12 minute read
TAS News
CELEBRATING 70 YEARS OF HISTORY
On September 26, 2020, we gathered as a community to celebrate 70 years of Taipei American School by reflecting on both our rich past and our bright future. From the basement of a seminary in 1949 with eight students in attendance to our modern, 21st century campus with an enrollment of nearly 2,400 students, our school has evolved dramatically over the past 70 years. The first graduating class of 14 seniors in 1956 went on to become business, civic, and government leaders around the world and in Taiwan itself, just as the graduates of 2020 will do. As a community, we have come so far and continue to expand the options and opportunities for every TAS student. By planning for a school that meets the needs of our students today, and those of their children’s children for generations to come, our evolution influences us as we strive for excellence in all that we do.
PLAY, LEARN, AND GROW IN THE NEW TIGER GARDEN
By Becca Budde, Communications Officer The new Lower School playground, the Tiger Garden, opened on December 12, 2019. Despite being a stone’s throw from Zhongshan North Road, the shady trees, flowing water, netted tree house, sand box, bike track, and multiple slides and tunnels allow students’ imaginations to soar; students may even forget that they are in the middle of the city, and still on campus. Play is critical for children in the development of emotional, social, and creative thinking skills, and it helps them grow into creative and confident adults. By encouraging independence and appropriately scaffolded risk-taking, the Tiger Garden beckons students to climb a bit higher, step out of their comfort zones, and shift their perspectives. A truly unique playground, the Tiger Garden was designed specifically for our space and for our students; lower school students and principals worked with architects on the design, sharing their ideas, dreams, and vision for the space. The goal was to capture the energy, optimism and playfulness of the Lower School, Tara Simeonidis, Lower School Principal shares. “We wanted the playground to capture the spirit of the lower school. And play and exploration are a huge part of learning. The Tiger theme, of course, is a fun way to acknowledge our school mascot,” she adds. During a typical recess period, groups of students are racing around the Tiger Garden in their regular game of tag, negotiating where “base” is. Two students are at the water feature creating a dam with their hands to temporarily block the running water, before releasing it all at once and gleefully counting how many pebbles the water can drag down this time. Four students are chatting in the shade of a slide, coming together from different homerooms to connect and share about their mornings. For students who spend the majority of their days in carefully structured and controlled environments, the Tiger Garden provides spaces for them to be free to be kids, where they can create their own games and develop social emotional intelligence in an environment where teachers are nearby but not directing conversations. Construction of the Tiger Garden was funded by the generosity of parent donors. Thank you to our parents and everyone in the community who contributed to making this dream a reality for our students!
A LASTING LEGACY
By Lindsey Kundel, Communications Officer
On September 26, 2020, during TAS’s 70th Anniversary celebration, our community was able to celebrate another important milestone for the school during a surprise announcement by Board Chair, Ms. Tina Koo. To commemorate this historic event—and to honor TAS’s longest-serving Head of School—33 sets of donors banded together donating over USD $1 million to the school—in order to rename the Upper School D-Block building. The newly minted Dr. Sharon DiBartolomeo Hennessy Upper School is a physical testament to the transformative leadership of its namesake. Under her leadership, the school has undergone many major changes, including the construction of the Solomon Wong Tech Cube, Liu Lim Arts Center, and the building which now bears her name, D-Block, formerly known as the Upper School Science and Technology Building. Dr. Hennessy was both genuinely surprised and touched by the generosity of these donors, humorously asking the audience to grant her two minutes of preparation for her remarks, which is the same amount of time allotted to upper school extemporaneous speakers competing in forensics tournaments. Although she said she does not like surprises, this major surprise left her deeply humbled and honored. She lovingly brought her husband, Lt. Col. Gary Hennessy, and trusted colleague, Dr. Richard Hartzell, up to the podium to express her gratitude for them both as they worked alongside her to accomplish her goals over the last 14 years. The Upper School Science and Technology Building first opened in 2012, under the guidance of then-principal, Dr. Richard Hartzell, who retired at the end of last year. It features state of the art science and robotics labs, and new classrooms equipped with cutting-edge technology, which is updated annually. It also features the Winston Wong Lecture Hall, a multi-use space open to guest speakers, upper school clubs, and classes in a true university-style format. The building also includes the Upper School Joie Gymnasium, the Tiger Health and Wellness Center, and covered outdoor tennis courts. Prior to the opening of the Upper School Science and Technology Building, the upper school community was located in B- and C-blocks of our campus. In February 2009, the Board of Directors passed resolutions adopting a Master Plan for a Facilities Development Project and a corresponding funding proposal, and TAS broke ground on the facilities development project on Tuesday, September 14, 2010. The Board was able to attract the participation of world-renowned architect and TAS parent, Kris Yao. Mr. Yao’s deep understanding of the TAS mission enabled him to translate the board and administration’s statement of program needs into a design of structures that demonstrates how TAS values academic excellence, co-curricular involvement, and environmental awareness.
