We had sort of a mini staff retreat on Saturday, where the native English teachers treated our kindy HRTs (homeroom teachers) to dinner at Friday's. (Yes, they have Friday's in Taiwan. And it was their choice to eat there!) There are some concerns about some of us not getting to know our co-workers as well as we could, and we really did make an effort to rectify that on Saturday night. We made a big show of having alternate seating so that it wouldn't turn into Westerners at one end, Taiwanese at the other - but in the end, it did come pretty close to that. This was officially because a couple of the HRTs wanted to share a dinner, but probably because of...well, things I shouldn't go into publicly. Suffice to say my own hands are clean.
It did, in any case, lead to a few amusing moments, one of which I've been curious about ever since. One of the HRTs found a way to grab our attention: she started revealing their Chinese names, including her own. (They, like the students, have English names that usualy carry no meaning beyond being phonetically similar to their Chinese ones.) And she ran into a bit of resistance from them in doing so, as if they were embarrassed to have us know their real names.
Once the secrets were out, everyone had a good laugh about it and no one was really embarrassed or anything. But I am still wondering, why any resistance at all in the first place? Why, for that matter, should they not be expected to use their real names outside of the classroom where it's not a matter of all English all the time?
Odd.
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