We went to Vietnam to teach storytelling activities to upper level english speakers at schools in Vietnam. Many students learn English from the 3rd grade on, but they don’t learn how to do other things with their language skills and a lot of students stop going to school at 12 to get a job instead of continuing on with their Education. As we found out, a lot of the students, and people, in the more rural areas have never met or spoken with a native English speaker and this opportunity to learn more advanced reading, writing, speaking and processing skills was really an amazing opportunity. One that I don’t really think I understood before going.
We had developed lessons on how to write a short story, a personal narrative, interviewing someone, adding fiction to nonfiction stories, adding details to stories, how to tell a story with photos, and I did a mini lesson on telling a story through poetry. We had worked on this in America and aimed for the work to be the same as we would teach to American teens and to not dumb it down because we will be teaching via a translator. We practiced our lessons on one another and felt pretty good about where we were and went into our first conference day in Vo Nhai.
Vo Nhai had high school students and was a small village with a huge school that brought students from all over. Students came in for the summer session and were absolutely amazing. They were full of energy and eager to use their English skills to work in each of our groups. The school was beautiful, but the room was hot and made it hard for us to focus completely on the task at hand, but we kept trudging through. At the Vo Nhai conference, one of my students wrote a poem being LGBTQ in Vietnam. There were so many amazing parts to this poem, first being that she wrote it in English, second that she was willing to share it aloud with our group, and third that the term LGBTQ is multinational. The English acronym is what she used, she didn’t translate it into Vietnamese. Being in a communist school, with pictures of Ho Chi Mihn and other communist leaders all over the buildings and such, to be talking about the freedom to be who she was born and love who she was meant to be love and to do it free from ridicule and harassment. I wasn’t able to get a copy of her poem, but she brought me to tears!! My translator for this poem was Mia and she was like, “Wow!” after she translated her poem. Exactly. Wow!
We had developed lessons on how to write a short story, a personal narrative, interviewing someone, adding fiction to nonfiction stories, adding details to stories, how to tell a story with photos, and I did a mini lesson on telling a story through poetry. We had worked on this in America and aimed for the work to be the same as we would teach to American teens and to not dumb it down because we will be teaching via a translator. We practiced our lessons on one another and felt pretty good about where we were and went into our first conference day in Vo Nhai.
Vo Nhai had high school students and was a small village with a huge school that brought students from all over. Students came in for the summer session and were absolutely amazing. They were full of energy and eager to use their English skills to work in each of our groups. The school was beautiful, but the room was hot and made it hard for us to focus completely on the task at hand, but we kept trudging through. At the Vo Nhai conference, one of my students wrote a poem being LGBTQ in Vietnam. There were so many amazing parts to this poem, first being that she wrote it in English, second that she was willing to share it aloud with our group, and third that the term LGBTQ is multinational. The English acronym is what she used, she didn’t translate it into Vietnamese. Being in a communist school, with pictures of Ho Chi Mihn and other communist leaders all over the buildings and such, to be talking about the freedom to be who she was born and love who she was meant to be love and to do it free from ridicule and harassment. I wasn’t able to get a copy of her poem, but she brought me to tears!! My translator for this poem was Mia and she was like, “Wow!” after she translated her poem. Exactly. Wow!
After the conference, the students wanted to take selfies and pictures with us for hours. OK, maybe not hours, but every student wanted a picture with each of us. They also wanted to add each of us to Facebook. I now have so many Vietnamese FB friends that I can’t even read my timeline! I challenged my students to continue to write poems and send them to me on FB and I am happy to say, that I have already received one!! Yes!! I hope that I keep getting them, the one that I have gotten was from a student at the Vo Nhai conference.
Our second conference was in Nam Dinh. The school was a live in school in a larger town than Vo Nhai, but they were still out for the summer and students came in who wanted to focus on the experience with the English Language. We had a larger age gap, but the skills were overall higher in Nam Dinh. We had middle schoolers from 13 all the way to high schoolers up to 17 year olds. We had debriefed the conference and made a few changes with the interpreter's suggestions and help to improve the Nam Dinh conference. I think the Nam Dinh conference was amazing!! I had older kids and they wrote amazing poems!! I also had a student plagiarized Taylor Swift...but hey, who hasn’t? Nam Dinh also was very hot, but we had lunch with the students and took selfies with the students. The teachers were also amazing and took us into the only air conditioned room and shared coffee and choco pies and sesame sticks with us. Of course, a huge bust of Uncle Ho was in the room, just so we knew he was always watching.
Our second conference was in Nam Dinh. The school was a live in school in a larger town than Vo Nhai, but they were still out for the summer and students came in who wanted to focus on the experience with the English Language. We had a larger age gap, but the skills were overall higher in Nam Dinh. We had middle schoolers from 13 all the way to high schoolers up to 17 year olds. We had debriefed the conference and made a few changes with the interpreter's suggestions and help to improve the Nam Dinh conference. I think the Nam Dinh conference was amazing!! I had older kids and they wrote amazing poems!! I also had a student plagiarized Taylor Swift...but hey, who hasn’t? Nam Dinh also was very hot, but we had lunch with the students and took selfies with the students. The teachers were also amazing and took us into the only air conditioned room and shared coffee and choco pies and sesame sticks with us. Of course, a huge bust of Uncle Ho was in the room, just so we knew he was always watching.
Finally, we had our third conference in a tiny, rural village called Mai Chau. In Mai Chau we were teaching adults that the village’s English teacher had been teaching so they could prepare to work at the new resort that is being built. This group ranged from 18 to 29 years old. Also, this group had the lowest English skills and made our translator’s really work for their volunteer status. I didn’t teach my poetry class with this group, just because it wasn’t the right audience, but helped the other facilitators and talked with the students. Most of the students spoke and wrote in Vietnamese and a lot of what happened was very different from the other schools. But the school was also different, there was just a roof and 4 posts with a chalkboard and plastic desks and step stools as chairs and a fan. That was the school. No walls, no doors, no lights. Just an open room classroom with bugs and chickens and banana leaves and heat all through it. It was crazy and amazing and crazy. The students all scootered in from their farme jobs and spent the day with us trying to learn how to tell and write stories and use English in a different way. Their teacher, Ellie, was amazing and we can’t wait to work with her more next year on a service project with our 6th graders. Ellie is the only English teacher in the area and she gets any student from the 3rd grade up in her little one room class every morning and then she teaches adults in the afternoon. The students go to another one room school to learn reading, math, and Social Studies (which is communist history). Such an interesting set up. THey don’t really learn any science or other things until after they are 12 and decide if they are going to continue on to secondary school or be a farmer/rancher or do whatever their family does. Ellie went to University and got a teaching degree, then married her husband and was assigned to be the teacher in little village of Mai Chau because her husband was from there and that is the custom to return to your husband’s hometown. She didn’t really get much of a say, but she told us she was happy being the English teacher and she loved having a steady income that being a teacher for the government involved.