2.8.12
Yesterday was time to test the reinvention of my USA class. Yielding to the evidence (quiz performance) and student requests, I moved the quiz to the end of class. I divided the students into groups, and assigned each group one section of the reading, with reading questions. They had 20 minutes to pore over their sections and answer the questions, and then they shared their findings with the class. I told them ahead of time that I would be using some of those same reading questions on the quiz.
Twenty minutes ended up being way too much time for most of the groups, but fortunately students chose to use that extra time to start working on questions from other sections, and be better prepared for the quiz. The quizzes looked much better in that far fewer questions were left blank and the answers were generally longer than before, but I haven't had a chance to look over all of them yet. As my dad says, the proof is in the pudding. Still from the looks of things, I'm expecting the average score to increase from 4 to around 7. The students were almost entirely perfect angels while taking the quiz. The silence was heavenly. However, I noticed that there are prime cheating circumstances when the students are handing in their quizzes, and they can see other papers and whisper corrections to each other in the general post-quiz din. I'll have to find a way to keep that from happening next time.
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| Not pictured: pure silence |
We had the student's English club last night, and my co-teacher, Ms. Chau Anh, had prepared some handouts with readings and discussion questions. When students arrive they always self-segregate by class, but this actually worked out very advantageously. When I had them count off into groups, it resulted in each group having one third year, one second year, and one first year, more or less. I was very happy to see the more advanced students helping their peers, drawing them out, and encourage them to represent their group when it came time to share opinions. Our first discussion was on the importance of eating meals together with your family, and the second was about fashion. I wasn't really a fan of the second reading, which was clearly written by a Vietnamese person with a high English proficiency. It was a little thesaurus-happy, which just made things harder for the students, and several of the sentences were just not quite right. For a handful of examples among many:
- "At present, with the development of science and technology, the textile industry has made a long stride of progress that makes clothes-making easier..."
- "No one can deny the fact that Vietnamese ladies with their slender status are very beautiful and charming in the Ao Dai."
- "I think these kinds of fashion are just suitable on the stage or in films because they look very ridiculous in the real life." (suitable, very, and ridiculous are hallmarks of Vietnamese English)
"The Ancient Greek word βάρβαρος (barbaros), "barbarian", was an antonym for civis "citizen" and polis "city-state." The sound of barbaros onomatopoetically evokes the image of babbling (a person speaking a non-Greek language). ... The Greeks used the term as they encountered scores of different foreign cultures, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes, Celts, Germanic peoples, Phoenicians, Etruscans and Carthaginians. In fact, it became a common term to refer to all foreigners. ... The verb βαρβαρίζειν (barbarízein) in ancient Greek meant imitating the linguistic sounds non-Greeks made or making grammatical errors in Greek."2.9.12
In my dream I was in an American grocery store. I was staring at the hundreds of cereal options when I was baffled by the 30 different kinds of rice krispies in front of me (ones with strawberry flakes, pink ones, ones ideal for making rice krispie treats, ...) in boxes of varying size and unrelated price. I realized that my time in Vietnam was officially over and I felt a pang. Then I felt relief when I remembered that I was just visiting home for a few weeks, and I'd be back in Vietnam soon. But, I realized that it won't be easy re-adjusting to life in the States. Given that I was in the States for now, I gave up on the cereal and decided to go look for a good dark beer instead. Instead of walking, I was laying down on a low, wheeled platform and pushing myself along with one foot. (Awake, I realized that this is exactly how the extremely poor and limbless get around on the streets in Vietnam.)
Needless to say, it was a weird dream, and that's just part of it. I think weirdest is the fact that the dream ties together so many things about life in Vietnam, but at the time seemed not really Vietnam-related at all.
Last night I misremembered what time I had to teach this morning, so a few minutes after getting up I realized that I only had five minutes to get to class, rather than forty. I rushed over and was only a couple of minutes late. For reasons that I have never understood, I often see teacherless classrooms filled with students when I am looking for my class. Today, during the second half of my class, one such class full of rowdy boys started hooting and hollering and creating a general hullabaloo that interfered with my attempts to conduct a listening class. Then, the listless boys decided to start running around, and started peering into my classroom window and making faces at me and my students. Because my co-teacher wasn't there and I don't speak Vietnamese, I was completely incapable of chastising them, asking them to stop, or doing anything useful other than ignoring them. I found myself wanting to yell at them in Italian, a great language for telling people to cut it out.
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