Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
i love being loved
Alaina and I get lots of texts from students, since we give out our mobile numbers. Some of my personal favorites have been:
• I’m nga. You are extrovert- a girl with lovely smile☺could you give me your nickname,please?when are you going to come back USA?have a good trip!
• What are you doing now? Are you sleeping? Do I annoy you? This morning we all were so excited when talking with both of you. You are two friendly Americans
• We are all nice to meet you.And I want to make friend with you so much. You are pretty social, talkative. Do you want to visit more tourist attractions in Hanoi?
• Hello Eliza! I am Ha.We met each other at my class on Tuesday.Do you remember me? I am very glad to make friend with you.Welcome to Vietnam.If having problem,don't hasitate to tell me! I 'll help you.If I have a chance to visit America,will you agree tobe a tourist guider.?hihi.Goodluck for you
• WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU TIRED?
• OH. I AM FINE. THANK U. I LOVE U HAVE A GOOD NAP .
• Excuse me.hello.my name hien.we can do frjend.sometime we can talk eachother through telephone.ok.now you are student.or you work.i can do make frjend. ok
• I’m nga. You are extrovert- a girl with lovely smile☺could you give me your nickname,please?when are you going to come back USA?have a good trip!
• What are you doing now? Are you sleeping? Do I annoy you? This morning we all were so excited when talking with both of you. You are two friendly Americans
• We are all nice to meet you.And I want to make friend with you so much. You are pretty social, talkative. Do you want to visit more tourist attractions in Hanoi?
• Hello Eliza! I am Ha.We met each other at my class on Tuesday.Do you remember me? I am very glad to make friend with you.Welcome to Vietnam.If having problem,don't hasitate to tell me! I 'll help you.If I have a chance to visit America,will you agree tobe a tourist guider.?hihi.Goodluck for you
• WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU TIRED?
• OH. I AM FINE. THANK U. I LOVE U HAVE A GOOD NAP .
• Excuse me.hello.my name hien.we can do frjend.sometime we can talk eachother through telephone.ok.now you are student.or you work.i can do make frjend. ok
Monday, November 2, 2009
I'm a Professahh! Kinda
Every Tuesday and Thursday is an adventure, some better than others. These days I have my internship with Alaina at Hanoi Open University where we teach English. Or rather, we sing, work on pronunciation and answer lots and lots of questions on a good day. Originally I liked my internship there because we would go into classes (we never have the same class twice) and the students would be very excited to be able to talk with us. If we were lucky the teacher would be there to help facilitate a discussion, since our Vietnamese is lacking. Lately though we are left to teach pronunciation by ourselves to classes. This is fine by me, I don’t mind independence. The hard part though is when they hand us a class of 90 students and a shotty microphone. How can we work on pronunciation with 90 students, who can’t even hear what we are saying, let alone understand, with no one to help us translate to Vietnamese? The other difficulty is the fact that often we will go into a class, and try incredibly hard to motivate students with our extensive lesson plans, but some just don’t care and talk during our class. For example, we read out a story for the students and then asked them to take three minutes to write out one sentence explaining the story. We got back blank stares, so we asked if they understood the assignment. They said they did. So we told them to write sentences. A few students tugged out a pen and paper and started to scribble, while others just stared into space or leaned their head against their hand for three minutes. After seeing this I asked them where their sentences were and they just looked at me and started to write down something, while making a weird “what do you think you’re doing” face. This has happened multiple times and it makes me feel so frustrated because I try so hard to communicate and to help them learn, but if they are not even willing to help themselves then I can’t do anything. Sometimes I feel like the students, and sometimes the teachers as well, think that since we are there we can simply hand them English proficiency. Which is not the case.
