Today was my first day of teaching in Vietnam so I was up at 6am to leave for the school at 7.15am. The walk takes half an hour, but doesn’t seem far, but oh my gosh it’ SO HOT and the weather here hasn’t even got hot yet… It’s only February…I’m going to die… I would walk home for lunch every day, so that was two hours of exercise a day! No wonder I lost weight…
On the way, the market was being set up, and there was all kinds of activity happening, the funniest of which was that some guys had laid out their potatoes across the driveway to a shop and a car was trying to get out. We just saw it reversing, and it was clearly not stopping, heading straight for the potatoes. The men were shouting “stop, stop!”, but the car clearly thought it had every right to run over their potatoes… so they had to quickly rescue the potatoes! The car crushed a few… very funny to watch.
At the school we met the Head of English, who was an English man, who had a Vietnamese wife. I was instantly at ease, he was very friendly and I got his number for if I needed anything. He told us that basically I just ask the students what page they have already been taught, turn back a few pages and then go over those pages. The structure was: make sure they remember the vocabulary, pronunciation practise and then games! Each class was only 35 minutes long and so not much planning was needed which was great because I was worried I would be spending all my time planning. The students didn’t do any writing practise in my class. Also, if I want to take on extra private classes I could, for $30 an hour!
Today was the open day for the Kindergarten children before they come to Primary school so there were a few tears! We were able to meet some of the children during assembly, whose English varied quite a lot, and we had to pretend to be different animals in front of all of them and they had to guess the answer in English! (I would soon learn that this was a major part of ESL teaching…)
Then we had to sing songs with the teachers, in front of all the kids, which was embarrassing because I didn’t know some of them. “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea to see what he could see, see, see…” followed by “A sailor went to chop, chop, chopm, to see what he could chop, chop, chop… you get the idea! This was followed by knee, foot and bum, with actions! Also the Vietnamese version of heads, shoulders knees and toes was much faster! We also sang “If you’re happy and you know it, B-I-N-G-O, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star! After this experience, I decided that I would be fine teaching….!
As soon as I got back I went to the volunteers house (a sister program to the teaching program I was on) and we headed to Hanoi city centre to be “terrible tourists” and go to a place called “Le pub” which served English pub food- this was amazing!! I cannot tell you how boring meat, rice/noodles and veg gets TWICE A DAY, EVERY DAY!!!! I had a Hawaiian pizza and chips. The pineapple was also real, fresh, sliced pineapple, not the tinned stuff we get!
I also bought a dress because all of the teachers wear smart dresses to school- and really formal! It was quite a lot in Vietnamese terms but only £35 so I was happy. I decided to take a look the next day, around my local area, for more bargains!
We were almost killed on the way home because the taxi driver missed the junction off the main road by about 500 yards and so stopped, and I was worried he was going to do a u turn but oh no… he began to REVERSE the wrong way, up the equivalent of a motorway, and backed onto a five road junction, in order to get onto our road…. insane. Completely insane!!
