The daily life of a teaching assistant (TA) in Taiwan goes something like this;

1. wake up

2. go to work

3. wait for kids to arrive (or when the time comes go and pick them up from their respective schools)

4. try and keep some kind of order in the school till classes start

5. when classes start, assist the teacher

6. after class talk to the parents and make sure everyone leaves the school with an adult

7. tidy up and go home

That’s not everything the TA’s do, but it’s pretty much the gist of it.

Every Tuesday there’s a slight break in this routine as the students for whatever reason don’t arrive till about 3:30pm.

Usually then this time is allocated to cleaning the classrooms a bit thoroughly then your average sweep clean. One particular day however I walked into the school to find one of our TA’s doing this;

What you’re looking at there is the result of a few hours of meticulous work cleaning the wheels of the reception stool.

I walked into work and the conversation went something like this;

‘uh… what are you doing?’

‘cleaning the wheels.’

‘…uh, why?’

‘they’re dirty!’

(I kind of got the feeling that she felt I’d just asked her a stupid question at this point, as if cleaning chair wheels was the most routine way to spend your time at work).

‘…you do know that your the only person on the planet that actually goes about cleaning chair wheels… right?’

‘Nooooo, they’re dirty so you have to clean them! What do you do when the chair wheels are dirty?’

Not having ever thought about this before I just said the first thing that popped into my mind;

‘I dunno, wait for somebody else to clea-…’

‘…what?’

‘nevermind.’

Thankfully I stopped myself in time.

I guess even if you’ve got nothing to do you still have to make yourself look busy and cleaning chair wheels accomplishes that goal. Still, as much as I love our TA’s they sure can be weird at times.


Tweet