Rose and Sam's Excellent Adventure

5 minutes into my teaching career, and I have a “Kick Me!” sign stuck to my back, and I’m wondering how such a small person can create so much noise without an amplifier and how my boss can look so much like Leonie Wilson without being a relation. And in the back of my mind I’m thinking about the kid taken sick with Cholera a few weeks back, and how effective spraying the school with bleach really was….. Cholera?

I’m the scumbag teacher who is learning the ropes at the moment, and the kids sense it, and try to sass me. I have two major regrets in my life. The 1st is breaking Amanda Plowman’s heart in 1995, and the 2nd is not kicking more ass in school, and by the grace of god, I have been given a second chance. It’s time to take out the trash!

The teacher I’m taking over from, an English girl called Harriet (I know Az, actually called Harriet.. It’s a sign yah?) is kinda showing me around and trying to give me a feel to the practicalities of teaching insane children who seem to have an internal, and by no means finite, supply of sugar.

There seems to be a single way to teach kids to speak English. Screaming, Running, Jumping, Throwing and Coughing. I have a Kindy class every day, and on some other days, I have older kids who speak more English than most of us. There’s no way I can coherently, and chronologically explain what happens in the classroom, from the standpoint of interesting events, so painting visuals is the way I’m processing it all at the moment.

Visuals that still make me piss myself 5 hours later, like the visual of… We were going through some vocab with these 4 year old Vietnamese kids, at this point, it was family members. Mummy, Daddy, Baby Brother, Baby Sister and all that jazz. I hold up the Daddy card, and say it a few times like I’m a retard, and one kid says it a little louder than the rest of the kids. Grand. Praise and claps. This plants the seed of competition in one mini-person and out spurts a “DAADDDYY” from the kids mouth.

They sense they’re onto a winner, three boys start yelling “DADDY! DADDY!” while looking at me. I applaud their efforts, which seems to fuel this surreal fire until the kids are half slapping their faces and kicking their legs like they’re trying to swim backwards, while sitting down screaming “DAAAAADDDY”. I just sat back, laughing and let it go. They’re a) having fun and b) talking English. I guess that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

There’s one kid in this class who has kinda crazy eyes. One is a bit lazy, and he blinks at a slightly different left to right ratio which gives him a kinda John Malkovich air about him, which is accentuated when he thinks. His lazy eye squints and twitches ever so slightly, and, by the look on his face I think he’s about to expound something deep until he then says “Mummy”. I’ve never heard family names appear so downright profound and intense. This kid can colour-in like a motherfucker. He’s like a crayon savant. He stares at you most of the lesson though, until you look at him and say “Helllloooo?” and then he just looks away, giggling.

The older group (around 9y/old) is horse of a different colour. Within the first 5 minutes, I had a “Kick Me!” sign on my back and I was thinking “shit Muzz, you’re losing them already.” but the look on the kids face when he was informed that I was going to be his teacher next week, and I wasn’t to be fucked with was worth it. His time will come.

The games we play in the older class are more fun, because, well… when you’re 9 you’re not 4 and your brain isn’t thinking “sugar, hitting, sugar, kicking, sugar, coughing on the teacher”. Apparently, the Friday evening class in this age group is… kinda like a bad day in Baghdad from what I’ve heard.

This is a surface scratch. There’ll be more when I get the class to myself. There’ll be pictures, video, the whole shebang. Out of all of the gag tin-mines I’ve worked in, this place takes the mother-loving cake. Stay tuned. For Christ’s sake, don’t flip that dial. I’m gunna milk these gags for all they’re worth. And they’re worth a small island in the Bahamas.

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This entry was posted by Sam on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Hanoi, TESOL, Vietnam, gag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.