(upbeat music)
- Alright. Good morning everyone.
My name is Sydney, I am 24 years old.
I am originally from New York
and I have been living and teaching
in New Taipei city, Taiwan for nine months now.
Now, as you can see, it is very early in the morning here,
it is little before 6:00 AM, Wednesday morning.
I am usually up this early
because I do try and go to the gym every morning
before I start my school day.
But before I go to the gym,
I'm gonna show you guys a little bit of my apartment.
So I live in a teeny tiny studio here in New Taipei city,
I live in a district called Xinzhuang
and this is what my apartment looks like.
So we can start over here, so this is my apartment here.
We have my little living space.
The apartment did come with this couch,
it came with this table,
I actually bought these little green pillows from IKEA,
and I brought the rug from IKEA as well.
Coming over to the left, is where I have any personal items,
and I've got a little storage in here
where I keep my socks, shirts, towels, things like that.
To the left, is where I have my "bedroom area,"
so I've got my little pillows, my blanket,
any throws, my onesie, some more stuff over here.
The apartment did come furnished with the bed,
and I actually bought the blanket
and the pillow cases myself.
And moving right along to the right,
as we enter more of the living space/kitchen,
I've got my AC over here.
I did laundry about two days ago,
so my towels and things are drying up here.
Most apartments in Taiwan do not come with dryers,
so whenever I do laundry, I just hang my things here to dry.
I've got my TV there.
This came with the apartment as did the little table.
To the left, I've got my little kitchen area.
The apartment did obviously come with a hot plate,
built-in sink and little mini fridge,
and this cute little stool.
I did end up buying myself a toaster oven
and another hot plate myself
and everything you see over here,
obviously seasonings, cheese grater, ketchup,
whatever else, I purchased myself as well.
Alright, and moving on over to the right,
the apartment did come with this little table
and this little chair as well.
This is kind of where I keep pots, pans, strainers,
my cereal, laundry detergent, things like that,
so that's all over here.
My little trash can, my little broom and dustpan.
Over here is my closet that does come with two drawers,
up here is where I keep my suitcases.
And as we come over here, this is my bathroom.
So the washing machine is here,
shower is here, sink and things is here.
As you can see, my teeny tiny studio is very small
but I love it.
So now that I've showed you guys
a little bit of my apartment,
it's time for me to go to the gym, and as I do that,
I will post a little teeny tiny question, box here,
so you guys can ask me anything your heart desires
and I will do my best to answer
every single question that you have.
As I mentioned, I am headed to the gym.
My gym is actually only about
a five minute walk from my apartment,
which is why I'm able
to just get up really early in the morning
and go whenever I can.
And my school is actually
only about a 10 minute walk from my apartment too.
So everything that I need is pretty close to me
which is really nice if I need it.
(upbeat music)
♪ To the once Life ♪
(silence)
Okay, I'm back.
So just a quick note about my school
before I start getting into some of the questions
that you guys asked in the little box.
I am teaching at a cram school.
My school is called Annie's English school,
Annie's has about seven or eight different locations
throughout New Taipei, Taipei and Italian city,
and all three of those cities are located
in the Northern part of Taiwan.
To know about my day today, so today is Wednesday.
It is almost 7:30 AM, my school day starts from 8:30 AM
and ends at 5:00 PM.
Today, I am teaching my kids all day,
which is why it might be a little bit busy for me today.
I teach kindergarten and all of my kids
are between five and six years old and I've got 21 of them.
I actually found my school through a recruiter
from a company called Reach To Teach recruiting.
Are actually my top three favorite things
about working with Reach To Teach,
one, their service is completely free,
two, communication between my recruiter and my school
was very easy since they have a very close relationship,
and three, my recruiter has actually been living in Taiwan
for the last 13 years
so she was able to give me lots of tips and tricks
before I flew over.
Here's a great question, I do plan my own lessons,
but there is a laid out curriculum for me to follow
so as long as I follow the curriculum,
the lesson planning should be pretty straight forward.
As you can see, I pretty much have no hair.
So I don't really need a ton of hair products
but the black community here in Taipei
is actually quite large, so if you do need products,
you can find them.
(silence)
(students shouting)
(silence)
So I do not actually speak any Mandarin,
and it's actually not too difficult to get by
without knowing any.
Surprisingly, where I live, a lot of people speak English,
so I'm pretty much good to go on that front.
Obviously, I do obviously highly recommend trying to learn.
