Saigon I – Teaching Terrors

Such a fraud.

Two weeks into my time in Vietnam and I’m shaking and sweating, shitting myself basically, at the prospect of meeting a 16 year old Vietnamese boy. This is what it must have been like in’69. Only this kid wouldn’t be crouching behind a tree cradling a Russian-made assault rifle. At least I hoped not – this was a high school in the middle of Saigon.

If you ever find yourself speaking to a Vietnamese person with a stutter and an Aussie accent, here’s why. I come from a family of teachers – mother, father, brother, grandfather, auntie, cousins, the lot – and I’ve spent the last 12 years doing everything but teaching. I’ve been a mechanic, a delivery driver, a bookseller and a busker, but in my thirtieth year the family firm caught up with me – I was a teacher. Or at least I would be if I didn’t die of a fear-induced stroke in the next few minutes.

In late February, Alicia and I arrived in Saigon (that’s Ho Chi Minh City for those of you playing at home) where we had enrolled in a course to make us teach English good. The month-long TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is one of a couple of internationally recognised qualifications required by most schools to land an English teaching gig. There were five of us doing the course together - American Meg, Vietnamese-American Viet, Aussie Brad, Alicia and me. In only our second week of the course our heavily-pregnant instructor Diem told us that we now knew enough about teaching methodology. It was time to start teaching. Tomorrow.

“What’s a methodology?” I whimpered to Alicia as we cobbled together a written plan for a 60 minute one-on-one lesson at a local high school.

With no resources available, I had to channel my inner child to prep for kids classes. Note the retarded cat.

The next morning we all piled into a taxi and pushed through the heat and chaos of Saigon traffic. Ten minutes into my lesson and I’m still sans student. My fellow TESOLians are seated and teaching with varying degrees of competence. Alicia’s student speaks English like a BBC newsreader and they chat happily about life in Australia and some recent revision to Swedish taxation law or something.

Finally Dung is pushed into the room. He’s so nervous he knocks his chair over.

“Hello, how are you?” I say.

The kid just sweats and shifts in his seat.

“How are you?” More slowly this time.

Nothing.

“He doesn’t understand.” Says our instructor helpfully.

Let me just point out at this stage that after a week in the country I don’t speak a syllable of Vietnamese. Our style of teaching is called target language teaching and the idea is to use pictures, context, mime and repetition to get the message across. The problem I faced now is that we had been told we were teaching kids with intermediate level English, enough to hold a pretty basic conversation. Poor Dung was pre-beginner. My lesson was based on ‘the family’ and ‘likes and dislikes’. Stuff like, ‘how old is your brother? Does he like reading books? What does he dislike?’

Mr Dung was as likely to know the word dislike as he was hypoanaeshthesiologist, and I just made that word up. I was screwed. Eventually we stumbled through ‘what is your name,’ and ‘how old are you?’ Then we just drew silly stickmen playing soccer and spoke the international language of 16 year old boys.

“Manchester United”

“Yes”

“Angelina Jolie”

“Yes!”

I drew some boobs and hair on one of the stickmen playing soccer.

“Angelina Jolie and Manchester United.”

Limited educational value but at least we were laughing.

Notice all the boys paying such close attention. Alicia is a very effective teacher.

The next couple of weeks were spent doing lesson plans in the morning and teaching in the afternoons at various schools around town. In the last week I had my biggest lesson to date – an observed 90 minute lesson in front of 35 teenagers in, of all places, a government run technical college. The school was straight from the 1950s - wooden floors, big old blackboard, bare walls and teachers' cane resting in the corner (Vietnamese teachers still belt their students pretty regularly). Each classroom could sit 80 to 100 students on wooden desks that still had holes for inkwells. The only decoration on the damp-stained walls was a framed photo of Ho Chi Minh staring sternly onto the class from above the raised teachers desk. A single fan with no guard creaked from high on the wall and scattered any paper not weighted down. With no carpet, the room echoed like a drum as the kids in starched shirts filed in. And here’s the weird thing, I wasn’t really nervous. It was the same during my whole teaching ‘career’. The bigger the class the more comfortable I felt. Even after 6 months, one-on-one classes terrify me. A class of 40 rowdy 12 year olds? Bring it on.

As you can probably deduce for the décor, Vietnamese government schools don’t do fun. So teaching in them is easy, just play a couple of games and get them running around or staging a silly play and you’ve made 35 new friends. That’s what I did and a couple of days later we all graduated with our ‘license to teach’. 

Graduation day.

 All I had to do now was find a job.

             Saigon has nearly 47 million English Language Centres and another 84 billion High schools that employ foreign teachers. Ok so I clearly made that up, but you get the idea – there are heaps. It shouldn’t be hard to find a job. The only problem was that I needed two things to get a job in Saigon, a TESOL certificate (check) and a University Degree. Since I was not smart enough to do a Bachelor of Science and not silly enough to do a Bachelor of Arts, I never went to ‘College’ as it’s known in Vietnam (the Vietnamese love an Americanism). After a frustrating, depressing month of teaching the odd evening class and sweating around Saigon in long pants and leather shoes going to interviews and handing out reams of CVs, I hit upon a solution that was brilliant in it’s simplicity. I lied.

              With her good-looks, charm and legitimate qualifications, Alicia had been offered a job about 35 seconds after our course finished at one of Saigon’s better language centres, so I borrowed one of her two – I know, greedy – bachelors degrees and forged a pretty good photocopy of a Deakin University Bachelor of Arts (Photography). Incidentally this would backfire months later when the principal of my school asked me to take a few publicity photos for the school brochure.

“Um, why me?”

“Didn’t you study photography in college?”

“I did?.. Oh, yeah I did. Sure I’ll do it.”

Although at that time I thought aperture was a form of alternative medicine and F-stop was a style of hip hop dance, I talked a bit of nonsense about lighting and framing and now there’s a 5x life-size billboard of me ‘teaching’ two good-looking 'students' outside my old school. Ha.

I left the school the same week this went up.

Anyway, armed with my dodgy facsimile, I was offered a job that week at CEFALT school in District 3. Who said that crime doesn’t pay? The gig was teaching 90 minute general and conversational English classes to a mixture of university students, housewives, retirees and businessmen. The classes ranged from starter level (‘How are you? My name is…’) to advanced (good English but some suspect pronunciation). When the new term started a few weeks later I was teaching at two schools, 6 or 7 days a week both mornings and evenings. After three months in Saigon I was finally saving money.

Now we were both earning money we could afford exotic luxury items like vegemite.