I started the AIS school blog near the beginning of the year to showcase student blogs which I had them set up on blogger, and also showcase some of their work they did using Adobe Photoshop.

Check out the site to see what is going on inside the head of Vietnamese teenagers — especially their creative stories most have posted to their blogs. I particularly like Tue (G7), Hienrich (8A) and Watson (possibly the next H.G Wells, 8B).

Soon I will be uploading some of their videos made in class using Adobe Premiere Elements, when I have the patience/time to deal with uploading videos!

As I come to the end of my tenure at the Korean School (thank you sweet jesus) I am forced to reflect on the last 16 months. Here I have been a homeroom teacher for Grade 4, teaching English, Math, Science, Social Studies, and theoretically, P.E. This year since September I’ve had 36 eleven year olds in my class. They are totally off the scale — they make barnyard animals seem civilized and well-mannered. The noise they can generate in a breaktime is comparable to a jumbo jet taking off (you are stood on the runway). The Koreans seem to have a ‘leave them to it’ philosophy inbetween classes. Yeah, leave them to……fight, shout, fight more, break something, scream, start crying, smash a window and make someone bleed.

I could moan and bitch about the 5000 things wrong with the school, the way they manage us, the way as foreigners we fit in in Korean culture and therefore the way the kids treat us with less respect than our Korean counterparts, the curriculum, the fact we have to take P.E classes, the number of times cultural misunderstandings have occured — I could ask a searching question about where we should draw the line between cultural misunderstandings and sheer common sense….but I won’t. In two weeks, all that will be behind me — now put yourself in my position, and ask yourself, how do you deal with this?

Most of the time, I have to be mean to get them to listen. Sometimes they listen, and we can have fun. Most of the time, they don’t listen. Sometimes, I have to shout at the top of my voice — sometimes they shout at the top of their voices. Sometimes I bring them in for lunchtime detention. Most of the time they arrive 20 minutes late for lunchtime detention, dripping in sweat, and with grass stains on their shirts. I spend about 63% of my time here rolling my eyes in disbelief. We play football in P.E class. That’s all I know, or want to do, in P.E class. Some boys are very keen:

Others don’t know what a football is:

What keeps me going in this zoo-like environment is the little moments with the kids outside of the classroom, when I can afford to relax a little. They are little charmers, some of them — no matter how much they are distracted and no matter how much I want to rip tufts of hair from my scalp until it bleeds for the sake of them never having a bloody notebook or a pencil everytime we have class, I still don’t dislike them. They’re just kids after all!

So what do you have at the end of it — one lost for words, messed up and shattered teacher.

I tried to contact my embassy regarding what avenues expats have regarding crime/theft and the answer I received was “Here you are on your own. Try to pay off the police to help you if it is an emergency, but other that that good luck”.

You know why it scares me? Because I know it’s true. Reading things like this make me realise how I am really walking a tightrope. The people in that discussion are bitter and negative because these things have personally affected them. They haven’t touched me personally so I don’t have such a negative attitude, but it’s important to remember how easily it could be to end up feeling so angry, alone and ostracized, especially considering my experience in England where the police actually help you. My first experience was when my fiancee, to my horror, became victim to a number of burglaries. She told me she knew it was one of her next door neighbours. I told her matter-of-factly “Well call the police then!” but she told me that she would end up paying more to get anything done than had actually been taken from the house. The solution: buy a better door. I suppose my point here is that many foreginers who have an experience like this simply cannot accept such a conflict with their moral belief system and end up living in their own contrived world. Trust me, my girlfriend is as frustrated, fed up and disappointed with the way the governement and the police operate here, and she tells me it’s a view shared by many. The Vietnamese know they ‘got nothing coming’ from the police and to an extent the village community (very much alive in the city) polices itself.

