english teacher

Drifting via motorbike down an alleyway lined with homes and small shops easily overlooked by the eye in the third district of Ho Chi Minh City, the sound of blaring horns is cut short as we round the corner to the two-floored structure housing the locally run non-governmental organization known as Du An Tuong Lai, as known as Project Future.

Leaving our sandals at the foyer where a shoe rack stands next to glass enclosures containing various dated books and a picture of the great leader atop, two project managers, Anh Hai and Anh Nhat, greet us and welcome us upstairs into a small classroom with crumbling walls and quite too many desks to discuss my requested internship placement and its hours. After the formal introductions and proper handshakes, we exchange the necessary information and mark our calendars. Before departing, I ask if it would be alright if I were to have the students embark on any side projects outside of class; however, the perception becomes construed to mean that I would be interested in taking the students on a weekend fieldtrip. My broader intent for the proposed side project, which does not actually materialize over the course of my internship, is to have the students participate in an art-media project of self-expression through each student’s individual creativity.

Down the same alleyway a week later though in the evening this time, I feel both a sense of excitement and anxiety as it has been almost seven months since I have taught English to the youth in this country. As suggested by Anh Nhat, I have arrived thirty minutes prior to the start of the evening class instead of adhering to the doctrine of flexible time common among the people here. In the back office, I am introduced to one of the teachers whom I will be working with—Co Tam, a woman in her early thirties with a persistent smile on her face. She shows me the day’s lesson plans in the textbook known as Let’s Go to which I am allowed to add to where I deem it necessary.

As the students fill into the classroom, which is better spaced out than the other in which I had the interview a week prior, each pupil greets me with the phrase “hello teacher, how are you?”. Co Tam introduces me to the class consisting of students ranging from ages fifteen to twenty-one, turns her tape recorder on, and seats herself down in a desk. Meanwhile, I stand at the front of the whiteboard in a state of anxious nervousness as I had not expected to be teaching the class solely by myself on the first day. The subject matter, which I am to teach, deals with telephone conversations and general occupations. Getting ahead of myself, I write a telephone conversation between a doctor and patient on the whiteboard—only to realize that my handwriting is much too small and the terminology which I have employed is much too complex. Eventually I am able to relax a bit, and the first class goes fairly well after the many recitations of terms.

At the next session a week later, both the older and younger groups of students are tested on their language speaking capabilities. In an office on the second floor, students enter in pairs and Co Tam asks me to read the questions aloud for them to hear—not the best of testing strategies as they have not yet grown accustomed to my English speaking habits. After an hour and a half of this, my tongue is exhausted from speaking the same phrases over and over again. From what I have come to understand, the students here come from disadvantaged families on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Many of the older students seem to be migrants from the rural countryside whom have come to the city to look for income earning opportunities in order to help their families back home. More likely than not, these students attend language class at night while working low-skill and service industry jobs during the day.

The next week my twice-a-week schedule begins and I am reassigned to teach the younger students, a rowdy bunch, with a local volunteer in her second year of university. The teaching environment with these students is more rigid than with the other group, and the only break from the inflexibility of the book, which focuses more on vocabulary than an actual understanding of grammar and sentence structure, comes at the end of the class when there is time left over for an impromptu game. Looking back now, I realize that I should have taken more time to develop written and verbal assignments outside of the book for these younger students to understand the basic grammatical structures of the English language.

In the week that follows, I am reassigned to teach the older group of students once again. During these sessions, I am able to teach the students topics of their own choosing—love, hate, and relationships; economics. With the first topic comes a broader range of flexibility, as I am able to teach the students useful terminology in the expression of feelings and emotions. The teaching of economic terminology, however, becomes constrained when Co Tam suggests that I focus more on terms associated with the lower-end service and restaurant industry.

All in all, the internship placement at Du An Tuong Lai was well worthwhile and the experience of teaching and learning to understand the hardships and mindsets of the local youth will stay with me as I continue to develop plans to aid the impoverished and poorly educated peoples of this country in the near future. At times I have come to question the usefulness of teaching English abroad; in part I understand its usefulness as a business language in the global marketplace, but it is foreseeable that English may soon become an unofficial second language which may drastically alter the Vietnamese culture and language, if it has not already.