Anyhow our internship is difficult and sometimes feels pointless, but we are definitely learning a lot about the Vietnamese education system and its inner workings. When we do have the chance to teach with a teacher, we are often told to have punishments for the students that do not say correct answers. This is somewhat of a cultural and moral dilemma for me; being a student of the American educational system I tend to think that as long as a student tries, then they are doing a good job and that they do not deserve a punishment: rather, they need encouragement. Another cultural difference is communication. At one point a male teacher invited Alaina and I (but Alaina thinks he has a crush on me) to a Halloween party the same night of ours. We declined and said that although we wanted to go, we were hosting our own party, and invited him to it for after his. I definitely said something wrong because he looked physically in pain after I declined him, as if he had asked me to marry him or something and I declined. He kept fidgeting and gulping, also averting his eyes. I apologized and left, and later learned that I need to skirt around the subject of not attending, rather than outright saying it. Ooops. Yet another cultural blunder I’ve had was in class, when the students were taking turns reading out loud a paragraph on Halloween we had handed out. Not only do the students read in a whisper so that you can barely hear, but everyone around talks. I kept announcing that people needed to stop talking because they were being rude. When they didn’t stop, I picked on some girls in the front laughing and making a lot of noise by sternly saying, “please stop talking and disrespecting the person who is reading.” They proceeded to eye me and themselves and stopped talking. I at that moment realized what I had done— to them, it is not considered rude to talk when others are talking, including the teacher. I have seen this everywhere and in each class. Even more, what is disrespectful to me is not disrespectful to them. Being American I have a more individualized perception of the workings of the world, and thus talking while another person is talking out loud for others is not showing them respect for what they are doing— whereas here it is much more about the group, so if people in the group want to talk, they talk. And boy is it frustrating, especially when your Vietnamese is lacking and you can’t hear your students reading.
Our day at the internship goes a bit like this. We walk twenty minutes and on the way cross the busy highway and walk through a local market, trying not to step on animal blood but enjoying the sights. As we near the school we spot the trusty bo bia ngot lady selling her delicious creations from a white box at the end of her bicycle. She’s there every morning and afternoon, and Alaina and I are absolutely addicted to bo bia ngot, which is a crepe filled with sugarcane, shredded coconut and black sesame seeds. It melts in your mouth and has the most satisfying caramel and coconut aftertaste. Anyhow we also stop for ca phe sua da which kicks us into gear and gets us buzzing for our first two hour class. Whenever we get to work we’re ushered into one of the teachers rooms and told to sip little cups of tea as we watch students watch us from the hallway. At this point in time one of us is usually offered a vow of marriage by one of the two unmarried male teachers, which is awkward. We then wait until a teacher comes to stake their claim on us (lately it’s meant a free period for them) to teach in their class. Like I said before, if we are lucky, students will for the most part be very excited to have foreigners visiting their class and we will answer questions about America and Vietnam for two hours, with the help of the teacher. (We are often asked about our boyfriends, why we don’t have them, when our wedding is and why we don’t know when it is, and whether we find Vietnamese men attractive.) This could be also mean us singing songs for two hours with or without a teacher— or just going ahead with our lesson plan with no teacher and upwards of 90 students at a time. We never know what we’re gonna get, which is both thrilling and frightening. We always attempt to fit in our pre-made lesson plan into the abilities and attention span of the students we’re given for that period of time and sometimes it’s more challenging than others. After the first class of surprises we head to the local Bia Hoi restaurant, complete with a hanging mutilated goat carcass which becomes more skeletal each time we visit. We sit facing the other wall and we order by pointing to random dishes and seeing what we get. We cross our fingers that it does not contain goat. Later, in the second class, we have another set of surprises awaiting. The second class is always more tired and solemn, maybe after a large lunch and a busy morning, and it’s much more challenging trying to teach. Usually at this point we've held it long enough and we decide to brave the bathroom. Bathroom is a loose word, you need a bath after you go to this room. But that's just the way it is. Typically, upon entering, your nostrils hit a wall of urine stench which doesn't cease and can be explained by the puddles on the floor. There are three "stalls": one wide open with no doors and a wide trough, like a woman urinal, and a bucket of brown water for flushing/pseudo-toilet paper; one missing a door and often you'll get the back view of some girl peeing; and finally one with a door. Oh, and they're all squat pots. Meaning a hole to aim for and places to put your feet. Sometimes when I'm done I just come out laughing; it's the one thing that I just can't seem to get used to while living here. You've just gotta laugh it off and then wash your shoes.
Overall the experience teaching at Hanoi Open University thus far has been ok. We still have plenty of time to grow into it and become better at it, but we are faced with many challenges. This is good for me though, since I may want to teach as a profession when I’m older.