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE GOES DIGITAL
By Lindsey Kundel, Communications Officer In the wake of news about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in February 2020, the Taipei American School followed the Taiwanese government’s recommendations on closing school campuses to prioritize the health and safety of its nearly 2,000 members, and as a result, reopened on February 6, 2020 not on the school's state-ofthe-art campus in Shilin district but in kitchens and living rooms, on sofas and in bedrooms. How do you transition from physical classroom learning to online learning overnight? If you're a teacher at TAS—seamlessly. With less than a day's notice, faculty and staff across all divisions mobilized to ensure that there was no gap in learning for our students when we closed our campus. Faculty not only made use of the many existing online solutions but also came up with new and creative ways to adapt the physical classrooms, and lessons, into virtual ones. In the Lower School, students used their time independently reading, interacting with math modules, responding to Mandarin activities, watching morning meeting video announcements, and much more. By structuring distance learning off of the routine that students are used to, lower school teachers provided consistency, routine, and support for students as they continue with their learning at home. Some parents have found themselves surprised by the studiousness of our school's youngest learners. "Our girls—Hazuki (Grade 2) and Hoshina (Kindergarten)—have been very excited to participate every morning and they even got their Japanese homework done by themselves before I got out of bed this morning!" said lower school parent Miwako Ito. "E-learning has been helping us to build a good routine and structure at home." In the Middle and Upper Schools, students were hard at work on the school's learning management software, Canvas, which has been in place for the last two years. The transition to digital learning and teaching was quite easy for many in these divisions since blended learning enabled by this software has been both the norm and expectation in both divisions. Middle School mathematics department chair Chris Hoffman quickly created a command center at his home to help facilitate his various online classes, all of which met synchronously online. "I had one computer running a live video feed on the Zoom application with my Honors Geometry students as we learn[ed] about the Law of Sines. I also had another computer running two other classes (Algebra 1 and Math 8) as they worked through a series of learning tasks which included watching a pre-recorded video and communicating via Canvas Chat focusing on the properties of exponents and exponential functions." TAS was in a unique position to switch to digital learning when the need to do so occurred because of the government's decision to close schools. While many schools in the region shut down with no learning opportunities for students, the TAS Board and Administration of years past had the foresight to plan for a scenario just like the one we faced, for example, by instituting a 1:1 laptop program in the Middle and Upper Schools. "Our technology infrastructure has been intentionally enhanced over the last decade," said Head of School Dr. Sharon Hennessy. "Our teachers were trained and new hires are expected to bring appropriate knowledge of the use of these tools. In order to support the faculty, well-trained educational technology specialists work with their respective divisions and provide expertise to optimize teaching and learning through the integration of technology. We are all committed to ensuring your children are supported in their journey towards academic excellence, under whatever circumstances we may face. We will also continue to provide the academic excellence and personal care for which we have become known."
