Life In a Shoe Factory, One Year On

Hi from the office! Pardon my sweat and fluffy hair.

Well Hello! It’s been a while. How nice to be back with you again! (Yes, YOU!)

I just passed an anniversary at my job, and it occurs to me that I’ve never really explained what I do at my new place of employment. I haven't posted in so long!

My mother likes to tell people I work in a shoe factory in Vietnam - har har, Mother! What a troll. ;D She’s correct, of course, but I’m firmly in bonafide cubicle-land among the shoe developers, managers, and planners. And, as of September 1st, I’ve been here a year.

It’s a fascinating job and fairly challenging in all the best ways, and a few really not great ways.

Let me give you a little overview...

I’m teaching English to a wide range of office staffers. There's a ton of variation in here in terms of people and positions. Ages run from about 23-50, and from super actual beginner to high intermediate levels. Many students are false beginners - they studied English years ago but have had little chance to deploy skills in everyday life. "Use it or lose it," I constantly remind them. In this way my position is a great asset for them - for at least 10 hours each week I’m in the office, working alongside them and sculpting the program in a way that benefits them personally.

A rather sparse beginner class.

I work from a book for beginner classes and manage three classes with about 65 active students (the ones that actually come to class… on the books I have 90 beginner students enrolled). I plan and develop my own curriculum for each class. I also utilize an online Learning Management System: the fantastic Schoology (FREE!), which lets me track homework and create exercises and exams that self-correct, among a plethora of other features. It provides them with an easy, personalized learning opportunity every day - I encourage them to simply do 10-20 minutes each day in either Schoology or Duolingo. 

Listening and speaking are big areas of concern for most students. Because they’re generally living in the outskirts of HCMC or in the neighboring province, relatively close to the the office, they have few organic opportunities to practice English with foreigners and develop these skills.

Leader class - Spaghetti Tower Challenge

I’m also running two more classes.

I do an intermediate topic/activity-based class with about 20 students. I've finally developed a program that has no book and no homework, which was challenging to me as a teacher. I tried repeatedly to implement a more traditional curriculum and met resistance, time and again, for almost a year. (Honestly, big props to the students who stuck with me!! I hope it's finally paying off!)

I only just recently worked out a design that seems to be effective in teaching and also in bringing students back week after week.

Recent classes have included discussion of the experiences of North Korean refugees, Kesha’s lawsuit against Dr. Luke and her subsequent confessional songs off her new album, and a role-play murder mystery. This past week we got stranded on a desert island and had to contend with evolved apes and a mess of poisonous snakes! 

The goal is to present new vocabulary and structures in a way that generates a significant amount of student-student communication. Fingers crossed it continues to generate excitement and attendance! (really, please cross your fingers for luck. I'm gonna need it.)

Leader Class - Spaghetti Tower Challenge. They won.

Finally, I’ve got a leadership class. This class is focused on the eight areas of successful communication in the workplace. We recently finished a two-month focus on negotiation (VERY helpful for me, personally!), and now we are deep into teamwork and decision-making. My theatre training is coming into use here, as well. 

Lots of projects and discussion in this class, as it's primarily a forum to practice exchanging ideas and developing listening/speaking skills. Developing a successful format for this class was hands down my biggest challenge. Again... fingers crossed we continue to be engaged!

It’s been a strange road to this point over the last year.

My colleagues are amazing - last week
one gave me a boiled sweet potato as a snack!
It was great. Very potato-y.

Slowly, I was able to work out what made each class tick. There was no class infrastructure when I arrived, meaning I had to build everything from the ground up. It's been a unique experience, and one that I feel is relatively rare in Vietnam.

Teaching adults is a very special experience. You have a lot of freedom to draw examples from their personal lives, as you get to know them and have normal, adult conversations with them. It's a skill they've never had the opportunity to practice. And frankly, learning how the average Vietnamese office worker lives is humbling and inspiring.

Meanwhile, they’re able to pursue, at a slow but steady pace, learning a language that many thought was out of reach at this stage in their lives, whether it was considered irrelevant, unavailable, or unattainable. I’ve had some great successes, especially in my beginner classes, as students rise to the challenge of successfully communicating with a foreigner (either me or, preferably, their international business contacts via email and conference call).

Beginner, Session 2 - Vegetable Memory

One big challenge to developing a program in this context is that family life must be accounted for in a greater way at this stage - children get sick, errands must be run, couples have dates, etc. Some nights students are working in the office until 7 or 8 pm, and that always takes priority over class-time. 

Generally, I’ve found that students who accept the challenge have committed to our educational journey in a way that they weren’t doing when I first started here. If they miss class, it's only 1 or 2 weeks (we hold every class weekly) and they invariably catch up on in-class assignments soon after. I hope this is because I've finally found my groove, but perhaps they're just awesome students... or both! (Hopefully both!)

It helps that our classroom is in the main offices… without a separate journey to an English center, and then travel home after, there’s a much greater likelihood that they stick around for 90+ minutes after work to take part in this great opportunity (which is free for them!). I’m very proud, on the whole (although I have some habitual skippers, hrm).

Must have been teaching a
vocab word...?

All in all, it continues to be a highly unusual and satisfying job in a lot of ways. I’m the only teacher here, which is a bit of a bummer as my workload is enormous: planning, executing, and tracking membership, points, and homework for about 85 active students (~120 students enrolled), as well as proofreading marketing materials and press releases, and interviewing job candidates in English. 

Also, I just plain old miss working as part of a team. Those theatre skills will never die, I tell you!

My goals for my future here are three-fold.

First, Absolutely the base expectation: sustain these existing classes. Actively encouraging attendance is one of our programs' weakest areas. I mean, it's a free language class with a teacher who will know your name, can I get a hell yeah?!? Still, have yet to figure this one out within the context of a Vietnamese corporation.

Second, I will encourage my students to interact more in English on a daily basis in the office, displaying confidence and eventually extending this to communicating effectively with international business partners.

Third, I will continue to develop and improve a program that captures the interest of a large amount of students and is sticky, so they keep returning. The stickiness is particularly important, as I have a significant number of students that come to a newly set-up class for a few weeks and then disappear forever.... or those that take the intake test and then vanish into thin air. I may have failed those students in some way. A better design might change that.

I'm optimistic! Should be a fascinating near future.

Vietnam remains a great country to live in. There are always minor issues when you’re an expat - but, by and large, it’s worth it. This has and continues to be an experience like none other I've had.

Anyway, that's where I am now! That, and back to the blog (I hope, sigh).

Please leave a note if you're reading! It's been a long time, and I miss so many of you!

Later gators!