In the picture, you can see my parents’ house in Brooklyn, New York. A couple of weeks ago, there was a freak storm that, among other things, knocked down the huge old tree in front of our house. The storm included a tornado, which apparently raced up streets in Brooklyn, tossing trees and cars to and fro. It took out mass transit for the whole day, and lots of people couldn’t get to work. Apparently, from the newspaper articles I read, it was a wild day. I’m sort of sorry I missed it. I like storms.
The tree being knocked down makes me sad. It was a nice tree. Seeing my house makes me sad, as I haven’t been there in a long, long time.
Sometimes when we’re sad, it’s important to remember that we will be happy again. That things end, things change, things we relied upon can dry up and go away, but new things will come.
I saw a bad accident on the street on Saturday afternoon, while I was out with the students from my intermediate class. Down and finished, like the tree. I keep trying to remind myself that until we’re down and finished, like the tree, things will, in fact, get better.
There are times, like when a storm knocks down the tree in front of your house, that hurt. It’s easy to lose perspective then. I’m old enough and experienced enough now to know that it really does get better, and that softens the edges of any sadness or disappointment. But I’m also old enough to know that some things we lose can’t ever come back. And saying goodbye can be incredibly hard.
Teaching – some observations
These days, I seem to be doing a lot of teaching. This is a good thing, because teaching is one of my favorite things to do. Still, I’d like to have more time for other things, but we can’t have everything. Because the only thing I care about these days is the quality of the teaching at the school I work for, I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching. Thus, some observations about teaching:
You can’t make all of the students happy all of the time.
The student who complains that “we don’t do enough listening” will be absent on the day we do listening.
The students notice everything. So take a shower, zip your fly, get a haircut, wear a nice shirt, shine your shoes, blow your nose, and eat a breath mint.
Improvement in English is a gradual process. While this is an immensely logical notion, most students ignore this logic and prefer to think that they aren’t learning anything. This, by the way, is the teacher’s fault.
Giving advice to people is generally a useless thing to do. They don’t listen. Advising students that the best way to improve their English is by actually using and practicing their English for at least a few hours every day is amongst the most useless advice you can give. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s true.
If the teacher is talking, the students aren’t doing anything.
There is probably nothing you can do to make the life of that sad looking boy or girl in the back of the room any better, but it’s nice to try.
If you think a lesson is going to be incredibly boring … it is. So teach something else.
Don’t take any shit. You’re a teacher, not a policeman, but that doesn’t mean that one misbehaving little brat should be allowed to ruin the lesson for everyone. When you have to be the boss, be the boss.
Prepare a lesson. Carefully. The notion that you can show up and do just about anything and your students will find it brilliant is somewhat misguided and more than a little narcisistic.
Have a long term plan. If you can’t remember what you taught last week, then no one learned it.
Don’t teach what people already know. Teach them what they need to learn.
Know your students. Care about them as people. Don’t be surprised if the 40 year old business man going through a divorce finds your lesson on first dates and love at first sight a trifle boring. (See again the first point.)
Never be sarcastic or insulting.
Don’t worry if you think the students don’t “like” you. Hating teachers is a long and honored tradition. I hated my favorite teacher very much.
If you give homework and don’t check it and the students don’t do it, it’s your fault. If you give homework and say you’re not going to check it and the students don’t do it, then it’s their fault.
Sometimes it feels like everyone is looking at you. They are. (See point 3.)
Teaching is a lot like writing. You should teach what you love and what you know.
Because learning is a gradual process, and if you are as old as I am, then you will probably be dead before your students realize how much they learned. Thus, don’t worry if they don’t say thank you.
Don’t play favorites. Give everyone in the room equal time. Address students following a variety of random patterns, and avoid having a go-to-guy for all the answers. Don’t be afraid to ask the student who never does any work and never has any answers as many questions as everyone else. If he’s not doing any work, the best way to make him start is to ask him a lot of questions.
If you think the two girls who always sit together whispering in their native language aren’t learning anything, you’re absolutely right. Separate them, even though they’ll hate you.
Correct your students when they’re wrong. It’s what they came for, after all.
Leave your garbage, your problems, your worries, outside the classroom door. From the start of the lesson to the end of the lesson, just teach. All your problems will be right where you left them when the lesson ends. I promise.
Let your classroom be the one place in the world where your students can relax, learn something new, and know for certain that absolutely nothing bad will ever happen there.