My counter argument is simple, and provided by many people to combat those constantly spreading a negative image of Vietnam - all the crime and theft is relatively petty. Bag and phone snatching, pick pocketing, house burglaries etc. Well, I know where I’d rather be, even if I’m a bigger target for crime in Vietnam, I’m sure I’m in more danger in my own society which truely is one of violence and aggression, where city centers are basically a no-go zone on Friday and Saturday nights because of drunken yob behaviour, where gangs and racial tension are running inner cities and council estates. I’d rather be here where I feel safe late at night on the streets.

In HCMC I marvel at the foreign exchange places where they keep thousands of dollars in a wooden drawer under the counter. Where the banks are policed by one or two unarmed security gaurds and they have huge bricks of money behind the counters, no glass windows, no grills, nothing protecting the staff there. Why? There’s obviously no need for it. Can you imagine something similar in London or New York? I didn’t think so. In England, the reality is that even taxi drivers are encased in perspex to stop people attacking them. It’s sad.

Onto the discussion about the roads, the guy says the following:

The complete disregard for human life is appalling on the roads and the average Vietnamese has a disgusting “life is cheap” attitude that cannot be ignored when being on the road.

This is a horrible statement and the perfect example of a huge huge misunderstanding by an ‘expert’ who should really be thinking a lot more about what he writes. My opinion is that off the cuff remarks like this are borne out of frustration and anger. Anger that so many people are needlessly killed on the roads simply fuels the ethnocentrism in this statement. Maybe he saw something; it is not to be underestimated the effect that witnessing a bad accident can have on someone, you could end up seeing something similar to that you might see in a war, we’re not talking about grazed knees here. I’ve met people who have been here for a few days and seen people killed. I have never witnessed anything that bad, but I have seen a couple of things where afterwards I barely had the willpower to continue driving home; I did continue, but very slowly, hogging the kerbside. Here’s a link to an old report on the traffic situation in Vietnam.

What I will say though is that both the report and the previous link I gave are ethnocentric. There’s no such thing as a good pass or an improper pass in Vietnam, there are no driving standards or laws which provide the standards in the first place. There is no driving test to pass. Yes motorbikes are overloaded with people and goods, but what are you supposed to do? Take the kids to school one by one? Make 3 trips to supply your store on the other side of town, or only one? As even the biggest stores don’t have delivery trucks everything is delivered by bike - thats including huge TV’s, fridges, washing machines and anything else you can think of, and they are often very badly balanced and being stabilised by one hand of the driver. The worst habits people have is talking on their mobile phones whilst driving and not looking when they enter a stream of traffic. The Vietnamese are not bad drivers, they are driving the only way they know how. I think it’d be hard work to change the rules of the road here, but we could start with simple things. Here are some of my ideas to help road safety in Vietnam:

1) Start with advertising on TV and billboards. Encourage people not to run red lights, to pull over to answer their phones and to prepare in advance for their right or left turns. It should be done in an educational way, and many reasonably minded people will recognise the danger of their activites.

2) We have advertising campaigns in the west about drink driving that are really brutal. Would a similar kind of thing hit home in Vietnam?

3) Please, please, lets install some footbridges at junctions and major roads. I see people edging their way across 6 lane highways inbetween honking 40 footers.

4) In regard to number 3, I should remember that even the most basic projects can’t occur until money is channelled positivly. I remember my feelings of hopelessness at reading this BBC article. The one thing Vietnam really needs is a better infrastructure, and here we are reading about how it’s the most corrupt department going. Until this issue is resolved throughout all levels of government, new roads will continue to fall apart after a few weeks, old roads will continue to be badly maintained and the traffic on the roads isn’t helped at all.

There are two sides to every argument. Here I’m trying to balance a little of the negative press Vietnam often receives about petty crime and its road safety record. How did I do?

Whether the man is guilty of the murder of JonBenet is irrelevant, this case is now highlighting the issues at large in the ESL (English as a Second Language) industry. Unqualified teachers, in other words, people who aren’t teachers at all, can gain employment in all manner of schools around Asia.