I do plan on trying to learn at some point,
I'm just still kind of
getting a little bit more acclimated to my surroundings
and getting used to living here and things like that,
but once I am a little bit more settled,
then I do plan on actually making an honest effort
to learn the language, so I can fully appreciate the people
and the culture.
So this is a great question.
The quickest answer I can honestly give you
as to why I chose Taiwan, is research.
Research, research, research, research.
The internet is your friend.
To go into more detail before I did come to Taiwan,
and before I actually interviewed
for the positions in Taiwan,
I did have one interview for South Korea,
one for China and two for Japan.
And that was after doing my research
on those countries as well.
When I did my research on Taiwan
and I read about the cost of living and how cheap it was,
when I read about the weather,
when I read about how close it was to China for travel
and other parts of Asia, and honestly,
how small it is, I loved it.
So I figured, okay, well, that's where I should be.
So I think my top three favorite things
of living in Taiwan, number one, the weather,
number two, being able to afford living on my own,
and number three, just the easy way of life.
As I said, I am from New York,
and I did go to college in Philadelphia for four years,
and I lived there
for about a year and a half after I graduated,
so I'm born, raised and bred in the Northeast part
of the United States,
where it gets freezing in the winter time.
So the fact that the winter's here...
They can get cold, but they're more mild.
There's no snow, there's no putting down ice,
there's no sleep, nothing crazy like that.
The only downside about the weather here,
is that when it does get cold,
you do have to dress warm or maybe get a space heater
because there are actually no heaters in apartments here
because it is pretty mild for most of the year
in terms of the weather.
And I mentioned that living here is easy,
that there's an easy way of life,
I mean that I feel safe,
I don't feel like I'm ever really in danger,
I feel like I can just go about my day, live my life,
walk at my own pace,
no one's going to shout at me in the street,
no one's going to cat call me,
no one's going to hat call me.
I'm not going to get robbed,
I'm not going to get beaten up,
everything here makes sense.
It's a nice, calm, uniform, respectful society
living here in Taiwan and I think
that's the biggest thing that I appreciate most about it.
So to quickly note, Taiwan was never on lockdown
or quarantine for the Coronavirus.
Taiwan took action very early.
After the Chinese New Year in January,
they closed public schools for two weeks
and that prevented a lot of the spread
throughout the country.
Masks are required to be worn in schools,
in most places of work
and on all forms of public transportation.
So I'm telling you as someone who lives
in an essentially COVID free society, masks work.
Taiwan has not had a locally...
There hasn't been a case of COVID-19 in over 200 days,
so I'm telling you it works so masks work.
As someone who works with five-year-old kids every day
and has not gotten sick once, masks work.
Oh, sis, okay. To keep it short, I feel good.
Black Girl Magic still rains in Asia,
and that's all I say.
Just to expand on this a little bit,
I did actually write an article about this for ITA.
So if you go on ITA's website and search my name,
you should find the article, it should pop right up,
and that should answer any questions that you might have
because honestly, I could go on and on
about being black in Asia,
but the article should speak for itself.
So please go and check it out and read it.
Can everyone say happy Halloween.
Ready? One, two, three.
- [Students] Happy Halloween.
- Yay.
As I did mention earlier, I teach at a cram school.
The cram school is here in New Taipei city.
I think I did mention that I do have 21,
five and six year old students.
The curriculum I teach is called Calvert,
and Calvert has ELA, science
and social studies as three subjects.
In addition to that, I also teach a phonics book,
I teach something called STEAM,
which has a separate science curriculum,
and I'm also teaching them a play
for the 2021 kindergarten graduation.
They're long, so my kindergartners had no summer break,
kinder teachers had no summer break.
It might sound strange, but it's fine
because Taiwan has lots of four day holidays,
three-day weekends, bank holidays, things like that,
but please note that...
One last quick note about cram schools,
cram schools run all year long,
at least mine does, I did not have a summer break.
It runs from January through December
or whenever the school year starts.
It runs all...
You do start at a cram school, more than likely
will be working all year round, so no summers off.
I did not have any prior teaching experience.
I have a Bachelor's of Business Administration
with the concentration in Human Resource Management
and worked in HR for about two years after I graduated.
So no prior experience.
So this is probably one of the last ones I'll answer,
why I got into TEFL.
One, corporate America life was really boring
and two, I discovered I had a passion for education
(upbeat music)