Have fun. If you’re enjoying yourself, the students will learn more. And you’ll still get paid, even when it doesn’t feel like work.
Stop procrastinating and prepare your lessons … which is exactly what I’m going to do now.
How Hanoi Looked (to me) 4 Years Ago
I was reading through some old journals of mine, and came across a number of entries from my first few days in Vietnam, now almost 4 years ago. Reading them, I got a kick out of what my observations were back then. This place has changed a lot in 4 years, both in reality and from my subjective viewpoint. Anyway, here’s just a few excerpts showing what things looked like to me when I first hit town (and had no idea I’d be staying forever). Reading over this stuff really made nostalgic. Remember – this isn’t what I think now. It’s what I was thinking, in early October, 2003.
People drive like crazy here and there are no traffic lights, so survival is in doubt from a street-crossing perspective. I recall that when playing the video game Frogger the approach of just rushing across gets you through the first board or two, but then you go splat. So I carefully wait for my opportunity, but even then it’s risky. It took half a day, but I finally found a place clean enough to eat in – Little Hanoi it’s called – and I had the best French baguette in the world, along with some Vietnamese coffee and scrambled eggs and fruit – dragonfruit, pineapple, mango, and banana. Yum. Eventually I will eat some Vietnamese food and risk it, but not yet.
Internet access is everywhere, but slow as hell! I don’t have an apartment yet. For now, I will check e-mail and do some work on my website at least once a day. But it’s slow – I read a book and write in my journal while I’m waiting for pages to load.
Ugh, the Internet is stinky over here! Only Yahoo Mail seems to work, and even that is wiggy. Soon I will have a connection in my own place because…Yesterday, I got an apartment. It has two bathrooms, a den, a kitchen, and washing machine. The den has an extra bed and both the den and bedroom have desks. There is a lot of closet space, and many windows, and a small balcony. It is spacious, gets lots of light, and seems fairly clean (we’ll work on that.) Very cool. The last guy who lived there was Japanese, walked around naked, had only one arm and one leg, and refused to take out the garbage or do his dishes. There have been sightings of rats, geckos, spiders, waterbugs the size of small cars, etc…but not on the third floor where it is fairly clean. Luckily, I sleep on the third floor.
In New York, there are two Starbucks on every corner. In Vietnam there are three Nokia wireless stores on every block. The phones they sell are very, very light and tiny – they look like toys. Anna Kournikova and Britney Spears seem to be the most popular celebs over here, which I’m afraid means that the Vietnamese people prefer looks over talent; this bodes well from my karaoke debut.
The apartment is a lot of work. I have to reclaim it from the waterbugs that I believe are employed by the city to serve as commuter buses in the event of shortages in conventional transportation methods. In other words, they are big. I shudder every time I have to kill one, thinking, “phew, that was close.” For the past couple of days we have been scrubbing away at it. The natural state of things in Vietnam seems to be very, very dirty, and we are breaking our backs recovering this apartment from its state of nature.
Have I talked about the traffic? Do you know how you make a U-Turn in Hanoi? Right into oncoming traffic. The motorbikes bounce against the taxi door like moths against a car windshield, only bigger and with more oomph. Our street is a two way street (NOTE FROM NOW: Le Thanh Nghi at Ta Quang Buu 4 years ago, if anyone remembers what it was like then – a madhouse!) and whenever a cab brings us home from the direction that would normally require going around the block to reach our front door, they just drive into oncoming traffic and pull over. I am spending my days and nights driving headlong into oncoming traffic. But… Vietnam, no problem! as the taxi drivers say. I have, for the moment anyway, given up any plans of getting any kind of motorized vehicle myself. Driving here requires Zen beyond my humble training.
This is fun: At 6:30 a.m. there are the neighborhood announcements. That’s right, some Vietnamese guy comes on an incredibly loud loudspeaker and wakes the whole neighborhood up. My friend says he giving the prices at the market and advising all the sellers to give Vietnamese fair prices and cheat the foreigners. Oh well.
Monday I report to the University to begin my language classes. It’s a good thing too, everyone over here speaks Vietnamese except me!
Job interview over. It seems that having ties is somewhat more important than having actual qualifications here, as I must wear a tie if I teach here. The school I interviewed with wants me 18 hours per week; I only want about 9. The pay is OK. Not quite NYC school teacher, but this is Vietnam, right? I haven’t agreed to take the job yet, but maybe I will. Teaching a little couldn’t hurt, right? Oh, by the way Mom if you’re reading this – please send ties!
