Day 2 of training: learn to teach!

On Tuesday I woke up very early to go to the gym, which was predictably rough. I also met Tyler, our last ETA, so the gang is all here today! 

Today was all about teacher training, and it was today that I think the full enormity of what I am doing hit me. I have taught before, but I have never done a lesson plan or a formal curriculum, so I am a little terrified at the prospect. However, I am just going to put my nose to the grindstone and learn as much as I can as quickly as I can.

We covered basic concepts of TEFL training today such as letting students drive the classroom, the importance of grounding instruction in the students' real-world experience and how to schedule a lesson effectively. An overarching theme was getting students to speak comfortably, to create an atmosphere where they felt comfortable sharing and making mistakes.

We watched several instructional videos that showed teachers implementing lesson plans for smaller classes of 12-15 students, and then we were asked to try and figure out how we could configure these plans differently for larger classes of up to 60 students, which we might very well be dealing with.

This is a lot for me to take in, but our teacher Andrew is very good so I am optimistic about the rest of classes. I will keep you posted as my education progresses.

At this point, I should probably mention another daily hazard/fact of life in Vietnam: the rain. It is currently monsoon season in Vietnam, so I was expecting a certain degree of rain. However, the rain here is not only heavy, it is also thoroughly unpredictable. Coming from Boston I am used to sporadic rain showers and unpredictable weather, but Boston has nothing on Hanoi. The sky will be perfectly clear, then the heavens will open up and an entire lake will come splashing down from the sky, then the weather will be perfect again. It takes some getting used to.

This is what the rain looks like in Vietnam. I see a lot of it.

After training we all went out to dinner again

Quan tried to illustrate the Vietnamese name for each family member. It got quite complicated. 

Dinner together!

After dinner Trevor and I went to find ultimate frisbee, as Trevor played ultimate throughout college. After a taxi ride and much fruitless poking around we were not able to find the fields. Trevor and I made the best of it, throwing for a while before heading back home. We would later discover that we were in the right area and were almost on top of the fields. *sigh*. We'll go there next week.

On the way back we stopped at a Ga Nuong (Grilled Chicken) place that Trevor recommended. The chicken was delicious, and the alleyway was a beautiful little slice of Hanoi life. Motorcycles would purr by occasionally, tourists and locals alike devoured this amazingly grilled chicken as a full moon shone done over all of us. The earlier heat had evaporated, and a cool breeze occasionally blew through. It was a beautiful, completely grounded yet strangely transcendent moment.

Then we were absolutely ripped off and charged 150,000 VND each for the meal. Ah Hanoi, the city that keeps giving and taking and giving and taking and giving...

Peace,

Jefferson 

Day 1 of training: welcome to Vietnam

Hey all, so I think I'll be posting every other day. Might try to do daily, but we'll see how my schedule holds up.

Well, I had basically been jet lag free on Sunday but on Monday it hit me. Woke up after nine hours of sleep and still felt like I had been hit by a bus. Luckily Vietnamese coffee is both very good and very strong, so I rode the waves of caffeine through the day. I also met Trevor and Anna, so the only ETA I have not met is Tyler, who should be heading over tomorrow.

The first day of training began with a general welcome, followed by waves of briefing from different U.S. Embassy Officials. We got an overview of the Fulbright program, a safety briefing, a political briefing and a medical briefing.

I don't want to bore you with the details, but I think I can give you some general highlights:

--The Fulbright Program in Vietnam was started in 1992. The main components of the Fulbright Program are the U.S. Student Program, the U.S. Scholar Program, the Vietnamese Student Program and the Vietnamese Scholar Program. Since 1992 the program has expanded from 18 Fulbright Fellowships to 77.

--The English Teaching Assistantship is the newest aspect of the Fulbright Program in Vietnam, founded in 2007.

--Politically, Vietnam is one of only four countries that remain communist, along with North Korea, China and Cuba. This has important ramifications for both international relations and daily interactions in Vietnam. The Communist Party of Vietnam is the most important policy-making body in the country.

--Vietnam and the U.S. have forged strong diplomatic and economic ties over the past fifteen years. With the Vietnam War only ending in 1975, many have asked me about why there are already relatively warm relations between both nations. The answer is complicated, but there are two main factors:
          
1. A ridiculous portion (~60%) of Vietnam is under 30, so they do not have first-hand   experience of the war and thus there is less residual bitterness
2. China. Both Vietnam and U.S. have a very strong incentive to balance China's aggressive growth.