In Japan and Korea it is probably more difficult - I had to provide my original diploma to get an E2 visa which allowed me to stay in Korea for one year - there was however no criminal record check or background check. People ask me “How did you get a job in Korea?” and I answer “On the Internet”. I used a website such as this one. Here you can see the global demand for teachers of English. My recruiter who was based in London found me a job and arranged a phone interview which took about 5 minutes and was basically to establish that I was breathing. Within 8 weeks I had gone from surfing for a job to having my visa and flight tickets in hand and boarding the plane. All I needed was my University degree. It really is that easy. Of course everybody leaves for different reasons; mine were the same as many at my age - a real desire to see the world and a total frustration with my lack of options at home; however you can imagine that with the process being so easy, many other kinds of characters successfully apply and gain employment in Korea. What kind of characters I hear you asking……well, I’ve met them all. People who wouldn’t fit in back home, social rejects, people with a bad smell, a drinking problem, bad social skills, people with undiagnosed mental problems like ADD or OCD. Indeed, inside the expat teaching community these kind of teachers are notorious. I suggest you read this ‘thread’ (note: waygook means foreigner in Korean) on the popular expat teachers disscussion forum: a brief example:

A 40 something year old guy. INSISTED he was 28. Really short and scrawny. We kind of felt sorry for him. 10 days in he was short of money and said he needed food. Lent him 100, 000 won. Later found out he borrowed 100,000 from another foriegn teacher and 100, 000 from a Korean teacher. We went out that night and he kept trying to pick up girls by staring at them and disgustingly and leacherously licking potato chips. It was so gross! I left. Next day he pulled the old midnight run.

The midnight run is where the teacher packs up and leaves the country, in the process not telling anyone, breaking contract and adding to the bad rep of foreign teachers. It’s a vicious circle and it ends up impacting all the people here who are sane and don’t smell like cabbage. Teacher comes to Korea. Teacher is imbalanced. Teacher hates job and crappy apartment. Teacher hates disgusting old man Korean boss. Teacher leaves Korea in the middle of the night. Old disgusting boss has foreignerless classes at his school. Boss hates lousy foreigner. Boss will never again trust forgieners. Boss will now treat all foreign staff like badly behaved children no matter what. As usual, its the majority that suffer thanks to the actions of the few; I for one however don’t hold anything against some people who do runner to escape their miserable contracts and jobs which they walked into blindly expecting much better than what they actually got. It works both ways; the profession has a rep for odd characters, but school bosses are well known for lying, providing the absolute bare minimum by way of accomodation, overworking staff, penny pinching to the extreme etc etc. So that’s teaching in Korea for you.

Teaching English in South East Asia has the same problems. Thailand and Cambodia, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, are well known for their ’sex tourists’. As the BBC article says :

But there is little doubt that Thailand, and South East Asia as a whole, has an unenviable reputation for attracting paedophiles - a problem brought into the spotlight in recent months by the conviction of British pop star Gary Glitter in Vietnam.

The dodgy teachers in this part of the world fall into a different catagory than those in East Asia (China, Japan and Korea). I think those in SE Aisa were wondering through the region already doing their thing. They meet people of a similiar persuasion in bars of an evening, and they think ‘Here’s my ticket to live this lifestyle on a permanent basis’. It’s easy to get a job because of the nature of the industry….so many language schools, so many people desperate to learn English, so many people desperate to cash in on all those desperate people desperate to learn English…….means that teachers will be hired almost immediatly without any consideration to background or experience…..sometimes its a case of ‘a warm body in the classroom is good enough’. Read the expat teachers in Thailand discussing the effects of the JonBenet case here. The industry needs more regulation to vet potential teachers.

The Vietnamese government recently tried to make all foreigners get a work permit. I went through all the steps, including getting a criminal record check from Britan. However, I think it depends on how ‘friendly’ the language school is with the Ministry of Education as to how stringent they are on the staff. There were stories of one school being ‘raided’ and unqualified/work permitless teachers being deported, buts thats the only one I’ve heard. Maybe the 6 month tourist visas shouldn’t be so easy to get. How can I be in Vietnam on a tourist visa yet work and pay 10% income tax to the Vietnamese government. Whilst the authorities are having their cake and eating it, there is no answer.

