Walking for Scholars' Promise

Built around 1900 during the French colonial period in Vietnam, Long Bien Bridge was for many decades the only link across the Red River flowing through Hanoi. Today, while it still supports train traffic and a lot of motorbike traffic, it is less important as infrastructure but more important as an icon of Hanoi. Although bombed numerous times during war the bridge was never successfully destroyed, and stands today in its patched and repaired state as a testament to the power of determination (and as the start point of my Digital Learning Day Virtual 5K walk).

International students seeking access to an American education clearly face challenges. But there are also numerous pathways open to them. Digital learning, such as the American high school program offered entirely online by Scholars’ Promise, may be just the bridge you need to get you to your goal.

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"Train Street”

Along the viaduct supporting the rail line, the old stone arches have been filled in and designated an ‘art street’ for murals depicting old Hanoi. While the murals are full of nostalgia, many of the patrons are there to snap selfies, inserting themselves in these scenes from the past - and instantaneously posting them online, of course.

Curating our experience of the present seems a natural instinct, producing, you might say, an instant noodles variety of nostalgia. Speaking of which, you can also get noodles - along with all variety of street foods - served up on the sidewalk along this railroad. Which you might want to snap a picture of...

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Leaving the railroad line, I walked past a small park where a statue of V. I. Lenin stands. The large plaza in front of the statue is a popular evening spot for skateboarders, while in the daytime it is mostly tourists stopping by to snap pictures. Across the street is a flag tower, part of the pre-colonial military fortress Thang Long Citadel, as well as the Vietnam Military History Museum featuring outdoor displays of American and French aircraft and military equipment, wrecked or abandoned in Vietnam during war or upon the departure of these forces.

And, by the way, this walk happened to fall on the second day of the summit, of which Hanoi was very proud of being chosen to host, between US President Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. Flags and signs adorned many parts of the city (the banners above say: "Vietnam: A Safe and Friendly Destination" and "Hanoi: A City for Peace") and there were soldiers and armored personnel carriers patrolling around the iconic French colonial era hotel in the city centre, the Metropole. (Which is not normal, by the way.)

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The end point of my walk, the Temple of Literature is considered the “first university” in Vietnam. Established in the 11th Century, today this is a park-like space with koi ponds and temple structures arranged in feng shui perfection, along with a giant bell and giant drum. I am not sure if the bell and drum were used to announce class opening back in the day (?) but in any case they are impressively large. The Temple is Literature is a tourism draw and includes souvenir shops, but is also the site of photo sessions by graduates and a place of pilgrimage for students about to take key exams.

The flanks of the compound are lined with large stone tortoises whose backs support stone markers engraved with the names of successful candidates within the rigorous academic mandarinate system under imperial Vietnam. After we are done discussing the virtues and flaws of that system, and of today’s education system here in Vietnam, and that in the West; those stone markers are still there, those names are still there, their efforts, aspirations and dreams are still memorialized in stone for today’s would-be scholars to draw inspiration from.

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My route:

An Ambitious Yet Responsible American Pioneer

Advertising is one of the things that really cracks me up here. Working all night and buying a lot of coffee and junk food seems to be what I've been up to lately. I wonder who decided that the cup of coffee to go from a gas station is a great place for customer ego inflation? I'm a pioneer of recycling because I bought an outrageously overpriced cup of coffee !?! Perhaps I should introduce this kind of flattery to the coffee shop around the corner from my room in Hanoi, I don't think their customers realize that they are pioneers of recycling, for using cups that get washed and reused, wow, what a concept. Or that their beverages are extremely hot, now that is good to know. Or, indeed, that their cups make a statement about them - although perhaps that statement does not start with "Hey, look at me," perhaps it starts with "We only have one size of drink here (reasonable) and you picked it, congratulations !"

My Armchair Travels

Actually, I don’t have an armchair. But if I did, I would certainly use it! I am back in Hanoi, for anybody who didn’t know, wandering in small circles as usual. Re-entry has been fairly smooth – I have the same room, same motorbike, same ‘job’ and am studying the same language. Phở is still good for breakfast, and better here than on Fruitville Pike, no surprise there!

