in life? Is it accomplishing a lot of things, or being happy? Is there a happy medium?

I thought I would be okay with this whole teaching thing cause I really love little kids. as it turns out, I love entertaining the little tykes and making sure they are happy and safe, I don’t give a crap if Taiwanese kids learn English! Seriously! I think they might be better off if they didn’t learn it. If I had my choice, I’d say, ‘let’s go take a walk in the woods, kids, why don’t you stare at a tree for a while and decide to become an artist. Success and money really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.’ Or better yet, ‘children, it’s high time you paid some serious attention to the wonderful world of surfing. Now paddle, paddle paddle good stand up. Excellent work. Let’s all get some ice cream.’

But hippy guidance counselor isn’t really in my job description, is it? Oh how I wish it were.

Just to bring this around to Hess, let me say that my co-worker spends about 12 hours at the school and only gets paid for 6 of them, at best. It really takes that much time to plan and understand the lessons, and she still feels like she’s behind. I, on the other hand, come an hour or two early. With the exception of my kindy class, my lessons suck. I think I’m naturally good at Kindy. I want to be a good teacher, but am I willing to put 6 hours of unpaid time in every day?

The answer is no. I am not.

I hope that no future employer is reading this post.