Friday, July 21: Playing Teacher

We are teaching at the Dinh Thuy Junior High School, but the word “school” should be used loosely. It would be hard to make the facilities more Spartan. The building is a single-story “U-shaped” poured concrete structure divided into rooms that are packed with benches. The yard is dirt and patches of grass with only a flagpole. I guess we are lucky that the building has the squatter toilets it does because the Primary School has no bathroom facilities at all. The rooms are bleak enough to depress me promptly every time I enter. Our walls have a picture of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese flag at the front and two signs on the back that proclaim “Study Hard,” and “Teach Hard.” There’s no library to speak of, but there is a closet of books somewhere, and the teachers share a sort of office/ “lounge” combination. The most advanced technology in the building besides the teachers’ television is the florescent lights that sometimes work in each room. Nothing seems to work; the desks are long cramped benches and tables stuffed into a room and filled with at least twice as many students as designed to hold, so it’s not uncommon for one or two to break each day. Even the chalkboard is too shiny to write legibly on.

After all the planning in Ho Chi Minh City and on Sunday before teaching that we had done, we were excited for our first day of classes. There appeared to be over one hundred students waiting for all of us at the school, and Gia, our program coordinator’s husband, quickly organized them all with a song. Everyone clapped and shouted, “Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh!” Our next task was dividing all the students into manageable classes. We had learned recently that through some miscommunication, the high school had decided to schedule its mandatory review classes at exactly the same time as our camp, so there would not have any tenth through twelfth graders. No problem, we said—we’ll just take the eighth and ninth graders. On Monday there were twenty-six—twice the number we had planned for, but certainly still workable.
I thought we had planned well for the first day. We handed out paper and markers for each student to make name placards and we had a series of icebreaker/name game activities to get everyone comfortable—at least to Chris and I, it seemed very standard. In our planning meeting on Sunday night we had explained the games to our Vietnamese partners, and both said they understood perfectly. First we would go outside and form a circle to do a clapping/singing traditional Vietnamese game where everyone has to call someone else’s name. Then we planned an American game where we wanted everyone to say their name and a food that started with the first letter, with each successive student repeating the previous names and then adding their own.

Yet, somehow when we were in front of the students, the plans fell apart. We hadn’t spelled out exactly who would say what, so there was plenty of awkward fumbling among ourselves. For the clapping game we tried to get in a circle outside, but for some reason it took forever to get people organized. We realized the issue was that for whatever reason, the boys and girls refused to stand next to each other. In fact, in one case where a boy and a girl did end up being adjacent, they held a piece of grass between them so they didn’t have to hold hands. Chris and I were rather taken aback by this startling lack of maturity among eighth and ninth graders, although our roommates later revealed that though these students seemed a bit more sensitive than usual, the behavior was not atypical for students their age.

We went back inside for the name/food game. Chris and I gave the directions in English, but when our partners went to translate them, they went into excruciating detail, offering each student an example of a food that started with the letter of their name and then making each practice with the person next to them, one pair at a time, while the whole class waited. Nearly twenty minutes ticked by just giving directions for our icebreaker. It was a disaster! I grew increasingly frustrated, but there was little Chris or I could do. If all the teachers were American, a brief sentence might have corrected anything, but the communication process is so slow and literal between us and our partners, that it was impossible in front of our class to try to correct the way the game had spiraled downhill.

The class recovered a bit during the second half as we dove into lesson one of the textbook, but we still saw that a great deal of organization was necessary. I finished the day with a summary of all the activities we had planned: art projects, singing, problem solving, games, activities—it sounded great. I was already beginning to wonder if we had bitten off more than we could chew; scaling back ended up being a major theme of our plan revisions. When the clock finally reached 4:00, it was with immense relief that we said goodbye to our students. We had survived the day, but there was so much work to do. Little did I know that it would be one of our easiest days of the week.