I have now had my first two lessons in Vietnamese. Primarily, I have learned that all the little things I thought I’d picked up about Vietnamese were wrong. For example, one does not say “ciao” to say goodbye as the Italians do, but one says instead “chao.” This might lead you to believe that the Vietnamese have a better sense of spelling than the Italians; please allow me to dissuade you of that notion.
I study Vietnamese three times per week for three hours each session (NOTE: At Bach Khoa University). The lessons are given in a small room with one window, a slow moving fan, and no air conditioner. As far as I know I haven’t been convicted of a crime; I think they have windowless rooms for the convicts. Anyway, my lessons are one-on-one with a young Vietnamese woman whose husband will be in Saudi Arabia until some time in 2005. Her English is not very good, and neither is my French as we discovered when I tried to resort to it to improve communications between us. Her teaching methods are somewhat questionable; tonight’s homework is “Learn Vietnamese words so that we can have a conversation.” She was sad today that I did not yet know the words for doctor, nurse, lawyer and police man, which I believe she expected would have come up since I have already been in Vietnam over a week.
Before we could move on to teaching me how to actually say something like, “Do you think I could bring a fan to class on Friday?” I had to learn how to address different individuals. Here, they have two different words (one for each gender) for all of these instances: for a person older than me, older than my mother, older than my grandmother, my age, younger than me, and much younger than me. I tried to explain to my teacher that in English similar concepts abounded, but they had all been largely done away with since the advent of the word “yo,” as in, “Yo, could I bring a fan to class tomorrow?” Alas, “yo” ain’t in the Vietnamese dictionary.
What this guarantees is that I will never address anyone in Vietnamese, since all Vietnamese people look either really, really old, or really, really young, practically guaranteeing that I’ll use the wrong form of address and end up in prison, which they could easily accomplish by boarding up that little window in my classroom.
Well, armed with this new knowledge of Vietnamese, I returned home to learn that I once again had been called in to “chat” with the administrator for the Oxford-English program where I’ll be teaching. I call him Anh Trung (Anh being Mister, Trung being his name). I have no idea if that’s his name or not. He learned his English in Britain, and if you haven’t heard a Vietnamese person speaking reasonably good English with a really bad British accent, you’re missing out. Try this with your own British accent: “So Mister Cret (that’s how they say Craig over here), it’s like this; one of our teachers now, well, she’s, well, I must say she’s rather a fuck-up and really must go. So, what we need, and this is a favor you would be doing for us, is that you take over her schedule, which is somewhat more than the nine hours you asked for, but still not so bad, not so terrible. She teaches every day, Monday through Saturday, and comes in early to help us with a spot of testing for the new students on Thursdays and Saturdays. So what do you say to that, Mr. Cret? Can you be a good sort, a team player, and help us out?”
It sounded like many more hours than I wanted, but I told him that was fine, and he made another phone call, requesting some books get sent over for me. The lovely young lady who delivered the books, Ms. Tuyet – which means snow, the same name as my Vietnamese teacher, so maybe everyone in this country where it never snows is named snow – forgot the audiotapes that go with them. Since she had come by motorbike (which I think is called a Xe Om, although they may only be called that when they’re professionally employed in the business of carting foreigners around), I would have to ride with her on her motorbike to the other office, where I would get my tapes. I agreed, despite having vowed never to ride on one of those Xe Om things, as the drivers often seemed drunk and that the whole thing was far too perilous. Believing the young lady to be quite sober, I climbed onto the tiny motorbike behind her and the thing groaned under my weight like we might not be going anywhere after all. After a moment’s pause in which she no doubt thought to herself, “Gee, he’s as big and heavy as he looks,” she donned a mask like a ninja along with long gloves to protect her smooth white arms from the sun and off we went. We traveled half a block on the sidewalk scattering pedestrians and honking our horn before plunging off the sidewalk and into oncoming traffic. I don’t remember much more, except for her heavily perfumed, silky black hair blowing in my face and eclipsing my view of her daredevil driving. I’m in love.
When we arrived at the other office, I stumbled in still shaken from the ride and someone handed over the tapes. I wanted to say thank you in Vietnamese. I believe that I mistakenly said in Vietnamese, “Thanks, old man, see a dog soon.” As I left, she told her friends, “That’s the new teacher from America.”
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So, that’s how it all began… If people like this stuff, maybe I”ll post some more of those old entries.