Being something less than half employed and being something less than a model (laborious!) student, I spend inordinate amounts of time soaking up caffeine in one form or another and reading books (which is really an armchair sort of activity, unless you happen not have an armchair - in my case it is a child-sized-plastic-lawn-furniture activity, as that is what sidewalk cafes here have to sit on). So, at the risk of flooding my blog with things other people have said, here are some comments and notable quotes from my latest stack of books.

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Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, describes the life and work of Dr Paul Farmer. Dr Farmer’s primary work is in a clinic in rural Haiti, although he is also part of a great many other projects in public health all over the place. This book is really good. While I know next to nothing about public health issues, the way you can see idealism (naiveté, in another word) put to practical use here is a little inspiring to me. It is a comprehensive perspective on life that sort of reminds me of all the opportunities that are out there, even for me in my type Z personality world…

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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo, is one very funny and insightful novel, on language and cross-cultural experience and relationships. It is the story of a Chinese student who goes to England for a year of study, and as the title suggests, it is primarily about the linguistic and cultural conundrums inherent in her relationship with her boyfriend there. The writing is in the voice of someone just learning English. You might think that I see enough fractured English already, being an editor, but the use of that simplistic yet direct and forceful style adds a lot to the story.

Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But, English language is boss of English user.

Every night I coming out Tottenham Hale tube station and walking home shivering. I scared to pass each single dark corner. In this place, crazy mans or sporty kids throwing stones to you or shouting to you without reasons. Also, the robbers robbing the peoples even poorer than them. In China, we believe “rob the rich to feed the poor.” But robbers here have no poetry.

I sit in pub alone, trying to feel involving in the conversation. It seem a place of middle-aged-mans culture. I smell a kind of dying, although it still struggling. While I sitting here, many singles, desperately mans coming up saying, “Hello darling.” But I not your darling. Where your darling? 7 o’clock in the evening, your darling must be cooking baked bean in orange sauce for you at home … Why not just go home spending time with your darling?

“You’ve invaded my privacy! You can’t do that!” First time, you shout to me, like a lion.
“What privacy? But we living together! No privacy if we are lovers!”
“Of course there is! Everybody has privacy!”
But why people need privacy? Why privacy so important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son, and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.

We argue all the way back to home. Open the door, make a pot of tea, you start woover the floor again.
So noisy. It makes me headache immediately. The woover must be invented by mans. I sit on chair not let the big dragon swallow me and take out the Little Red Book from my drawer. There are some pages about womans and equal in Mao’s speech:
In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production.
This must be the original thoughts which became legend “womans hold up half of the sky” in China.

In Italy: Inside of taxi, so close, I can see his face clearly. He looks bit formal in his plain suit and black leather Made-in-Italy shoes. His hair is very few in the middle of his head. He seems sincerely but a little boring, if I can judge like that.
“So what do you do?” I ask.
“I am an avocado,” he replies.
“Avocado?” I am surprised to hear. Is a fruit also a job? “Please explain me,” I ask.
“If you are going to be put in prison you can hire me to help you in court,” he says.
“Ah… is like a lawyer?”
“Yes! Yes! Avocado is lawyer.”

You are cooking some obscure pie for me. It is called q-u-i-c-h-e. I have never seen if before. On the bag it says Even Real Men Eat Quiche. Quiche, q-u-i-c-h-e. I can’t believe it when I am swallowing this piece of shapeless hot stuff. Such an ambiguous piece of food. Totally formless. I wonder about what my parents would say if one day they come to this country, and they eat this. My mother probably will say: “It is like eating something from other people’s mouth.” And my father will say: “It must be left from earlier meal so they re-cook it but inside are already messed up.”
I will agree with my father: it is a piece of big mess indeed. You tell me it is actually from France. I don’t believe you. I think the English are too ashamed to acknowledge it is their food. So they say it is French to defend themself.

“You know, you never tell me things like this.” Now you get up from the bed. You must feel better.
“But you never really ask me. You never really pay attention to my culture. You English once took over Hong Kong so you probably heard of that we Chinese have 5,000 years of the greatest human civilization ever existed in the world… Our Chinese invented paper so your Shakespeare can write two thousand years later. Our Chinese invented gunpowder for you English and Americans to bomb Iraq. And our Chinese invented compass for you English to sail and colonize the Asian and Africa.”
You stare at me, no words. Then you leave the bed, and put the kettle on.
“Do you want some tea?” you ask.