Anyhow our internship is difficult and sometimes feels pointless, but we are definitely learning a lot about the Vietnamese education system and its inner workings. When we do have the chance to teach with a teacher, we are often told to have punishments for the students that do not say correct answers. This is somewhat of a cultural and moral dilemma for me; being a student of the American educational system I tend to think that as long as a student tries, then they are doing a good job and that they do not deserve a punishment: rather, they need encouragement. Another cultural difference is communication. At one point a male teacher invited Alaina and I (but Alaina thinks he has a crush on me) to a Halloween party the same night of ours. We declined and said that although we wanted to go, we were hosting our own party, and invited him to it for after his. I definitely said something wrong because he looked physically in pain after I declined him, as if he had asked me to marry him or something and I declined. He kept fidgeting and gulping, also averting his eyes. I apologized and left, and later learned that I need to skirt around the subject of not attending, rather than outright saying it. Ooops. Yet another cultural blunder I’ve had was in class, when the students were taking turns reading out loud a paragraph on Halloween we had handed out. Not only do the students read in a whisper so that you can barely hear, but everyone around talks. I kept announcing that people needed to stop talking because they were being rude. When they didn’t stop, I picked on some girls in the front laughing and making a lot of noise by sternly saying, “please stop talking and disrespecting the person who is reading.” They proceeded to eye me and themselves and stopped talking. I at that moment realized what I had done— to them, it is not considered rude to talk when others are talking, including the teacher. I have seen this everywhere and in each class. Even more, what is disrespectful to me is not disrespectful to them. Being American I have a more individualized perception of the workings of the world, and thus talking while another person is talking out loud for others is not showing them respect for what they are doing— whereas here it is much more about the group, so if people in the group want to talk, they talk. And boy is it frustrating, especially when your Vietnamese is lacking and you can’t hear your students reading.
Our day at the internship goes a bit like this. We walk twenty minutes and on the way cross the busy highway and walk through a local market, trying not to step on animal blood but enjoying the sights. As we near the school we spot the trusty bo bia ngot lady selling her delicious creations from a white box at the end of her bicycle. She’s there every morning and afternoon, and Alaina and I are absolutely addicted to bo bia ngot, which is a crepe filled with sugarcane, shredded coconut and black sesame seeds. It melts in your mouth and has the most satisfying caramel and coconut aftertaste. Anyhow we also stop for ca phe sua da which kicks us into gear and gets us buzzing for our first two hour class. Whenever we get to work we’re ushered into one of the teachers rooms and told to sip little cups of tea as we watch students watch us from the hallway. At this point in time one of us is usually offered a vow of marriage by one of the two unmarried male teachers, which is awkward. We then wait until a teacher comes to stake their claim on us (lately it’s meant a free period for them) to teach in their class. Like I said before, if we are lucky, students will for the most part be very excited to have foreigners visiting their class and we will answer questions about America and Vietnam for two hours, with the help of the teacher. (We are often asked about our boyfriends, why we don’t have them, when our wedding is and why we don’t know when it is, and whether we find Vietnamese men attractive.) This could be also mean us singing songs for two hours with or without a teacher— or just going ahead with our lesson plan with no teacher and upwards of 90 students at a time. We never know what we’re gonna get, which is both thrilling and frightening. We always attempt to fit in our pre-made lesson plan into the abilities and attention span of the students we’re given for that period of time and sometimes it’s more challenging than others. After the first class of surprises we head to the local Bia Hoi restaurant, complete with a hanging mutilated goat carcass which becomes more skeletal each time we visit. We sit facing the other wall and we order by pointing to random dishes and seeing what we get. We cross our fingers that it does not contain goat. Later, in the second class, we have another set of surprises awaiting. The second class is always more tired and solemn, maybe after a large lunch and a busy morning, and it’s much more challenging trying to teach. Usually at this point we've held it long enough and we decide to brave the bathroom. Bathroom is a loose word, you need a bath after you go to this room. But that's just the way it is. Typically, upon entering, your nostrils hit a wall of urine stench which doesn't cease and can be explained by the puddles on the floor. There are three "stalls": one wide open with no doors and a wide trough, like a woman urinal, and a bucket of brown water for flushing/pseudo-toilet paper; one missing a door and often you'll get the back view of some girl peeing; and finally one with a door. Oh, and they're all squat pots. Meaning a hole to aim for and places to put your feet. Sometimes when I'm done I just come out laughing; it's the one thing that I just can't seem to get used to while living here. You've just gotta laugh it off and then wash your shoes.
Overall the experience teaching at Hanoi Open University thus far has been ok. We still have plenty of time to grow into it and become better at it, but we are faced with many challenges. This is good for me though, since I may want to teach as a profession when I’m older.
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