Last month thirty-three hardworking students from all Kinmen elementary schools gave up their weekend free time to join Fulbright and local English teachers in a celebration of language and literature at the KETLC.
The two-day camp was themed after "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," the famous children's book by Lewis Carroll, which emphasizes creativity, mathematics, and logic. Students who participated used English to practice creative writing, logic games, and drama.
What made this camp special for me was the work ethic of the students who volunteered to come. In the beginning, the highest ranked students were offered the opportunity to come, but many of them chose not to attend because they had more pressing commitments. So the option was given to students who had lower English averages. As a teacher, these students impressed me because of their motivation and their behavior.
One of the major lessons in the book is that people must display proper behavior toward one another; we call this behavior "manners." Manners are the actions we do to show others that we have respect, not only for them, but also for ourselves. I was affected by just how well the students behaved during the creative writing class that I taught. The content was challenging, and at times, I am sure, boring.
The camp concluded with a drama in the readers' theater style. Groups performed scenes from the book after designing costumes and blocking their actions.
My students performed a scene called Golden Afternoon in which Alice is made to feel alienated and cast out from a garden by a group of flowers that have no manners. During the practice, I emphasized with my students that the importance of this scene is that we treat all outsiders and foreigners with the same respect we would treat our neighbors.
It is not surprising to me, after a year in Kinmen, that these students would already embody so many of the good manners and friendly motivation that is characteristic of the people of Kinmen.