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Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala, another novel, describes the life of a child soldier in West Africa. It is an utterly personable and humanizing story about a topic that is not easy to address.

Every night they are making fire and soldier is sitting down and talking. After some time I am getting up to go and sit with them around the fire. It is warm and it is making me to feel a little bit okay and I am happying to be back at the camp because it is nice here – at least nicer than having to be in place with all of its screaming people that you are killing all the time. And here, I am relaxing because there is no enemy that I have to be watching out for if they are wanting to kill me. But I am sitting here listening to the other men talking and breathing and breathing and somehow looking alive. When it is so, we are really all just waiting to die, I am still sadding too much. I am not liking to be sad because being sad is what happens to you before you are becoming mad. And if you are becoming mad, then it is meaning that you are not going to be fighting. So I cannot be sad because if I cannot be fighting, then either I will die, or Commandant will be killing me. If I am dead, then I will not be able to be finding my mother and my sister when this war is finishing.

Then I will go back to church. I will go back to church to ask God for forgiveness every day. And I will go back to church and sit on the bench under the fan that one day will just be falling and crushing me and I will not even be minding the splinter that is chooking into my leg because I will be paying attention to Jesus. I won’t even be moving my eye from the statue of Jesus and instead I will just be sitting there watching Him and watching Him until one day He will be telling me that it is okay.

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A Prayer for Burma, by Kenneth Wong is a travel memoir, but it is more about the authors experience in the tourist v. native son quandary than it is really about Burma particularly. While this was of course written before Burma hit the news again this summer, the situation there was not much different then. However, the book is almost exclusively from a personal perspective; refreshing if you are accustomed to reading about Burma from the perspective of the Western political establishment which is a whole different story.

On paying the ‘camera fee’ when entering a temple:

I showed him the small Canon dangling from my belt. “Oh, that’s too small,” he said. “We can’t possibly charge you for this. Just go right ahead.” Both the man and the young woman seemed so congenial that I couldn’t imagine them chasing after tourists who refused to pay. They probably wouldn’t. They operated on the premise that everyone was fundamentally good; they trusted that everyone would do the right thing, and those who didn’t would eventually be punished. That was characteristically Buddhist.

Finding a meal:

“Can I get dim sum here?”
“Yes sir.”
“What do you have?”
“We have steamed chicken, steamed pork, and a few others.”
“Some egg rolls, please?”
“Sorry, sold out. Try the steamed chicken.”
“Thanks, but I’ll take some steamed shrimps instead.”
“Sorry, couldn’t get shrimps at the market today. But the steamed chicken is good.”
The Burmese are too polite and too embarrassed to tell a visitor that he or she doesn’t have any options. So they offer options that are not actually there to begin with, and gently guide the visitor back to the only option there is.

That phenomenon, by the way, is common here as well. You can call it polite embarrassment or you can call it optimistic advertising, when only half of what’s on the menu is actually available, either way it sort of helps people be flexible about their eating…

Brutal reality undermines everything quaint in Burma; few outsiders are capable of enduring what most Burmese suffer with dignity and humility every day. Yet, like a desert traveller mesmerized by a mirage, I found myself drawn to the deceptive charm of Burmese life. It was time for me to leave but I was reluctant to go. Travellers are a strange and stubborn bunch; contrary to the dictates of rationality, they seek ease in discomfort, reward in depravity, meaning in absurdity, and a surprising number of them report that they actually find what they seek.

If I were rating books this one would be low to medium, while it definitely has its good points, somehow I didn’t feel like I learned much from it.

My Daring Dictionary

I have the funniest set of dictionaries ever. Arriving in Vietnam as a student I bought 'pocket' Vietnamese-English and English-Vietnamese dictionaries. That is 'pocket' as in my Grandpa's bib overalls pocket, not as in any pocket I've got, but they are hardly up to Oxford Unabridged standard either. They are both "EXCLUSIVELY designed for Vietnamese students" which is why they probably cost a dollar, which is I why I chose them. I keep going to the bookstore and looking at real dictionaries, but real dictionaries have no character. I can find Vietnamese words for English words I didn't even know existed. For instance, insipidity. I can see the logic in that, but if I ever heard anyone actually use that word in a sentence, I would remember it, and I don't. On sentences, the example sentences are classic.