--Listening to travel health warnings is like reading WebMD and convincing yourself that you have several different diseases, except about 10,000 times worse. I am now convinced that I have dengue-malaria-AIDS.

--Not one, but two separate warnings about the dangers of traffic. Apparently every driver in the country is a threat to our safety. But I already told you how much fun the traffic is.

This is the room where we do all our training

I get a placard!

After training finished we headed out for a night on the town. 

We all went to dinner

And then we went to Le Pub, a bar Trevor recommended

From left: Trevor, Amelia, Justin

And then we went to Dragonfly, a hookah bar

Everyone, this is Anna

And Kate

And Amanda

And Trevor!

Anyways, have to go to bed now, thanks for reading!

Peace,

Jefferson

    

First day in Vietnam: Traffic and Food

Well, I have safely arrived in Vietnam and settled in to the hotel.

The flight landed yesterday at around 9:00 pm, I almost left my book behind on the plane but a very nice lady saved it for me. I got to meet a bunch of the other Fulbright ETAs in Tokyo--Vanlam, Claire, Justin, Jess, Amanda, Koua, Kate, Michelle and Lindsay. I was a little nervous about meeting everyone but they all seem really nice.

Our landing in Hanoi was a little chaotic, after about 20 hours of travel we were all exhausted. We somehow managed to fit everyone and their luggage into one car and van and drove into town and checked-in. I was too wired to go to sleep so I was up for a couple of hours unpacking and surfing the web.

This is my room in the Rising Dragon Grand Hotel

Double bed, good-size closet, A/C and fast internet along with a nice bathroom and a flat-screen tv. I'm feeling quite spoiled over here.


For our first day in Vietnam, I woke up at 8:00 to a nice complimentary breakfast provided by the hotel.    I got to meet Amelia and Quan, two other ETAs, and then I headed out to explore with Jess, Amanda, Koua, Kate, Michelle and Lindsay.

First important experience of Vietnam: the traffic

Ah, the traffic in Vietnam. A beautiful, chaotic melange of motorbikes, scooters and taxis zipping along without regard to any traffic laws a Westerner would recognize. Horns sound constantly as drivers pass each other constantly, drive the wrong way through traffic and attempt maneuvers that would get you arrested and/or killed in the States. Here, right-of-way is determined by the size of your vehicle. Motorcycles defer to cars, cars defer to vans and everyone deters to buses. When you see a bus barreling down the road, you get the hell out of the way.

Oh, and there are no crosswalks and nobody stops for pedestrians.

Good luck.

I have been to Vietnam before, most recently a year and a half ago, and I lived for a month in Cairo which has a similar driving culture, so I am somewhat prepared for the traffic here. However, there is nothing quite like crossing the street in the middle of heavy traffic. If you stop or make a sudden move you make it harder for the bikers to steer around you, so both the impulse to wait for traffic to pass you and the impulse to dash across the street must be controlled. Instead, you must walk slowly but steadily forward as motorcycles whiz by you, desperately praying that the motorcycles will pass around you.

When we last visited Vietnam my father's tip for crossing the street was "Don't look at the motorcycles.  If they don't think you see them they have to avoid you." This advice is quite true in my experience. It is also quite insane.

Our first destination in Hanoi was Hoan Kiem Lake, the lake in the center of Hanoi. According to legend, when Le Loi was leading the Vietnamese in a revolt against the Ming dynasty in the 15th century, he received a magical sword. Upon achieving victory, he cast the sword into the lake and a golden turtle rose to retrieve the sword.

Hoan Kiem Lake, with the Turtle Pagoda

On the lake

Statue of Emperor Le Loi

The lake is also a place where people do a lot of their outdoor activities, such as running, martial arts, badminton... 

...and jazzcercise.

There is also a really beautiful pagoda in the middle of the lake, the Ngoc Son Temple, and we went to see it. 

One of the turtles that supposedly returned Le Loi's sword to the lake

My fellow Fulbrighters!

Back row: Jess, Amanda, Lindsay, Michelle

Front row: Koua, Kate

Outside the pagoda

On the bridge to the pagoda

After visiting the pagoda we went to the old quarter of Hanoi, the marketplace where everything can be bought. We went by Dong Xuan, a massive marketplace that is what happens when you mix a shopping center with a bazaar. I didn't get any particularly great photos of Dong Xuan, maybe I'll try again later.

