Birdy Learns the Woes of Teaching

Foreign Staff Teaching Students
To Make A Line

     I remember when my mom and I flew down to visit Tuy Hoa last December. The project seemed daunting, promising, and challenging. These days we receive an embarrassing amount of praise and there's a lot of excitement over the direction things are going. Down the ground, however, we spend quite a bit of time swimming through the murkier aspects of starting up a school.

My Hallway (my room is the room at the far end)

     Most schools have an overly explicit student handbook, a staff manual, a heavy-worded vision and mission. We don't. We don't have a handbook or a staff manual or a vision or a mission. We have intentions, an abundance of clueless but well-intended quasi-administrators, and a serious need for a behavior plan. Yea, we need one of those, too.

     It seems to me that a lot about being a teacher is navigating campus politics. Usually these are pretty light and unimportant (like the length of a man's hair) and give little cause for anything more than sighs or grumbles. The trouble with our particular project here is that none of those politics are visible or open for discussion. Nor are they written down anywhere. For the foreign staff this is particularly frustrating, because we don't know what's expected of us or our colleagues. Yay for ambiguity!

Our New Building
(so shiny!)

Birdy Teaching
(she's not normally that crooked,
she's just bending over)

    What drew me to the project was the opportunity to train teachers. It seems weird for a second-year teacher to be out and about telling other teachers what to do, but I came into it for some very specific reasons. First of all, there is nothing in Vietnam like the type of multi-sensory, multiple-intelligence oriented teaching approach that I was trained in. Secondly, they have coconuts here. Third (thirdly?), this is exactly the sort of work I want to be doing when I grow up. Finally, most importantly, I know how much teaching something helps the teacher learn. If I teach about geology, I learn about geology. If I teach about history, I learn about history. Teaching something forces us to evaluate what we know and how we're approaching our subject. Why not teach about teaching to learn about teaching? It's working. I already learned I like purple and use the word 'taco' a lot.

     Birdy has been volunteering as a teacher at the school, teaching 1st grade ESL. She loves kids, has a lot of experience with day care, and recently told me, "Yea, I definitely don't want to be a teacher." Teaching is hard work, and consists of a lot of failure and frustration. She doesn't believe me when I tell her how proud I am of her, how impressed I am by the amount of effort she's putting into teaching and by how successful she's been. She can't see her success. I think that must be the thing that drives people out of teaching more than anything else: the inability to acknowledge success amidst so much error and frustration. It's not easy. It's the little victories that count. It's the ability to pretend the kid who just pranced around the room without permission is a genius deep, deep, deep down inside. It's also about getting kids to do ridiculous things for your amusement, and tying it in to the lesson.

Ahhh... I love teaching!