This week I began teaching my 1st and 5th grade classes. Each class has nine subjects and are taught entirely in English unless the AC (Academic Counselor) needs to say something in Vietnamese for disciplinary measures. I teach 1st grade from 8am-11am with 15 minute breaks at the end of each hour. I then have time to prepare for my 5th grade class and to eat lunch. At 1pm-4pm I teach the 5th grade class. The last hour I have to clean up and prepare for the next day. Now that you have a run down of the general schedule, I'll begin with a day in the life of my work week.
Alarm goes off at 5 or 5:30am, depending on how late I stayed up the previous night. Get up, hop in the shower (with hot water), dry off, get dressed and ready to go eat breakfast. I walk down 3 flights of stairs, greet the owners of the guesthouse if they are awake "Chao Ong, Chao Chi, Chao buoi sang!" (Hello uncle, hello elder sister, good morning!). I grab my sandals, open the door and hear the birds chirping in this urban atrium. Turn right into the alleyway, a moto glides by my left side, I strategically avoid the puddles of water from last night's rain. After 20 yards I meet with my coffee maker, she is roughly in her 40s, polite and quick. Behind her orange display she creates a magnificent liquid masterpiece, a full plastic cup of espresso coffee, condensed milk, and ice. She makes sure she fills it up to the top by adding coffee at the end, ensuring a full cup's worth of caffeine (others only create half the drink). I give her 10,000VND, (.48 cents USD), and turn around back toward my home. Along the way I meet with the grandmother, I nod my head and she turns to her giant witches' pot of soupy goodness. No, it is not of demonic ingredients, but of tantalizing ones for the palate. In less than a minute in my hands I have a bowl of noodles, pork, cilantro, chili, lime, coagulated pig's blood (very much like tofu), green onion, salt, and some other seasonings to be determined. I sit down in a blue chair designed for a kindergartener next to an older Vietnamese man. We greet, then return to business, I am careful to eat each noodle and avoid the fatty parts of the pork. By the end of the meal my nostrils are cleared and it's time to finish off with that coffee masterpiece. I give the grandmother lady 20,000VND (.96 cents USD) and return to my guesthouse 20 feet away. I open the doors, greet the cleaning lady, "Chao co, co khoe khong?" (Hello aunt, how are you?" "Chao, khoe" She responds that she's well and with a smile. I venture up the three flights of stairs and change for work. I walk back downstairs and meet my driver, Ong, (another uncle), now this man would fit right in with what I imagine an Italian mobster would look like. He wears a dress shirt, usually green that reveals a V down his chest about 8 or 9 inches. The only thing he's missing is chest hair and a chain. He has long graying hair and a wide face with gentle eyes. He knows the drill, he takes my briefcase and we drive to my workplace, 15 minutes away with traffic. I like this Ong, he always chooses to drive slower and safer, rather than faster and dangerous. We make it to SNA, time to begin work.
I'll briefly run over the class. It's Teacher Christy (AC), her Vietnamese name is Thuy. Every worker seems to have two names, an American name and a Vietnamese name, except for us foreign workers, we have the privilege of only being called one name. So Christy and I run the classroom together, I teach, read from the book, write simple words on the board, we sing songs, get the kids to draw, color, cut, glue, and read. Christy does a lot of the disciplining, but I will do it as well, when the kids are really getting out of hand, which doesn't happen very often. We go over the alphabet and words like dog, cat, play etc. Maybe we play a game and get some of the energy out of these kids. Throughout this class, students tattle on each other by telling me, "Teacher John, Phil spoke Viet na me" (They usually drop the s). In our class, the kids are only to speak English, the other half of their day is spent with the Vietnamese teacher where they are to only speak Vietnamese. I don't punish them for that, Christy will, but I'm easy right now, it's the first week. 11am hits, bam, bye 1st grade. I grab lunch at the cafeteria for free and try to guess what I'm eating, usually rice with fish/beef/pork and some vegetables. I grab a coffee outside and go up to my 5th grade classroom to prepare. This time my AC is Jessie, her Vietnamese name is Phung. She reminds me of a classmate in my high school, glasses, studious, polite, and inquisitive. She is also hard on the kids, though these ones need it sometimes. Here, we have three really bright students, Jack, Johnny, and William. This class contains 11 students, while my 1st grade classes has 20. It's much more managable and we get to speak about some more interesting things. So it's a nice change in the day. Unfortunately we have a few students who are much behind the others, so we fall behind the schedule because I want to make sure everyone is on the same page and that no students get behind the others. Soon enough, we reach 4pm. I go downstairs and grab the books I need for the next day. I look at the lessons and create activities if I think we'll need them. For 5th grade I'll think of creative ways to elicit the answers from the students. It's 5pm. Ong is here, on time. I grab my helmet and hop on the moto to get home. It's rush hour, motos line the streets. Honks go off in every direction, we ride inches away from each other until we make it off the large boulevards and go onto street Co Bac and head down our alleyway. I give Ong $4, which is double the price from what one other worker told me, but I like how Ong is always on time and is safe.
I go upstairs, relax for 20 minutes by checking my email, then hop in the shower. Return to my computer to see if there's any new communication from anyone, then decide it's about time to go grab dinner. This is roughly my day, the dinner time changes each day in general, so no run through on that one.
Onto part two of this posting.
Today at 7:15am we began our Opening Ceremony for the new school year. I played with my 1st graders till 8am when we were called up to go into the auditorium. We sit for the next 2.5 hours, listening to Government officials, chairmen, the principal, directors, and other echelons of power at the school. We also even have a high school student sing Mariah Carey's song, "Hero," another group sing, dance, and perform Lady Gaga's Paparazzi, and lastly another hip hop dance performance. All of this action occurs right in front of a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh's upper half body and head. While sitting there, I'm just thinking about how strange and odd this whole thing is. Our school is devoted to being half American and half Vietnamese. The education is split into half. The staff obviously are primarily Vietnamese with the remaining teachers and staff being American, one Australian, and one Philippino. I'm thinking to myself, if Ho Chi Minh was here right now, what on earth would be going through his mind. How odd it is that in 1975, the American War (as it is called here, AKA Vietnam War back in the U.S.) ended. Yet, here I am, 36 years later working at a school with American and Vietnamese educators. This is not to mention that our school is a private school and the irony of having Ho Chi Minh's sculpture there with the type of government he brought about...
1986 is when Vietnam changed it's economy from a highly centralized planned economy to a socialist oriented market economy. It was titled, Doi Moi, Renovation, and it permitted privately owned enterprises to take part in commodity production. Later, the collectivization of the industrial and agricultural sectors were abandoned. Thus, here today we have the economy and the school I work at. Though I have to admit, to comprehend all of this is rather difficult. I'm sure it must be strange for the grandmother in my alleyway to be serving Americans again, when during her lifetime Americans and Vietnamese were both perishing in the same war.
No comments:
Post a Comment