"I bitterly fail in this dusty world And must be content to hand my wish to the future."
"Everytime coming the autumn I dream of my childhood."
"It's time you woke up the fact that you're not very popular."
"Do you believe that stories about fairies exist?"
"Can you board and lodge me?"
And the winner of the insipidity contest:
"Thinking of her unfaithful character is the best way to distract myself from missing her melancholy-eyed face."

I can't read that without laughing, shouldn't dictionaries make you laugh? The E-V dictionary has an entry for "imbibition," unfortunately it doesn't have a sentence to go with it. Actually it doesn't have a definition either, or a translation or anything, only imbibition, so all exclusively Vietnamese students know for a fact that imbibition is indeed a word of some kind, with some meaning, to be used in some context or another... Allow me to offer a sentence.

"The inquest investigating the inhibition of imbibition was inhibited by its inimitable insipidity."

:)

Notes from the news

In Vietnam News an article titled "Ceremony Held to Mark Teacher's Day in Hanoi" about exactly that. Except for the second paragraph: "Nhan (Minister of Education) went on to criticize a small group of teachers in the educational system who were not sufficiently devoted to their jobs." Now this has nothing to do with my school or with me, but you know, I thought it fit anyway! Having take the last three weeks off from teaching I am wide open to criticism of being insufficiently devoted. As a result of my sorely insufficient devotion, I'm in the process of getting another job (in addition to teaching, not replacing it entirely) editing the news. I usually read the news anyway, and am always amused at the gauche English that pops up here and there, so I thought it might be a good fit. We'll see about that.

In the classroom, indeed most places here, as far as I can tell, whenever you need to decide something of no real importance you play rock, paper scissors. The street kids in Saigon are great at winning change from you using this game. Apparently there are actual rules and contests for this thing, sport, game whatever, cause there is now a world champion. And, although I'm not sure I remember seeing it, apparently people in the states play this game too because the champion is British and he played somebody from the states... This is important, see, news should make you wrinkle your forehead. If you just nod and say "I expected that" it's not news, is it? So read the details here.


And in 'real' news, something quirky which made me look twice:

General Vo Nguyen Giap yesterday received the Chilean President at his home in
Ha Noi. Giap said though far apart, Viet Nam and Chile were united in striving for peace, protecting national independence and freedom.
Like Viet Nam, Chile was a heroic nation that experienced major struggles to build the prosperous country of today.
Bachelet expressed her happiness in meeting the general, who was instrumental in Viet Nam’s resounding victory in the fight against aggressors.
Giap also presented two books, "Unforgettable Days" in Spanish and "Ho Chi Minh Thought and the Viet Nam Revolution Path," to Bachelet. (link)

Now if my memory of history class serves me correctly, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap cut his teeth a long time ago, being credited with the strategy giving Vietnam victory in Dien Bien Phu against the French in 1954. Not to mention the rest of the war(s) in and of Vietnam since then. He is currently around 94 years old, I believe. When I'm 94, if I make it that far, I'll probably be happy to sit around smoking a pipe on my porch and giving books to my grandkids (if I make it that far...), entertaining foreign presidents must be tiring!

I know people who collect foreign stamps, foreign money (money in general for that matter,) foreign addresses, foreign hats etc. All good, whatever floats your boat. Notice the list of flags on the right sidebar of my blog - this is my collection. It's pretty much the only thing I collect because I don't have to carry them around, and I don't have to do anything to collect them, only watch them pile up. Latest additions are Turkey, the Russian Federation and the United Arab Emirates. Put your mouse on the flag and you should get a map of the place. Maps make me happy. I think my Dad did that to me. Maps also make me poor!

Coughing, Quoting and Cackling to Myself

For anybody who cares (even if it is only enough to open a webpage), I am at the moment in a reasonably good humour but have an inappropriately prodigious nose. Most unfortunately for somebody who is supposed to make a living by teaching, I am also accompanied by the infamous tickle in the throat leading directly to a most indecorous hacking, and crackly whispering vocables that native speakers crinkle their foreheads at, while ESL students hear rumblings and beginnings of thoughts like 'Why school hire American accent teacher very not interesting'. So, I am not teaching today. I was going to do one short two hour class, but my supervisor sensibly told me to stay away. So now I have no reason not to write another blog.