JOURNEY TOWARD SELFHOOD
VISITING AUTHOR DR. SHAWN WONG LEADS A PANEL OF TAS WRITERS TO DISCUSS THEIR CRAFT
By Brenda Lin ’92, Upper School English Teacher The year is 1957. A boy waits with his mother for the bus to take him to the American school in Taipei. It is his first day of school—the family has just moved from California to Taiwan, and his mother will help him with registration. The school bus rolls up and as the boy boards the bus with his mother close behind, he hears the children on the bus—all of whom are white—begin to chant, “No Chinese on the bus! No Chinese on the bus!”
The boy’s first reaction is to let the children know that the woman behind him is his mother, that it is okay. The boy in this story is Dr. Shawn Wong, who attended Taipei American School in the second grade, during his father’s one-year stint working as an engineer for the U.S. Navy stationed in Taiwan. He shared this story with students, faculty, and parents during his week at TAS in January, at the invitation of Mr. Richard Arnold and with the sponsorship of the PTA. It was Dr. Wong’s first time back to TAS, after 63 years. What is remarkable about this story is not only the sting of racism within our own community, not terribly long ago, but how the young Dr. Wong did not immediately recognize that the “Chinese” the other children were referring to was him. One’s cultural identity is often pushed upon by others or made obvious by differences (at its worst, it is defined by mainstream oppressors). After his year in Taiwan, Shawn Wong went on to become one of the pioneers in Asian American studies and literature in the United States, scouring bookstores and libraries to rescue Asian American writers out of obscurity and forgotten history, collecting their stories into anthologies. He wrote two very different books— ”Homebase” and “American Knees”, both of which are ruminations on what it means to be Asian American—giving voice to a culture with deep roots in the art of silence. The story on the bus has a happy ending: Amid the taunts, a little girl walks up the aisle and asks to sit next to the young boy. She sits down and holds the little boy’s hand for the remainder of the bus ride, and for the rest of the school year, the two children are inseparable. Just like the little girl who offered friendship, a common theme in the stories Dr. Wong shared with us during his week at TAS was one of kindness and generosity—how the writer, Susan Sontag, encouraged him during a period of self-doubt by sharing her own bad writing; how he and his cohort of Asian American writer friends crusaded to bring books like “No No Boy” to print; how he now helps war veterans work through PTSD by using the creative and healing process of storytelling. One story he did not share, but that I thought of often: the kindness he showed a young writer he had never met by reading her book and offering to write its blurb. That writer was me; the book was my first—which had started out as a travelogue about a month-long train ride in China, and ultimately became a collection of essays about family and cultural identity. This is what he wrote, 16 years ago, for the back cover of my book: “Naming oneself would seem to be the easiest task in the world, but…naming our national identity is just the beginning, while ’becoming’ something, such as an American, is quite another story.” While Dr. Wong was here, Mr. Arnold put together a panel of writers, all of whom are TAS alumni, graduating between 1966 and 2019. I had the honor of being included on this panel. The age range was broad, as was the types of writers—novelist (Shawn Wong ’67), activist (Linda Gail Arrigo ’66), journalist (Han Cheung ’99), MFA student (Lin King ’12), and recent editor of the Blue & Gold (Shereen Lee ’19), but the conversation was grounded in the general agreement that in order to cultivate a thoughtful and engaged existence, one must first look inward.
The contexts may vary—be it a bus or train ride—but the journey toward an understanding of the world we live in must begin with an understanding of our own culture and identity. As a creative writing teacher, my job is to help my students develop the confidence to find their own voice. In a diverse community like ours—of expats, third-culture-kids, multiracial families, frequent travelers—what most of us discover is that we are not defined by either/or, but rather, and/and/and; we are braided in multitudes. And the most complex (and beautiful!) answers to a deceptively simple question—where are you from?—are found in our stories.
At the TAS Writers Panel, Shawn Wong ’66 (left), and Linda Gail Arrigo ’66 (Courtesy of Ian H. ’21, The Blue & Gold)