Monday night we met to debrief and plan. It was immediately clear that some of our more ambitious plans would never work with this larger group of younger students—roundtable discussions of current events and debates about the WTO would be impossible. Teaching sex-ed to twelve year olds seemed a recipe for disaster. However, I thought that we’d still be able to keep our general plans the same. Despite the lack of smoothness, we weren’t too upset with Monday’s class structure. Name games were done; we were ready to dive into our plans. In addition to our hour of English each day, we planned our first week to be a teamwork and conflict resolution overview, with group activities, discussions on listening, and role-plays. I had taught a similar curriculum in my lifeskills class in Saigon, so we even had my lesson plan sketches to help. We didn’t get to any of the teamwork activities we had planned beyond the most basic introduction on Monday, so there didn’t seem to be much additional work to prepare for Tuesday. We ordered ten more photocopies of the book—a few extras wouldn’t hurt.
With some trepidation we biked into a huge crowd of students waiting eagerly for us on Tuesday. When we finally got the mass of shrieking children quiet, there were forty-six packed into the room. Twenty-six was manageable; forty-six was going to require some real rethinking of lesson plans. In addition to the forty-six inside the classroom, the gaggle of street urchins who gathered outside the windows to harass our students had grown in both numbers and persistence. We tried to make it clear that everyone was welcome to learn, but they had to make a choice: in or out. Somehow this didn’t get through and we were left with intermittent disturbances without an effective remedy.

Making snap decisions and coordinating tasks to keep all four teachers occupied cannot be done on the fly. Though we had decided exactly what we were going to cover, we had not gone into enough detail to decide exactly who would say what and when, so it felt like we did an awful lot of fumbling during the English lecture. This was definitely a failure on our part to really understand what adequate planning to teach as a team entailed. With twice as many students, it also took twice as long to get everyone quiet and focused. That ended up being an accomplishment in itself.

After English we tried to hold a discussion on teamwork and introduce the listening skills portion of our unit, explaining verbal and non-verbal communication and how to best listen and share ideas. The discussion part simply did not work—both teachers and students failed. I would ask even a general question like, “What is important to think about when you are working with your friends on a team?” and I would get an answer like “yes,” or worse—dead silence.

Facilitating a discussion seemed automatic to Chris and I. The Vietnamese were really just translating my questions here, so I didn’t see how we could fail so abjectly. In retrospect, though, I didn’t consider cultural differences that might be important before planning a “simple discussion.” Traditional Vietnamese classes never, ever have a discussion component at all. The teacher stands at the front of the board and lectures while the students copy. Tests are rote memorization; students merely regurgitate exactly what they are taught and critical thinking is never expected, asked for, or encouraged. Thus, not only have our students never had a discussion based class, but neither have our teaching partners. Now they were being asked to facilitate something they had never done with a whole group of students not prepared at all to offer their own independent ideas. There were awkward fumblings, pauses, and silences, and I ended up having to provide almost all of the answers for the students anyways, no matter how easy the question seemed.

I have this huge fear of downtime with our students in the classroom—when teachers are talking to each other, it only takes a matter of seconds to lose the students’ attention, but it can take minutes to get everyone refocused. Every second lost while the four of us passed the English book around or asked each other what to do felt like an eternity for me, and I vowed to myself that we would eliminate this problem for Wednesday. Furthermore, a discussion-based class does not really have work to keep four teachers busy. I was speaking while Que and Phuong acted, but that still left Chris standing around and waiting awkwardly.

Tuesday was a low—it was hard to imagine class getting worse. For Wednesday we went through the English book and selected specific activities, determining who would say what, when, and how. On Saturday night our whole group was putting on a cultural exchange performance at the People’s Committee and we wanted our students to participate. Chris and I decided to teach the Hokey Pokey and Que and Phuong would do a traditional Vietnamese song with the class. We practiced the games we wanted to play for teamwork among the four of us and decided at least for the day to just do the activities; we could figure out how to talk about them and debrief once we saw how they went. We talked about splitting the class into two with two teachers each, but for some reason, the Vietnamese roommates were vehemently opposed to this. We finally compromised into breaking up for activity time and staying together for English.

