Left to right: Thao, who was the most prone to excessive compliments ("I love these new crayons! You are very nice today! This game is awesome!"); Yen Nhi, who was a bit shy at first but who would wait outside the staff room for me to walk to class; and Lan, who had somewhere picked up the phrase "oh noooo" and used it to call attention to pretty much anything that happened ever (a broken crayon: "Oh noooo, Mikka!"; a randomly open window: "oh nooooo!")
Back in June, I got assigned a kids class - Starters Two, which means very, very, very beginner - which was terrifying, given that a month of intensive CELTA training left me overwhelmed at teaching adults with a functional grasp of English already. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I walked into the room on the first day with a box of crayons and a lesson plan that pretty much consisted of:
1) Say "Hello!!! How are you?"
2) Get them to say "Hello!!! How are you?" back.
3) Sing the "Hello!!! How are you?" song at least three times.
4) Pass out crayons.
I was in no way prepared for how insanely good natured my students would be about the fact that I clearly had no idea what I was doing (or the fact that they already knew the phrase "Hello, how are you?" - I didn't find out till much later that the first three weeks of our class was meant to be review), but amazingly they were all cool with the fact that we spent the first few weeks doing way too much coloring and BINGO (they rocked BINGO), and after a few weeks, a handful of them took to waiting in the hallway for me to come out of the teachers room, and would bob around me as we walked up the hallway (Them:
Hellomikkahowareyou?? Me:
I'm fine, thank you, and you? Them: I
'mfinethanksandyou?? all the way up the hall) and then whenever I walked into the room they'd all chorus HELLO MIKKA! at the top of their lungs like I was actually a decent teacher who did more than just make them play Simon Says too much. It wasn't till late July that I was finally starting to feel a bit more adventerous, teaching-wise - one day we sang
Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles, and seriously if you haven't seen a roomfull of ridiculously tiny Vietnamese children earnestly singing the Beatles, you're missing out.
.
Bach! I don't even know what to write about Bach. He was the tiniest boy in the class with the weakest English, and I never knew how much he actually understood or could even write - I doubt very much - but he was always in a good mood about his relative lack of comprehension, and he did a mean chicken walk. His shining moment came when we played Simon Says for the first time - people seemed to be only shakily grasping the concept, so I didn't have much hope when I called for a volunteer to be Simon, and immediately felt my heart sink when only Bach raised his hand, but he ran up to the front of the room bursting with excitement and totally OWNED being Simon. If they ever make a movie of Bach's life, the scene where he rocks Simon Says will be accompanied by Eye of the Tiger. It was a thing to behold (Simon Says, point to the Mikka!), and I let him be Simon for much longer than all the other kids everytime after that, and he would always chicken-walk triumphantly back to his desk.
So I was completely smitten with my kids class by mid-August, which is why I was devastated to walk in one afternoon and find out that I'd been moved to Sundays, which meant my kids were going to be given a new teacher, and even more gutted when I found out the shift was happening that weekend and that I would never get to teach them again. I fell all over myself describing them to their new teacher ("They love coloring and BINGO and Simon Says and this game where you paste pictures to their backs and make them guess, oh, and wordsearches, don't forget those, Giang and Huy will finish everything really fast and Linh and Nghia need extra time, and Thuong will ask you to look at everything she does, and if you give Thao the new crayon box she will love you forever and, we started making zoo collages last week, don't forget their zoo collages, and and and" ) and I still miss them, like a lot, so much that I'm writing ridiculously long posts about them instead of my recent trip to Hoi An or pretty much anything else about living in Hanoi, but there you go. I miss you guys.