There are a million different people in this industry and they all have a million different reasons but the profession is seriously stigmatised. When I go back to the UK next year and tell people ‘I’ve been teaching English in Asia for the last 3 years’ I wonder what kind of reaction I’ll get. I still have friends who say things like ‘When are you coming back?’ and ‘I can’t believe your still out there’ - as if I am still wondering around with my backpack on 5 years after I started, so I know they think of me as a ‘traveller’ and not a ‘teacher’; they may be surprised to find that I actually am a teacher and I try to do my job professionally, and I am interested in professional development and linguistics and child pyscology, just the same as many young teachers in the field. As for all this other bad stuff I read, the stuff I’ve talked about here, and it’s stuff that I know is shaping people’s minds and opinions towards English teachers, I have to curl my mouth down, open my palms skyward, and in my best New Jersey accent say this:

“Waddya gonna do?”.

I have added a ‘Vietnam Blogs’ link list on the right hand side. It’s a nice way to share traffic and I’ve discovered that all these blogs have similar listings; bloggers like to link to each others sites. Check them out.

I’d love to hear more feedback from people viewing the site. It’s great when I get an email or people leave a comment to tell me what they think, so please do!

Now……….

Imagine your Vietnamese and you want to send your kid (s) to a school to learn English. Families that can afford to will of course send their children to a language school. There are loads of these schools dotted around the city. There are few big ones which have the market share, and there are many many smaller maybe franchised schools. The smaller schools are of course cheaper to enroll in and not so good. Most probably don’t have native speakers teaching there because they can’t afford to pay them. Anyway, if you had to send your kids to one of these schools, you’d choose one that sounded good wouldn’t you? Well, I present to you the most aptly named language school in all of Vietnam………..

You just wouldn’t…….

Here you can see wrapped inside the rice and thin layer of seaweed is some carrot, egg, ham, spinach and pickled radish (mmm juicy). There are many differant kinds of Kimbap..the rice and seaweed stays the same, the contents differs. Very tasty especially with a small bowl of soup to wash it down with, and extraordinarily cheap in Korea - about 50p for one roll (maybe 15 pieces).
Anyway, this foodstuffs is what the children of Grade 4 sang a song about on Sports Day…..make sense? No, I didn’t think so.

They even got dressed up for the part and made fake rolls of Kimbap, and ended up looking something like this:

And here I am marshalling the little old women before their routine, with my co-teacher, Mrs Cho Yeon Ju.

That week we also had a social studies lesson in which we had to talk about traditional games and activities. I introduced some English traditions to the kids such as conkers (although we couldn’t play, no suitable nuts) and foxhunting (we didn’t do that either, although I wanted to….). No no, they were fascinated by this upperclass pursuit and the pictures of it from the net, and we talked about how controversial it has been over the past few years. Myself and another teacher had wanted to play either a game of cricket or a game of croquet, both foriegn sports to the far east, but the usual problem emerged of where to get such equipment in Vietnam. One thing I did manage to do is organise a shove halfpenny tournement in class…..its not difficult to get these kids excited I tell you. Here I am sailing a 5000 dong coin into the ‘5 point’ zone (clears throat).

The next distraction was a field trip to a Mercedes Benz factory, and later, a famous market in town. The Benz factory was quite interesting as they had the entire assembly line in one building. They showed a comparison of Vietnam with Germany : the same population (80 million), Germany has 35 million registered cars, Vietnam has 500,000. So they think that Vietnam has huge potential for vehicle growth, but I don’t. They need a better infrastructure before the country can cope with a large number of cars. Here is a couple of pics from the factory.

So all very interesting (stifles yawn).

I think it was the first school visit the factory had hosted so you can imagine the look of the Vietnamese welders as this lot came through the factory. I don’t know who Ji Hwan thinks he is lying on the floor like that either.