Then, fifty-three students were waiting for us on Wednesday. All of our book copies were swallowed and there were still only one or two books in each row. The classroom was packed to what seemed well beyond capacity (In reality, it was not even a little uncommon for Vietnamese classes to be so large). The ruffians outside the class grew even bolder, banging on doors, poking their heads through the wall slats, and generally creating about as obnoxious a disturbance as possible. To top things off, it was an absolutely broiling day, so the classroom was hotter than your average sauna. My shirt was instantly soaked, causing the girls to fan my back and giggle every time I walked by. It didn’t bode well for the two hour class!

We made it through Wednesday and Thursday with similar plans, but it required drawing on extreme reserves of patience and energy and a constantly artificial smile. English was indeed smoother with our more detailed teaching plan. As we get better at working together, I don’t think we’ll need to be quite so detailed, but it’s a nice crutch for now. The beginning of the Hokey Pokey worked well enough, though the lyrics didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to the kids. For our teambuilding exercises we broke into two groups, and for once it was refreshing to have a somewhat manageable class.

With the teambuilding activities, I saw the beginning of what culminated in a huge disagreement the next week. Que was firmly convinced that the students didn’t have the skills to problem solve unless they were told exactly what to do and how to do it. It turned out that Que wasn’t the only one; most of the roommates said that these were not skills taught in Vietnamese schools and the students would not be able to do it. Any time a teaching group was doing something other than English, this was an issue we had to contend with.

Picture this: you are setting up a teamwork activity where everyone in a group has to cross a large “river” or swath of dirt stepping only on the few “islands” or pieces of paper that you give them. The challenge is for the team to work together to come up with a solution to not having enough “islands.” It’s a great activity, except when the facilitator provides the keys for solving the problem in his directions. When you tell the students how they can share the islands, the whole thing is ruined. The students don’t learn anything and they complain that the game is boring. I was exasperated while teaching but there wasn’t anything I could do. I could not instruct the students myself. I couldn’t even stop Que when he began to stray. I was powerless and the activities were only a fraction of how effective they could be.

By the end of class on Thursday I was ready to explode. Que and Phuong still said there was no way we could split up the classes, but the group was way, way too large to manage. Discussions weren’t working with the students so I was not sure at all what we could teach if we didn’t want to lecture. Discipline was lax; we didn’t need to run a boot camp, but I wanted everyone paying attention. Downtime and fumbling was certainly not in short supply, so really as teachers we were as much to blame for the environment as our students. And though it was beyond our control, there seems to be a limit to how much you can learn when the heat is stifling your breathing. Even the singing practice seemed to fail; teaching English lyrics was painfully slow and though the kids all knew the Vietnamese songs, the roommates never structured their practicing at all. I would have been happy to go home Thursday night and never see the school again.

Instead we had a meeting with all the Americans on Thursday night to brainstorm solutions. It was mostly a couple of hours of venting, but it felt so, so good. Hilary (our program director) had returned from her trip to Saigon, and she promised she would have the disruptive children outside of the rooms removed. That was probably the only tangible solution, but I think venting sometimes can be really healthy to reenergize.

We planned Friday to be just singing practice after our English hour. It seemed easy enough. There wasn’t really room or organizational capacity for all our students to sing on stage, so we could send some home and let the volunteers to perform stay. Choosing the volunteers, though, ended up being a sticky matter. The roommates only wanted girls, who generally behaved better, and they only wanted a few. Chris and I wanted as many participants as possible, and if the boys wanted to be on stage, we certainly hoped to encourage that as much as possible. However, again, we weren’t the ones who explained the process to the students. I was rather suspicious when our volunteers ended up being 18 girls and 2 boys, one of whom was a younger brother. That being said, it may not have been “cool” as a young high school boy to volunteer to perform. I’m not sure how to explain the somewhat wistful-looking boys standing behind the group while we did perform. In any case, that was the group we were left with.

