The Corona virus has forced a major lockdown of the city's infrastructure and schooling and business community here in Taipei. We're not quite experiencing the zombie apocalypse style vision emanating from the epicentere of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, but for a bustling cosmopolitan city normally teeming with cars and people on the streets the difference is stark.
The roads are quieter, the streets and paths lacking foot traffic and the schools and playgrounds are eerily empty. Restaurants have a just a smattering of their former custom and you could fire a gun through department store hallways with no danger of hitting anyone. We've taken to this pattern as I imagine most others have, by doing what we need to do out of doors and avoiding any unnecessary contact with others. We're not being paranoid, just practical and not tempting fate.
We've embraced a new daily routine which is busy yet because of its novel timetable and circumstances, refreshing. We get up to have our breakfast at a normal hour (instead of our regular 5.30 a.m.) then prepare for our online learning session in the morning. During that time we're on an online chat forum with all our students and they can ask any clarifying questions. They don't have many (or to rephrase, only a few have a question or two), mainly because we've spent hours preparing their instructional document, wordsmithing it to the lowest intellectual denominator (!), clearing up any ambiguity, and hyperlinking everything clearly. We send them to a variety of sites, some we've designed and some we've borrowed for videos, discussions, reading writing and speaking practice. It's well rounded, rigourous and entertaining....I wish my Grade 8 experience was like this!
The ease with which we've transitioned so smoothly to online instruction and learning is a testament to Cassy's years of hard work. She has developed documents and examples and written accompanying suggested responses which are detailed and engaging for all our units. This scenario was tailor-made for her slick operation: I imagine it is not so seamless and simple for lots of others! Our real secret is anticipating problems before they occur, keeping things simple yet varied and having strict rules in our online chat fora.
After our morning session the kids are meant to have a lunch break. We take this opportunity to do a round trip on the canals and walkways along "Sulfur Creek". We do this periodically under normal circumstances, but we try to do a 5 km loop daily just to make sure we're up and moving the legs each day. It's been great to spot the wildlife along the way! We've spotted flocks of birds of different feathers, egrets ballet dancing along the river bed and turtles sunning themselves on the smooth, hot rocks or even, in one case, a baby on its mother! The Moop has been spied doing its usual freeze frame body and wibble-wobbling throat in different parks on the route, and Cass was especially excited when we spotted a brown duck one day furiously paddling up the river to the lush grasses beyond!
The riverside parks are a hotbed of religion as well it seems. There is a garish collective of temples and shrines along the way, vying for the most hideous interpretation on the dragon on their spires, or the most frightening full body puppets that can be constructed: we see it all! The other constant is the reassuring thwack of tennis ball on racquet strings however: nothing's going to stop our local tennis buddies extolling each other to hit higher, longer or harder from dawn till dusk!
In the afternoon we're officially on again for a chat session to field questions from kids who don't understand the work, but, probably because of the aforementioned clear instructions, we don't have that many. The rest of the afternoon and evening is spent preparing the lessons and instructions for the next session when the cycle begins again. It's an interesting time and a glimpse at a different style of learning which has obviously morphed into a more sophisticated beast than the one that visited with the SARS virus lockdown we experienced in 2003. Fingers crossed that people stay safe and well and that the virus gets burned away as the warmer temperatures quickly approach.