Work itself is going on pretty much as expected. This week is a new term – I introduce myself to my classes as the teacher who croaks. I have a level 6 class this term, new heights of grammatically fortified students expecting me to enlighten them. That is an evening class, primarily adult students, so at least I am mostly unburdened of the testosterone gallery of the class!

Say No To Dishonesty
Speaking of education, I found this article on education in Vietnam exemplary of, what should I say, verbosity masquerading as obtusity, or perhaps the opposite, I’m not sure. That’s the point.

Foie Gras Feast
I always read the important news from the good old US of A. Open invitation to anyone interested in foie gras to head for Chicago. Illegality is so appealing. This fact is demonstrated by what I saw this morning. Red lights, here in Hanoi, are sort of like a gentle suggestion. Typically, about half the traffic stops, the other half guns it and shoots through the congealed blob of stopped motorbikes like hornets through the crack in your window. Usually this is when you use your horn. Today I saw a kid do it on a bicycle, going about as fast as you can go on a bicycle like that, whipping past the motorbikes and, upon hitting the middle of the intersection, he just let out a piercing scream to attract the attention of any traffic foolish enough to assume that a green light means you can go… Think of it as a swarm of Mayflies in Michigan being swatted with a radio antenna, you’ll hit a couple but the herd moves on. On my motorbike, unlike in my life, I try to run with the herd!

Chillies Aid Sumatra Jail Break
Pocket a habanera next time you see one, you never know when it might come in handy.

Prison guard: "The is the first time chilli has been used to get out of this penitentiary,"
Recaptured prisoner: “Nothing takes the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth like … ketchup or yoghurt or bread or anything but chillies!

Can you tell that I am reading a Bill Bryson book right now?

I have never kept much of a reading list, exactly, but here are a few comments on what I’ve read lately. Upon finishing my training in Saigon, I read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, which is a really fascinating, um, history of the world. The most interesting part, for me, was not so much the history itself, but his ability to summarize and synthesize information from many different disciplines into a comprehensible whole. It’s a great book to read when you are jobless – it is dense and it makes you feel like the tiniest blip on history’s radar screen. Somehow that is comforting when you are just watching TV and waiting for the phone to ring all day. And, on top of that, it’s not that difficult of a book to read, not like a textbook.

There were few other books in there somewhere, and one of them was Memoirs of a Geisha which is very informative for anybody interested in Geisha, or, indeed, humans in general since most of us are more similar than different. Even if you have no clue what a Geisha is, you are more similar than different.

Finally, my quote of the day from Bill Bryson’s book on Australia, Down Under.

“Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting on a
rowing boat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren’t biting; it’s
like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps to not
know what’s going on. In such a rarified world of contentment and
inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.”

Anybody who can do what Bill Bryson does and apparently make a living at it deserves my attention!

Oh, right, I have a job

In the last week and a half, I’ve mostly worked. Those of you who know me very well might be surprised at that, but the people I work with seem unsurprised. And speaking of work, let’s see, how is that going? My school is basically an IELTS preparation course. IELTS is the test that ‘foreign’ students have to take to get into English-speaking universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, etc etc. The school has classes from beginner (I mean the “ABC” kind of beginner) through eight levels up to the actual IELTS preparation course. Each course lasts through a five week term with class four hours a day. For about the first month I worked, I was filling in for teachers on holiday, so I had different classes and different schedules. Now a new term has started and I have a regular schedule.

I have one level three class with twelve students. I think level three is good for me. They are advanced enough that I can talk to them without always having to resort to sign language, my acting skills or drawing silly pictures on the board. They are not so advanced that they ask me questions about adverbial clauses and nominative phrasal verbs and intransitive quantifiers and all that jazz that I don’t know much about… Plus with only twelve students, some of whom I taught last term, I can actually remember all their names, which is good. So I usually enjoy teaching that class.

