Teaching, learning

Mr. Luan told me that you had pain in your tooth and had it picked last week. How are you doing now? Mr. Luan told me that you are ok now. I hope you will recover soon because picking up the tooth makes you very painful and tired. - Email from a concerned associate

So, I had to resume the responsibilities that grant me this life in Vietnam, and start teaching again. I was a little nervous; it's been a while, and it was also my first time teaching oral translation. I wasn't sure how things would go.

Oral translation went well, or well enough. I observed the class a few weeks ago, back when Elliot was still here. The main thing I gathered is that students seem terrified of the very notion of oral translation, and understandably so. It requires excellent listening comprehension, which most of them struggle with, and enough knowledge of both languages to re-express something correctly in the target language. My main goal today, as always, was boosting confidence. I wanted to show them that they can do this. We started by playing telephone, with a twist. I would give the first person a sentence in English, they'd mentally translate and whisper in Vietnamese to the next person, who would then whisper it in English to the next person, and so on. It took a few run-throughs to get them to actually switch back and forth, but it worked eventually.

Our next activity was translating stories. I wrote four ten-sentence stories and put the students into four groups of ten. Each student in each group was responsible for translating one sentence from a story. Another group had the answers, and was responsible for helping me evaluate their Vietnamese. Two groups translated stories from Vietnamese into English and two translated from English into Vietnamese. Trang, who normally teaches this class, provided me with written translations ahead of time. My intent for this activity was to show students that a)they are perfectly capable of translating one sentence and b) if you can translate one sentence you can translate something longer, because you take oral translation one sentence at a time. In some ways, it went great. The students' translations were above and beyond my expectations -- sometimes even translating sentences word for word as I had translated them -- and then I started getting suspicious. I was worried that they had gotten the translations from their counterpart teams over the break. Vietnamese students have quite a reputation for cheating, but I didn't want to accuse them or make them feel like I didn't think they were capable of doing well on their own. My solution: I had the translating group come to the front of the class, so they couldn't read (or not) answers off.

A student volunteer read the Vietnamese stories for others to translate into English

After translation I taught speaking to the second years. Today's topic was 'family values', and they had a worksheet with a list of past and current western family values. One of values on the list was 'A wife should obey her husband'. After some other activities, I took the class outside. I tried to have them do an agree/disagree gradient; students were to position themselves on a line between two trees, moving closer to one or another depending on how much they agreed with a family value. When we got to 'a wife should obey her husband,' I was especially curious about how they would respond. To be honest, given past experiences, I was half-expecting several students to agree. To my delight, almost all of them completely disagreed and the others mostly disagreed. Men and women are equal, they all said. How that equality may (or may not) manifest itself is another matter.

Wives should obey their husbands -- agree or disagree?

Tonight I had my first Vietnamese lesson in five zillion years. From now on, Trang and I will be conducting informal lessons over dinner and at cafes. I learned a whole slew of body parts, which on one hand were very logical and on the other hand showed me that Vietnamese can be quite illogical.
The words for arm (cánh tay), hand (bàn tay), and finger (ngón tay) share a root word that is switched out with another root word (chân) for leg, foot, and toe. Logical. Illogical: the two words that make up knee (dầu gối) are the words for head and pillow. Maybe, maybe I could see a knee being shaped like a head, but it is definitely not pillow-like. Other fun and perhaps slightly less ill-fitting word combinations are bắp chuối and mắt cá. Literally, the first means banana flower and the second means fish eye (except the word orders are reversed). As body parts they mean calf and ankle, respectively. I have a whole new way of looking at my ankle.

When I got back home there was this six-legged spider outside my door.