Teaching: One Month Down, Eight to Go

All Vietnamese class art is this terrible. It must be traditional, because
if it's not it's an international humanitarian crime.

I mentioned in my last post that I get pretty damn sweaty in the classroom - jumping back and forth, working with kids, and patrolling the narrow aisles leaves me damp and exhausted at the end of it. I'm also covered in all different colors of chalk dust pretty much all the time - I look like a refugee from the Indian holiday of Holi on some days, with yellow, green, blue, red, and white powder on my shirt, all over my pants, and smeared on my face when I lift my glasses to wipe off my brow with the sleeve of my shirt.

That light blue color under my left boob
is the original color of this shirt. Sweaty.

Teaching here makes for a messy, exhausting day, but, about 70% of the time, it's totally worth it. I'm working along side native Viets who I get to practice my Vietnamese on (it's pretty embarrassing asking a middle age teacher "What do you like?" and "Where are you from?" especially when I'm almost positive my accent makes me virtually unintelligible.

Some of my classes I'd like to herd into a bus, put a brick on the accelerator, and aim it at a cliff (not that I've given that particular fantasy any thought, Vietnamese Officials who no doubt track stuff like this), and some classes I'd like to adopt and take home to live in on my terrace (not that all 45-55 of them would fit!)... so you can probably say that I'm having a fairly ordinary teaching experience. I downright LOVE some of my students, and some are... trying. So, basically like kids everywhere.

Facilities are not high-end. As I've stated, the classroom sizes are extremely large, but the room remains the size of an average sized classroom that would fit 20-30 kids in America. Things are generally very clean, but lack basic amenities like sound systems. (For some reason, many of my second grade classrooms have huge LCD TVs hung up, but I've never seen them used. I don't know what they're for. All I know is that I have to ask for a boombox if I want one.) The teachers put a lot of effort into making classrooms effective places to learn, but they're on par with some of the more dingy schools I've been to. I guess that's an emerging country for you.

The view of one of my classes from the desk.

I always have a Vietnamese TA in my classes. Ostensibly, they're there to explain directions to the kids and discipline as needed. In reality, some of them are awesome and effective, and some are almost completely useless. I've become very good at scanning for troublemakers while drilling vocabulary, but I have a lot to learn about what kids will react well to in terms of discipline. When I'm playing games and eliciting answers from individual kids I have a hard time dividing my attention between the individual and the 44-54 kids NOT answering a question at that moment.

The kids here are also used to rote memorization - information is generally one-directional in nature. Asking questions like "How do I say that?" or "How do I make that sound?" or "Why A and not B?" is discouraged in the regular teacher's classroom, and their behavior extends to my speaking/listening exercises - a child will simply not answer or refuse to participate (or, even worse, simply repeat whatever I'm saying or what they previously said), which makes assessing and addressing individual needs particularly challenging. I've been attempting to find ways to discover their problems without anyone telling me.

The biggest pile of stuff I've confiscated so far.

The kids themselves are warm and friendly, much like adults here. I enjoy them quite a bit, especially my 1st graders. I can feel the love every time I enter a school - if only because of the incessant cries of "HELLO MR BEN! HELLO!" They're very, very curious about me personally and want to practice their most recent language acquisitions on me as I walk through the courtyard. To preserve my sanity I've stopped engaging them and give them a wave instead - it's exhausting trying to make personal connections with every one of them.

Learning their names has different policies at different schools. I'm not encouraged to learn names with my second graders, but I've been given seating charts of the first graders and try to call on them by name every day. They've been forbidden from taking English names (something that previous generations of ESL students have been encouraged to do), which is fine with me, since it gives me the chance to practice my pronunciation and become familiar with common VN names.

The spines are to keep
them from escaping? Or
maybe the teachers?

I teach in classrooms for 21 hours a week, not counting the hours of prep I do. I also have 4 hours of office work a week, where I proofread materials, create exams, and do general english projects for the business. Tuesday-Friday I'm out of the house from about 6:25am-9pm, darting between classes, private lessons, VN lessons, and short errands. The motorbike is great fun and very useful, but man, I miss the days when my commute could be used to accomplish things! I was so spoiled with the CTA!

I believe I've finally gotten the hang of this teaching thing, in short. It's been a very stressful 4 weeks, with many, many bumps along the way (many of them not my fault!), but I've been trying to be like the supple reed and not the mighty oak, knowing that to bend and sway with the storm is better in the long term than breaking.

This was taken on the day that all schools in
VN officially started. There were flowers, dances,
martial arts, chants, and songs. It was a headache.

Anyway, that's the reason I'm here, and I'm finally doing it - teaching English in Vietnam! It's a wild and crazy place, full of positives and negatives. Basically just like teaching challenges the world over, I'm sure! I'm looking forward to the next year, and maybe after that... a comfy position at an International School, teaching the children of wealthy expats. Who knows what that would bring... maybe A/C!! (That would almost be worth it just for the A/C, really.)

Thank you for following along, and thank you for your patience! I've had a tough time dealing with the ramp-up of teaching and I look forward to making all these things make more sense in context in the future.

Love,
Ben