Em là giáo viên

Two more classes today. Even though I teach four classes a week, it is only two groups of students. I teach Speaking and Listening to 2nd and 3rd year English majors. Today it was 2nd year listening first. I didn't get the course materials from the professor until last night, so I pretty much stuck with the lesson in the book. I did throw in a game taken straight out of my Hanoi Vietnamese teacher's playbook: telephone. To wrap up the class I prepared sentences using the day's vocabulary and had the students play telephone in four groups, competing to see which group could get the sentence down the line fastest and most accurately. I will definitely use this again in future classes. It was the perfect combination of speaking, listening, and fun.

Next was 3rd year speaking. Again, I stuck mostly to the teacher's original lesson plan, but with a few modifications. When things got going, I worried that the instructions were too complicated, but things worked out well enough. Students were divided into groups and received a tourism destination (Amazon, Caribbean, Himalayas, or Egypt) and a variety of activities. They were supposed to pretend that they were a travel agency, plan a trip by choosing from the possible activities, compose an advertisement for the agency and the trip it is offering, and present it to the class. Some of the groups stuck to the bare requirements, but some of the groups went all out, one even came up with a fake email address to include in their advertisement. It might not seem like a big thing, but that showed me that students were feeling confident enough to go beyond the instructions, and that they were having fun with it. The team with the fake email address ended up winning the class vote for the best advertisement.

Telephone teams

In the afternoon I had my Vietnamese lesson and I learned a lot of professions. I finally learned how to say "I am a teacher" (the title of this post). Right after Trang taught me the vocab she started verbally quizzing me on it. At first I felt like it was a little unreasonable, but I actually impressed myself with how much I was able to remember. Here's hoping I still remember it by our next class. I think I'll be making myself some flashcards.

Tomorrow is the Mid-Autumn Festival and I got conscripted for more public singing. I was asked to learn a Vietnamese song (in about 24 hours) so that I could sing it for the children tomorrow. I was game to give it a shot, but it turned out that I couldn't open the video files that I received to practice with, so I'll just be teaching kids games like duck-duck-goose.

I did some cleaning and tried to re-arrange my furniture yet again to make room for the new armoire, but I was thwarted by the location of the internet cable and the tv cable and the length of some cords. In the midst of my experimentation, I was once again visited by a few of my students. Nhu came yesterday with a friend (they were the ones that took me out to dinner) and she brought her roommates today. She is definitely a standout in terms of English ability, and clearly looking to make the most of me as a resource. She and her friends told me repeatedly and insistently that all of their peers really want to talk to me and tell me that they are happy that I am here and make me happy, but that they are too shy or don't know how to say all the things that they would like to say. It was nice to hear.

Sudden downpour

It had been raining all afternoon, sometimes coming down in buckets but mostly coming down in a steady trickle, so Trang invited me to dinner because she was worried about me finding something to eat in the rain. I think she is generally (overly) worried about me and my meal acquisition abilities, but I am happy to not eat alone, so I have no complaints. We had southern style phơ, and honestly it was totally different than northern phơ other than the fact that they are both noodle soups. She gave me a generous dollop of hot sauce in my soup, and more in a small dish in case I wanted to dip my meat in some extra hotness.


Editor's Note: In light of my recent night-time visitors and occasional encounters with unusual foods, I have added an 'Eek!' reaction option to the check-boxes below the post. Check as you see fit.