I went to school early today, since yesterday I waited until 6:40am and had to ride through heavy, pelting rain. At 6:28 yesterday, it had actually been almost not raining at all, and I was frustrated to have to go through the hardest rain because I had waited the extra 12 minutes. So today I went early when it wasn't raining hard.
I have a large purple poncho that we call our camel-back, because it's big enough to cover one or two passengers riding behind on my scooter, and when you ride with a head sticking out of the poncho and two humps behind, it reminds us of a camel. That poncho is fantastic--it saves my life!
I got downtown (west of the river) by 6:30 and didn't need to be at the campus until closer to 7am, so I went to a noodle shop for some My Quang noodles. I paid more for them ($2) than I would have at a plastic-stool shanty-shack, but they were very tasty and there was a lot more meat-to-noodle ratio than I normally get at the $1 noodle shops. I have mentally put it on my list of "places to take people when they come to Vietnam on a visit."
After noodles I parked the motorbike in the teacher's lot and took the elevator to the third floor. I teach on the fourth floor, but the #4 button in the elevator doesn't work. Sometimes I go to the 5th floor and walk down, but today I needed to stop at the teachers' office and check out a radio for my speech class. So on the 3rd floor I picked up the remote for the digital projector (my three classrooms all have a ceiling mounted projector) and a radio and a stereo cord, then I went up to my classroom on the 4th floor.
Only four students were there when I arrived at 6:48, though by the time we started class at 7:03 there were about 16. Three students were absent today, and four students came in late together, at 7:12. I had just been asking the class what Christmas Carol they wanted to learn today, so the four latecomers got to stand in front of the class and sing Silent Night karaoke-style. This is culturally normal--losing a game or coming late to class is rewarded with gleeful giggles and the group imposing a penalty on the loser/latecomer. It often happens that the loser ends up leading the song and then everyone joins in. It's cute.
We're learning Christmas Carols early for two reasons. For one, I hope to organize Christmas caroling later on, and so my Viet friends need to know some songs. For two, my students will all be gone at a mandatory military service training for the whole month of December. They ride home on the bus from the military service on December 24th--that's not a day with much special meaning for them, but I've already taught them "I'll be Home for Christmas" so they can croon it to each other on the bus ride home.
Okay, there's a third reason to sing the carols. Christmas carols are just a huge part of the Culture of Christmas. They teach about Frosty the Snowman, the First Noel, and the Jingling of Bells. It's these songs that let me explain so much about the beauty of the season to my Viet friends. Try teaching about the culture of Thanksgiving holiday sometime. "Well, we mostly just eat food. We travel from all over creation to get to a relatives' house, and we eat the same 5 foods we ate last year and have abstained from (mostly) in between times. It's awesome." But with Christmas there are more layers of meaning, and the Christmas carols help me teach all this.
Today's classes were Speech and Pronunciation. I teach four groups of students, all Freshmen, in a week. Each of these four classes has between 20-28 students, and I see them a total of six hours in a week. Two of the six hours are for Speech and Pronunciation and four are for an Integrated English class that includes the four elements of language: reading/writing/listening/speaking.
When I was finishing up the first morning class by telling stories from my own freshman year of college, I spontaneously invited them (any that wanted to) to come to my house for lunch. Several of them were game, so we met here at the house and went out to buy take-out lunch boxes. We went down to the corner and got boxes of pork chops and sour vegetables on rice, and brought them back here to combine with things from our fridge.
They stayed through the early afternoon, playing games like Nertz and another card game. But that's nap-time for them, and I could see them drooping. They were planning to leave at 3pm but it was 2pm and they were needing to lie back and rest, so I had the idea to read them a story. :)
The book I picked out for them was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis. I have enough copies that each could read along while I read to them. I did all the voices, and I gave Tumnus a pretty good Irish accent. The students understood at about 70%, because I was reading at full speed so they didn't have time to slow it down and try to learn all the arcane words like Nymph and Faun and Dryad. In this way I read the first three chapters to them and they've each taken copies to return to me next week. I'm looking forward to any follow-up Aslanian conversations that we may get to have with these kids in the months ahead!
If you have an extra copy of that book (Wardrobe) that you wouldn't mind donating, I may have you send me a copy in the spring with some friends who are coming over for a visit. Or if you have an idea for other books that you'd want to send over, let me encourage you to keep those ideas incubating. It may be that donating a book to a lending library in Vietnam is one way you can participate in spreading light and inspiration in a global way.
Janet has just now braved the rain to ride out to the local supermarket for shredded cheese and something else. I can't remember what the other thing was. But we're having our neighbors over for dinner tonight, and tacos are on the menu. We brought taco seasoning blends from the States and there is a foreign-foods store here that sells frozen tortillas that you thaw and cook before serving.
Wrapping a wrapper around meat and vegetables is nothing foreign to the Vietnamese--they have a hundred permutations of the idea and it's a cultural way of eating here. But their wrappers are all rice-based, and the seasonings are different enough that we hope it will be something the neighbors can appreciate as "special foreign food." These are the neighbors that helped me buy two guitars last month and with whom we interact a fair amount as families.
They'll come in a couple of hours, and I just checked--I've got over 100 student submissions to grade this weekend. So I'll sign off and go be responsible. Thought you'd want to know what my day was like. And I wanted to get you thinking about sending me books for a lending library when the next visitor(s) comes this way.
[Michael]
Today was a special day. Our Vietnamese neighbors came over for an American experience, and what better way to have an American experience than with Mexican food! It makes you think that, since America doesn't have any native food other than the double cheeseburger, we celebrate with other people's foods.
The ingredients were surprisingly hard to find, but my mom made some beans and pork and salsa, and we were good to go. We got some tortillas and taco shells, and other ingredients, and our neighbors brought over desert: homemade coconut jelly. It was delicious. I have to sign off now, we are watching Mr. Bean with the neighbor boys, and I don't want to miss out!
Random Pictures from Halloween Party at the Chases'
No comments:
Post a Comment