Practice was not easy. The roommates were doing the organizing, but they had not prepared how they intended to do so nor had they communicated with us or each other. In the end, they got into a fight with each other while the class disintegrated. However, by the conclusion of our extended period the performances were coming along well enough for us to not need to fear Saturday’s show. And that was the end of week one.

One week in and we definitely were not succeeding to the best of our abilities. It was frustrating that so many teachers and students were clearly so talented and we had not figured out an effective way to communicate together. Friday night, though we were all exhausted and far more interested in relaxing a bit and sleeping, we had a whole-group many hour meeting to discuss all of our difficulties from the first week and make some tangible plans for improvement. Rachael pointed out that some of the difficulty could come from the fact that we had never really spelled out our individual expectations for what the students should learn; we just assumed that everyone was on the same page. We weren’t; some wanted camp to be intense learning while others just wanted our students to have fun and hear gain exposure to foreigners. We made some very solid plans, beginning with deciding that we would establish classroom rules and consequences. This was a rather obvious seeming oversight. If we wrote down rules and expectations and had them posted in the rooms, it would seem to take care of much of the discipline problems. If students couldn’t follow the rules, they wouldn’t be allowed to come back. The summer camp was a privilege.

We also finally decided that we would split our classes into two groups. I’m still not sure why this was such an issue for our roommates. Chris and I speculated that Que especially might have been a little worried because his English wasn’t at the level of Phuong and his translation is slow and requires me to speak quite slowly. They also claimed that large classes were traditional in Vietnam, so we shouldn’t try to change this. They knew they weren’t building relationships with the students the way they could, and it seemed to bother them, but not enough to split.

The idea that we shouldn’t deviate from the traditional Vietnamese way ended up being a major focus and frustration of the meeting. What really was our object? The Americans felt firmly that we were not just here to reinforce Vietnamese lessons; we had the opportunity to bring all sorts of new ideas and activities to the students that they might never get to experience again. In fact, the group with the younger students had started to introduce new topics, like first aid and the environment. Chris and I had so much we wanted to do that we just could not begin to touch the way class was structured that first week. Our Vietnamese partners agreed in principle that we should be bringing new ideas to the students, but every time we suggested something, they said that that was not how Vietnamese students learn. The ideas of teambuilding and conflict resolution, they said, were interesting, but too complicated to be taught to eighth and ninth graders. If we did it, we’d have to relate it to their lives.

It’s hard to disagree with what they were saying on principle, but they could not offer any specifics of what that meant. We went back and forth for the longest time, trying to understand each other, and frustratingly, never got specifics. The roommates wanted the general ideas to come from us as new American themes, but it was hard for us to know exactly what it meant to teach an idea in a way that would relate to the students’ lives. For them, because the ideas were new, they didn’t really know how to teach them in Vietnamese style either.

We didn’t really come to a satisfactory conclusion. We resolved to basically simplify our lessons so that instead of explaining theory or concepts, as much as possible would be explained with role plays or demonstrations. I hated to dumb down the lessons because I certainly thought the students were capable, but at least teaching the concepts was better than not touching on new ideas, and we knew compromise was a necessary process. A lot of times in the planning process for everything we have done (not just teaching), I felt like it was the Americans coming up with ideas and than convincing and cajoling the Vietnamese into agreeing. I don’t think any of us wanted to be doing this; that’s not really collaboration. So compromise means not always getting to do what you think is best for the students. We don’t necessarily know what is best for the Vietnamese students anyways, so I think we were happy with our plans. We also resolved as a group to loosen up a bit. The singing for the culture show had been fun and engaging, so we’d try to introduce some new songs. We’d also play more games, switching off between traditional Vietnamese and American games, many of which overlapped. This was a great way to expose the kids to a bit more English and just have fun.

As I’ve said, the teaching has been by far the most trying part of my day; I’d rather do construction for ten hours than teach for two. I don’t think it has to be that way, though, and as we finished the first weeks meeting, I still hoped we could salvage the final two. I had really enjoyed myself teaching in Saigon, and we have some really fun students here, so we’ll see.