here, there, everywhere

It's almost four weeks to the end of my contract! My students are hilarious, all of them, and they are obsessed with learning slang, idioms, euphemisms of any sort: the lights are on but nobody's home, dealbreaker, gold-digger, sleazy. Today I taught them that rocks! -  mostly to offset their growing tendency to imitate my bad habit of saying awesome! while giving a thumbs up, which they do in spades, exaggeratedly, all the time.  It's like looking into a really horrifyingly perky mirror.

Above: Iain and four of my favorite kids in Vietnam.
The girl with the red scarf was obviously the bravest one, and she made it to the top first, at which point she sat back, ate some fruit, and taunted the others till the little boy in blue managed to join her.

The other two were much more cautious, and only made it halfway up, where they remained, despite much taunting and shoe-throwing (from their friends, obviously, not us).

(Above: the little boy in blue is taking off his sandal to throw it at the boy in yellow).

I couldn't tell at the time how much of this was for our benefit and how much was just, I don't know, impromptu acrobatic frolicking/shoe-throwing, but I'm glad my zoom lens, at least, was able to remove any doubt. After awhile, we waved goodbye (they ignored us) and started to hike back up the hill, at which point they scurried down, climbed to higher ground, and burst into an exuberant, apparently well-rehearsed dance.

Finally, as we drove off, they ran off - probably to collect their forgotten cow.

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.

Left to right: Lan Anh, who was the best artist in the class; Giang and Huy, who blazed through every worksheet I gave them to the point where I had to print out special word-searches for them to do while everyone else finished.

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.

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.