Since Uncle Sam's is a kindergarten school, the entire months of July and August are spent rehearsing for an elaborate graduation ceremony for the K6 students that will be moving on from the school and attending their Chinese elementary school full-time. Many of the students will still come back for night classes, so it's mostly a lot of hype and show for the parents. (It's really fun to be a Taiwanese student... school year-round from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and some of them even get to go home to private tutoring. Joy. Oh, and let's not forget that you need to be able to play an instrument, so after you come home and do your homework you can practice until 11 at night.) Anyway, to commemorate this not-so-momentous event, all of the foreign teachers at our school were required to write a script for our homeroom classes (with a dance sequence) based on a well-known kid's movie. Each child needed several speaking roles and we had to find music, sound effects, and designate staging and lighting. Did I mention that my homeroom class is composed of ESL 3 and 4 year olds? This has been no easy task by any means, and we are all feeling the stress of trying to get kids to memorize lines they can barely read and learn actions, songs, and dancing on top of it.

Teacher Bacon is doing Willy Wonka with his class, the K4 Gorillas, and I am doing Finding Nemo with my K2 Dolphins. The end result will probably end up being cute and funny, but the pressure and expectations in the mean time are becoming a bit overwhelming. It's all over on August 22nd though, and after that my friend Jenny from the States is coming to visit. Bacon and I finally got our vacation time approved from the owner of the school, and we'll be taking two weeks off to tour the whole island of Taiwan. We plan on staying in Taipei for a few days and then venturing down South and maybe even to a small island off of the coast! The image of us snorkeling and laying on white-sand beaches is what is going to get us through these next few weeks...