I also have two level five classes, which so far have been mostly another story. I only have them two days a week, so I don’t get to know the students as well. And, obviously, they are a lot more advanced. So they are doing things like speed reading, academic essays (that is the theory at least), impromptu speaking etc. So, in those classes I think of myself as a surfer who is being dragged along by the cord between my foot and my board which has been attacked by a shark. In level three I can usually keep on my feet. Well, maybe I will get better after a couple weeks. Four hour classes tend to defy all possible efforts in terms of preparation.

So I take ‘pages’ from my speech class, my myriad writing classes, and really nothing from the ‘English’ classes I’ve had. My attitude in the classroom is, well you could say lazy. These are students who are trying to get into university abroad, and our classes are supposed to prepare them for that experience. So, being inspired by all my favorite professors, I tell them that they can get out of the class whatever they are willing to put into it. People who don’t bother to do the work sort of annoy me but I don’t spend a whole lot of time lecturing them, they’ll figure it out when they take their exams. The idea of me actually motivating someone else is a little laughable. Anyway, that is the job.

Outside of the job I am still thinking about getting back into a Vietnamese class. Somehow being an English teacher doesn’t help my Vietnamese much... I have used a bit of that in my class, for example in a writing assignment about ‘famous buildings in your city,’ I kept running into the One Legged Temple. This place is generally called, in English, the One Pillar Pagoda, but in Vietnamese is called one-legged… I can understand just enough to know if my students are talking about me on break, but not enough to know what they are saying. Not really all that helpful! I can, however, tell motorbike taxi drivers which way to turn, not as if they listen to me but at least I can tell them!

And it is summertime, even here in Hanoi, which is hot with a capital T. Downpours happen a lot. The other day a huge tree was knocked down just up the street from my school. And on occasion the downpour climbs up into my bedroom through the three inch 'crack' under the door. I haven’t really figured that out yet – there is a door which seems to open towards the rest of the building, but there is some space out there which apparently has no purpose whatsoever other than so that you can open the door which goes to it. And for breakfast this morning I passed on my typical Vietnamese iced coffee for a Mocha which I didn’t much like, Vietnam is not a place where I miss coffee from America…

About my job…

Well I think it is going pretty well so far. My students are in their late teens or twenties, most of them are applying to study in foreign English-speaking universities. None of my students have run away in terror, or started throwing coconuts at me. As long as I am somewhere in between those points I can call myself a success … ? So far I teach a four hour morning class some days, and a two hour evening class. The things that are difficult for me are not surprises. I have to talk loudly for a long time, so I have a sore throat. I have to go fast enough to keep the ‘smart’ students awake (those who have already done the exercises in the book before we even get there) and slow enough not to lose everyone else. I am supposed to teach grammar points to students who usually know more about English grammar than I do. Knowing grammar and knowing how to communicate effectively are very different things! I have to make mundane subjects interesting by virtue of the difficulty of communicating in a second language. Well, or I have to try at least.

One class this week we talked about music. The text had some readings from Paul McCartney’s book, and I brought in a cd with various styles of music to talk about. Well, really just to amuse the students on Friday. None of them like Gregorian Chant. None of them like Muddy Waters. None of them like The Beatles. Most of them liked Eminem, and squarely at the top of the heap, the very epitome of popularity - Peter, Paul and Mary singing Puff the Magic Dragon. I expect that has more to do with the understandability (!) of the lyrics than the music.

Down the street from my school is a French deli/restaurant where you can get a baguette sandwich for lunch with cheeses like gorgonzola, Blue d’auvergne, etc. I picked the right street to work on. Plus, on the same street, you can get bun cha which I will explain some other day. So, yeah, my job is going pretty well.

Highly amusing

Hi folks, check out this link. English is a fascinating language, mostly thanks to all the good folks who just don't quite get it right...

http://dudieinmalay.blogspot.com/2006/04/bad-english-part-ii.html

Fish music and school

The last week has not been quite as event-less as might be assumed, based on a complete lack of activity on my blog. And I was studying too, some of the time! I taught two classes for my tefl course that were observed. The practice teaching we do is divided between two schools. One of them is a government (public) school here in District 1 with kids maybe 9-12 years old or so. The second is an IT College pretty far from here, I think it is a two year college, most of the students are around 19. This week was the first I was in the college, and if I learned anything it is that teaching adults is, at least at first glance, a whole lot easier than teaching kids. They may lose interest if the class is boring but at least they didn’t start throwing things. It is interesting to see their level of English. Based on very unofficial and random exchanges, I think that most of the 12 year olds in the government school are better at actually using English than the college kids are. Since it is an IT school, English is not really their emphasis so I guess that is not surprising. Overall, I think my classes went slightly better, which is good I guess. This week our classes will be from actual textbooks, which will significantly reduce the preparation time required, I am looking forward to that!

