7-minute Video

[Tim]

This is just a very informal, unedited 7-minute video of me walking out to the noodle shop that has just moved in next door.  I blab about things that come to mind, but I'm not able to guarantee that it's interesting blabbing.

This is the video:
https://youtu.be/Zvh7BL8ZYPU


Then, for those of you who aren't into amateur (shaky handed) video shots, here are some other recent pictures from my phone.  It seems that VIETNAMESE FOOD is featuring more and more on my camera rolls, as we are aware of the time here drawing to its close.

This is the banh my lady that we love.  She is still on the corner across from the Vincom Mall, even though the buildings that used to be behind her have been demolished to make way for a new high rise.  She makes DELICIOUS sandwiches, but she takes her break from 10:30 to 3:30, so we can never eat her banh me for lunch (when we most feel in the mood for sandwiches, crazy Americans that we are!).

And the fourth picture is a different streetfood: fish waffles.  Sounds nasty, but actually no fish were harmed in the making of this picutre--the waffles are a batter-waffle with fillings like chocolate and cream cheese.  :)

Below is a picture of a place where we sometimes treat ourselves to a fusion taco.  They're asian and western and delicious.  35K is about $1.50, but it takes two of them to constitute a full meal, so that's really expensive compared to a bowl of noodles or a dish of fried rice.  And ... we never go out without a hydroflask thermos full of ice water from home!

This last picture shows the location of the first noodle/bánh xèo shed (on the left) and the now-demolished second noodle shop on Phan Boi Street, which was always my favorite.  The favorite/"second" lady's shop is now reduced to rubble; it was to the right of the blue and yellow umbrella.  So this week she moved, happily for us, one block north to be on our street corner (reference the video at the top).  This is SO common here.  More than a handful of times our favorite go-to food stalls have suddenly become a demolition zone and we have no way to know how to find the people whose food was so convenient and good the day before.  Even our place for bun thit nuong, Ba Trai, is closed down and they are moving.  Michael is daily wanting us to go out for bun thit nuong noodle-bowls, and we don't have a good alternative place picked out. #developingworldproblems

Teaching English in Vietnam

[Tim]

In teaching ESL at the university here, I have three primary goals.  It's because of these goals that I'm able to post some videos at the bottom that many of you will find amusing to watch.  I'm tickled at the way this assignment turned out, and I am REALLY looking forward to seeing how the next big project goes.

First Goal: I want to encourage self-learning as much as possible.  I talk a lot about English being a "mountain" that these college students need to climb.  From the upper slopes of the English mountain there are many opportunities that they only barely are aware of from down here where they are starting.  Also, it's no shame to be lower down on Everest when other climbers are up above you in their journey--everyone keeps moving onward and upward.  Speed is important, because there are opportunities for kids who master English well before the 4 years of university life are spent that are not available to students who spend all 4 years just learning the language.

So in order to help them become self-learners, I give them techniques for learning that will outlast my stay in Vietnam.  I have them reading Newbery Award winning novels and learning the rhythm of spoken English from movies ... more about that later, though, because a specific movie-watching-assignment prompted this blogpost.

The second goal I have is to help them gain technology literacy.  Surprise surprise, right?  They build website-based portfolios and practice all manner of technology skills as they do their assignments for me.  For example, they don't just keep a reading log--they build themselves a Google Form and embed the resulting spreadsheet on their portfolio.  They don't just give speeches in class--they record themselves giving speeches and then embed the Youtube vids into their portfolios.  There are lots of auxiliary skills in those two sentences, too.  Logins and recording/re-recording and column-widths and text-wrapping ... I have happily provided no end to frustrations for my students as they have flexed their fledgling technology muscles.  There is no true growth without struggle, though, so I keep inflicting struggle.  Here is the Portfolio site of one student who is about mid-spectrum in terms of her English and technology abilities: http://kvyphan.weebly.com/b14/creating-my-reading-log

The third goal is the least important for me, and that is the one in which I actually "teach" them anything.  Yesterday I was on my motorcycle heading over to the banh-my-sandwich stand that we like so much, and I took a different route than usual.  The road that is the direct route is torn up, so I was cutting through the neighborhood.  I happened to glance in one window and saw a foreigner animatedly teaching an adult class of Vietnamese.  That was worth stopping my bike for, because it's my neighborhood, and I like to know the doings of any other foreigners on my turf.  :)

He was talking and circling words on the whiteboard and calling on students.  Teaching.  And I realized that I do the same thing when I'm in front of the university students once a week, but that I don't value it very highly.  My first two goals dwarf this third goal in importance.  He was teaching them something about currencies of the world and the students were copying the words he wrote.  It was fine-looking teaching, but my heart is not in it.  I think about John Gardner's quote: "I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive."

The kind of blended/virtual teaching I do isn't for everyone and it isn't for every age-level.  Please don't go dismantling any elementary schools because I said I don't value direct teaching.  It's just that I still struggle with a fair amount of disillusionment from my decade at La Pine Middle School, and I've found a mode of teaching that makes me feel like I'm doing good things for students again.  Back Stateside I teach for Baker Charter Schools in Oregon (and Michael will be enrolling in that online program in the fall) and I run Impact Virtual Learning for homeschoolers and private schools wanting technology-based electives.  Both are programs that I believe in, but especially Impact Virtual.

[Okay, folks.  He's getting back down off the soap box.  Looks like he's going to share those videos after all ...]