At this point everyone was feeling a bit exhausted and jet-lagged, so we headed back to the hotel. On the way we stopped for lunch. Now, normally I am strictly against posting pictures of food (man's gotta have principles) but in this case I think its allowed, because this picture is documentation of the first time Jess has ever tried Vietnamese food.

An historic event

On the way home we stopped for coconuts as well. 

The rest of the afternoon I worked out in my room, browsed around on the internet and did some other fairly trivial things. 

As we were heading to dinner we ended up meeting Andrew, a Fellow at the U.S. Embassy who is our Teaching English as a Foreign Language instructor, in the lobby of our hotel. We wandered around until we found a small Banh My (Vietnamese sandwich) shop. At first they tried to seat us upstairs, and charge us 60,000 VND ($3) each for a banh my. That seemed high to me, so I suggested we move downstairs and sit on the ground floor at the street. There the price was only 20,000 VND ($1) for a banh my. I was pretty proud of myself for avoiding a tourist trap in Hanoi, one of many that I am sure we will encounter.

On the way back from dinner it started to rain pretty heavily. I guess this heralds the start of monsoon season.  

Tomorrow is the first day of our training and I am super excited but also really nervous. I have very little teaching experience, so I'm going to try and pay very close attention to everything. I'll keep all of you posted.

Peace,

Jefferson

Background info

Damn, that was a lot of packing. It took a long time, and thanks to my mother for helping me out, but I think I am ready to go to Vietnam tomorrow.

I'm going to Vietnam tomorrow. AAAAAAHHHGHG!!!

Anyways, minor freakouts aside, I am going to spend most of tomorrow in an airplane heading over to Asia. Given that I have no actual travel stories to tell you yet, I figure now is a good time to tell you specifically what I will be doing in Vietnam.

As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant I will be teaching or assisting English language classes; I will be teaching college-age students who already have advanced English skills so I will not be teaching beginners. I am expected to spend 16 hours a week teaching and 14 hours a week doing lesson planning, grading, and other cultural activities. It's a relatively light schedule so the expectation is that I will be involved in other aspects of the community. For instance, I hope to eventually teach my students how to play ultimate frisbee.

I will be teaching at Ben Tre College in Ben Tre province one hour south of Ho Chi Minh city. Ben Tre is crisscrossed by rivers large and small in the middle of the Mekong Delta. Ben Tre is very agricultural, but Ben Tre has been developing fast since the first bridge between Ben Tre and the mainland was built in 2009. Ben Tre College was founded in 2004 and has a faculty of 258 teachers and 4,000 students. I am the second Fulbright ETA to go to Ben Tre, the first was Adelina Solis who went last year and she has been incredibly helpful as I prepare to head out.

Before I head to Ben Tre I will be spending a one month orientation in Hanoi with all my fellow Fulbrighters. After that all of us head our separate ways to various towns around the country.   

Well I don't want to drone on and on about the details but that is the general idea of what I will be doing and where. If you want more information, check out the links below

Time for me to try and catch some sleep, lot of traveling tomorrow!

Later,

Jefferson

Fulbright Program: http://us.fulbrightonline.org/

Ben Tre province: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Tre_province

Ben Tre College: http://www.cdbt.edu.vn/item.aspx?l=1&z=28 (only in Vietnamese, unfortunately. Google Chrome can translate decently)

Hello

Hello all,

My name is Jefferson Viet-Anh Day and I was recently awarded a Fulbright grant to teach English in Vietnam.

On this blog I hope to tell you about my travels, teaching English, learning Vietnamese and the various hijinks that are sure to ensue.

A little about myself, I am from Boston and recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in History. I am a huge ultimate frisbee player, a proud member of Sigma Phi Epsilon national fraternity and I enjoy both acting and writing as well.

If you found this blog that suggests that you are either one of my close friends or family that I told about this blog, or you randomly stumbled upon this site looking for hot pictures of naked women. Some of you may be both.

If you are the former, hi and welcome and thanks for following me! If you are the latter, I can't really help you. Sorry.

Anyways, stay tuned for more information about the school and province I will be working in, as well as exactly what I'll be doing. I'm leaving tomorrow so right now I have to pack like a lunatic.


Peace,
Jefferson