Tuesday night we were leading the program at Vision Cafe and used the topic "Love is & Love does." Did you know that if you type in "love is," Google suggests that you're starting to type in the phrase "love is patient"? We discussed about love being a purely natural/chemical/evolutionary event vs. love being a supernatural reality that overlays the physical universe. We discussed examples of what love looks like and pulled out the CS Lewis quote about what happens when you protect your heart from vulnerable love:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
As part of the "Love is & Love does" discussion program, I showed a clip from a good movie, Fireproof, and had table-groups discuss it. In Fireproof, a troubled marriage is transformed via the power of unilateral love. Enough students were interested in watching more, including our friend Nick, who is on staff at the Cafe, that we are planning to host a movie night before the week is out.
Today one of my classes has a morning with no school, so a group of students is coming over in an hour to read and watch The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I've found that if I hook my laptop to the TV and increase the font size, they can read the eBook along with me. I do all the voices, and they get a kick out of hearing their American-accented friend doing British and Irish accents (I do Tumnus and the Beavers with a trilling brogue). Then we'll watch the movie together, or maybe do a section of reading, section of movie, and back to the book, etc.
I am down to teaching just twice a week, now: Monday and Friday mornings. But next Monday there is no school, to celebrate the 41st anniversary of the liberation of Saigon. Half of our friends here have family from southern Vietnam and they don't seem to think it's a day worth celebrating--they would put the word liberation in quotes. But it's a quiet view that they'd mostly express just to foreigners.
I'm going to sign off and make sure the house is ready for my guests. We'll meet for beef noodle soup for breakfast and come back for book & movie here. Have a beautiful day!
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.
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
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 moviein 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?"
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...)
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