And in ‘other things’ I did last week I should add, found the jazz club. Jazz is a good thing. Not to mention other kinds of music – there are a surprising number of cafes downtown which have live music for “free.” Not really free, they just charge three bucks for a glass of orange juice… but hey, it’s three bucks. So in one evening of wandering I heard a classic rock band that did some quite good renditions of Eagles classics, the Vietnamese version of ACDC (which was amusing just as a concept – it is not quite as unusual here in Saigon to see Vietnamese men with long hair as other places in Vietnam, but I have never seen five in one spot with actual headbanging heavymetal long hair…), and a band flowing seamlessly between John Denver songs and French folk. That was, naturally, the Napoleon Café.




Other than that, I got a hot pot with a giant fish in it. And I think that is all for the moment – I have to GO STUDY J

I love hamburgers really?

It is a bit hard for me to believe that 110 people actually looked at this site since I started it. I don’t even know that many people. Of course, probably it is 5 people who have looked 110 times, but I will allow myself an ego trip, isn’t that what blogs are for?

So this week has been interesting in my Tefl course. Monday and Tuesday we met individually with students for one-on-one tutoring sessions. That went pretty well for me, not much different than what I do when I am trying to talk to someone in a café, except that I tried to avoid using the seventeen Vietnamese words I have remembered. Wednesday we observed one of our trainers doing two classes. Today, Thursday, we taught classes in teams of two, and tomorrow am we do our first individual classes. The kids in my class today were probably 11 or 12 years old. I would describe them as eager to be involved and severely prone to sudden extemporaneous and uncontrollable bursts of chanting. That was my week so far. We essentially have to prepare our own lessons using the Tefl format, so I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time drawing pictures for purposes of demonstration. I am not a good picture drawer. I’m quite sure the kids could do better at that than I. I suppose I’ll get used to it. Actually I suppose that after the course is over I will get a job teaching from an actual textbook and not have to make the whole lesson up out of nothing. That might be a good thing.

Last Sunday was a quite good day. Beginning, of course, with a perfectly arranged bowl of pho (see photo.) In the afternoon I had arranged to meet Mr. Chen Vinh for a tour of ChợLon, an old part of Saigon which is primarily Chinese. Chen is Chinese-Vietnamese, and he was at a loss to understand how it could be that I actually studied Mandarin, in Shanghai, and want to teach English, but still decided to come back to Vietnam instead of China. In spite of that, we had a good afternoon mostly just walking around talking, interspersed with visits to a few pagodas, a shopping mall, and yet another coffee shop.

After this I met Mr. Tai and his son, in a park, to practice his English. This is the third time I met them, I think, and they invite me to their house for dinner. This is fascinating. After a longish bike ride out District 1 where I spend most of my time, we arrive at a little computer shop with a room behind (and above) it, this is home. One of the more amusing aspects of this little dinner was the food – they went out to Lotteria, a fast food chain, and got me a hamburger and fries. I am American, so shouldn’t I be eating hamburgers and fries?? We had fun trying to communicate, and I met numerous neighbors, aunts, brothers, etc.

Finally, if 110 people looked at all this aimless rambling, why did only three of you COMMENT? If you say anything I don’t like, it won’t show up, other than that it is a free-for-all. OK, I have to get some sleep so I can stay awake in class tomorrow, I’m supposed to be the teacher. Hmm.

Cheers ... (?)

My Personal Bad English Page

How about stinky feet, are they allowed??
That, of course, refers to durian, for anybody who has never smelled durian.

On a "fake liquor" ring:

Notably, the gang hided their evil acts by masking the establishment as a crap collection facility.

Stuff you really need to know about

"I coulda been somebody!"

"Like ... a Blissful Bamboo Villager?"