The last two weeks we've been watching a movie in class.  I have the same movie with English subtitles and also with Vietnamese subs.  They watch a scene with Viet subs, then watch the same scene with English subs but no sound, then watch the same scene with sound and English subs, then close eyes and listen to the rhythm of the speech, then watch the same scene again, quoting along with the movie.  Not every scene warrants this much repetition, you understand, but the movie is the eminently quotable The Princess Bride!

So then the assignment that's got me so giggly I had to share some pedagogy with you today?  They had to record themselves quoting from the movie.  I hope you enjoy!!

Her first quote is a little hard to hear.  It's awesome though: "Farmboy, fetch me that pitcher?"

https://youtu.be/GeL8k4OsZsU




And this student's attempts at doing the voices gives me GREAT pleasure.

https://youtu.be/NsN5MYXuC5Q



The next big project?  I'm going to have them create subtitle files for movies that have never had Vietnamese subs.  The fruit of their translation work (they'll work in teams, with three teams per movie, so that we can get the best translations cross-checked with each other) is that we will ultimately upload the .srt files online ... to literally benefit the world.  Isn't that cool?  Then I'll show them the movie so they can improve their spoken-English cadence.  I feel like a great teacher to think of something like this!  #alittlegiddy

(And yes, they are being subjected to a unique taste in movies.  The ones I want them to translate into Viet are both old Bill Murray movies: What About Bob and The Man Who Knew Too Little.  My movie preferences aren't the only factor in what I'm choosing, but if I'm going to have to sit through a movie, scene by scene, multiple-multiple times, I'd like it to be one that I enjoy watching...)

The Squeeze

These are some photos of beach time with a class that was one of my favorite groups to teach in the fall but now only sees us at the beach or when they come to share a meal.  Glad to have good relationships with them!



This blogpost is not a request for money.  However, it's time for those who know and love us to know that there are things happening in our lives that need prayerful attention.

Two factors are putting the "squeeze" on us.  One is that I'm teaching fewer hours this semester.  It's a good thing in so many ways, actually.  University professors generally teach 16-20 classroom hours a week, and in the fall I was teaching 24.  I asked the university if I could cut that back a bit for the spring (I teach outside of those hours in some other capacities as well as volunteering three nights a week at the Cafe, and we have many relationships flourishing that need our time).  Well, they cut those hours back, all right!  When we got back from Tet Holidays, they said "here's your schedule for the spring" and I had only 8 teaching hours in a week.

That's a good thing.  I already have relationship with the classes they took off my teaching load, and those kids are still coming to the house for movies and games and borrowing books and going to the beach with us and all that.  Way better to teach a lot in the fall and have empty time in the spring, when there are people in our lives to invest in.  Tomorrow, for example, is a non-teaching day, and we get to spend it with one friend who is coming to hang out with us in the morning--it's a privilege to have this time to invest with our Vietnamese friends.  But I was only ever paid $12.50 an hour for the teaching at the university, and 8 hours a week just isn't very much money to cover rent here, much less buy the return air-tickets for a family of five.

We weren't really counting on Vietnamese salary to cover big expenses, anyhow.  Our house back in Bend has been rented out and provided a handsome cash-flow to cover expenses here.  Those renters have now found an opportunity to move on by the end of April, and we are happy for them.  But those last two months of rent money were going to a big part of how we were going to get home and get re-situated back stateside.  Compared to the reduction in university salary this semester, and in addition to that diminished income, the loss of the rental income is a huge blow for us.

We are two months away from our departure date, so it's an acceptable time for us to begin selling off some of our belongings here.  For example, today I listed our dryer on the Facebook expat group page, and a number of people are very interested in paying 7,000,000 VND for it.  That's what we paid for it when we arrived, so that's great news.  Oh, I should say that the seven million is just under $350--more than we'd pay for a used dryer in the US, right?  But here things like appliances sometimes cost more.

Can I insert an aside here?  Some things cost more, but lots of things cost WAY less.  A student accidentally poured water on my laptop last fall, and I lost the functionality of my touchpad.  I've been making-do with a radio keyboard and mouse, but then I ordered a laptop part from eBay and had Karen bring it with her when she came recently to visit.  I took my computer and the part in to my laptop shop here, and the next day I was able to pick it up, trackpad fully repaired.  They had to solder a cable to the trackpad inputs board, and they also opened up the display to install a new-used digitizer board, which didn't end up working.  But I'm happy about the work they did, and I refused to pay only what they asked.  They asked for 100,000 VND, which is less than $5.  Can you imagine how much a laptop service would have cost (where micro-soldering of a cable was involved) in the USA?  So I gave him half-again what he was wanting to charge.  He's awesome, and at SEVEN DOLLARS I've had a steal of a deal in terms of laptop repair.  Oh, actually I neglected to mention that he also repaired a kid-laptop trackpad clicker and threw that repair in with the original 100,000.  What a guy.  Sometimes it's awesome to live here!

So, back to our financial crisis.  We recognize that our lives are not our own.  We are living overseas, to be sure, but we're not doing anything here that we didn't do back at home.  Kingdom-work is at the core of what our family does, whether in central Oregon or central Vietnam.  Nobody should feel sorry for us or feel like we're way out on a limb "suffering" for a Cause.  Yet we know there is a pleasure in supporting people who have traveled to a distant land to live as cultural ambassadors, and we are in a position to want some of that financial partnership if you're in a position to send it our way.

If you are a praying person, please do that.  We suspect that our renters got their opportunity to move on as a result of our prayers and the prayers of some people who knew about their unhappiness in our home and the deteriorating landlord/tenant situation we were experiencing with them.  We view their move as a direct answer to prayer, even though it crunches our finances here at the end of our year abroad.

Thanks for praying!  Thanks for being our friends!