Transformed by Shannon

Transformed by Shannon - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

Flashback to my two weeks in DongRong Elementary School in YunLin, a small rural county in Taiwan. Look around and you’ll see nine Taiwanese students and me dancing together. Listen closely and you’ll hear singing and laughing. Take a deep breath and you’ll smell our sweaty bodies in the unforgiving heat and humidity. Open your mouth and . . . never mind, please don’t taste anything.
This past summer, I volunteered to teach English through the Assisting Individuals with Disadvantages (AID) program. As opposed to the comfortable life of a student I had grown accustomed to—sitting back and absorbing information—I suddenly had to fill the teacher role. I found it was a lot of work! I also realized I had power, for good or for bad. On one hand, I could inspire students to learn and love English, like Sunny (quite a fitting name), who wanted to stay at school even after eight hours of class. On the other, I could drill them with rote memorization exercises and tests. Through the former, I learned to give compassion. As I discovered more about my students, their daily life, and community, I realized that they had limited resources—from native Taiwanese teachers who spoke with accents to little access to books written in English. They were also disadvantaged by their localized lifestyle. Many had not even traveled outside their home county. For them, even seeing a foreigner was beyond anything they had ever imagined, much less learning and engaging with one up to twelve hours a day.
Back in that classroom, I could sense that Sunny, Finny, Marco, and even Kevin—the “troublemaker”—had a love for learning that they taught me to embrace. It didn’t take long to realize that singing and dancing were among the students’ favorite activities, for they were finally a change from the traditional pencil-and-paper method many Taiwanese teachers still use. Just about anything my teaching partner and I did was new and interesting to them, from applying animation effects on PowerPoint to showing YouTube videos to cooking s’mores on the metal playground. Their appreciation for the simplest things fascinated me: BINGO, brown bag animals, and even flashcards.
The reversal of intellectual roles from student to teacher, the physical flight from Michigan to Taiwan, and the relocation from my bedroom to the school library propelled a greater transition, one that is ultimately intangible and immeasurable: my growth as a person. Back at home, I had grown so comfortable—often too comfortable—that it was easy to forget about life outside my small world. It was easy to learn without teaching, to dismiss without understanding, and to live without sacrificing. My young students taught me that not everyone has the treasured opportunities that I had ignorantly taken for granted: accessible education, modern transportation, and even family dinners. Beyond my cultural awakening, I learned to be independent of my parents, specifically through traveling alone. My original flight was cancelled, and I got rescheduled to a different flight path. However, my new connecting flight from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo would have taken off long before I even arrived there from Detroit! I would’ve been forced to stay alone overnight in D.C. had I not examined the flight times closely, a responsibility that I had never needed to manage myself in this airport jungle. My stay in Taiwan (after finally arriving) was my longest duration from home. By living in the school library, sleeping on the wooden floor, air-drying clothes in the computer lab, and even sharing one shower room with seven other volunteers, I adapted to a different environment. I gave my sweat to the grounds of Taiwan, my blood to the mosquitos that bit me, and my tears to the children when we parted. The 7,526 mile long leap towards self-awareness matured my outlook and love for cultures outside my small world of Troy.