End of week teaching in Kim Giang

The good news for you lot dreading another school review: This is the last core school I taught at in the week, and I taught here both on Thursday and Friday. The bad? I will do a quick rundown of the many cover schools I taught at as well! However, from this point on there will be more about the actual adventures on a blog site called Paul’s TEFL Adventures.

Thursday was something of a slog as far as teaching goes. By this point of the week I was teaching on autopilot, so it was the right time of week to send me to Kim Giang, another Thanh Xuân school near the Tô Lịch river. This time myself and Sara would be paired up and sent to the school. Oddly, the school had a few different entrances and none seemed to get us into the teachers room at first. It did feel like a school where the planning for the courtyard and back entrance got mixed up and they just made do with building the school around it. The Christmas poster that never got taken down throughout the internship wasn’t a great sign either…

Thursdays tended to be with an in school TA but after 3 months BME TA Took over. She was professional and quiet, similar to Hien at Thanh Liet, but she seemed less experienced. Still, she did things by the book and the grade 3’s I taught behaved for the most part (keyword being the most part).

You see, Kim Giang is likely the noisiest school I taught in Hanoi, second to perhaps Ha Dinh which was only around 500 meters away. Perhaps this area just allows children to scream and shout all day and not discipline them. At least the students tried not to be offensively bad, just incredibly noisy. No middle fingers, chair throwing or rude insults which was done to other teachers happened to me. It was just wall to wall noise. Class sizes here could be 70+, and it showed. I would hate to teach a full class like this all day.

This was alleviated by having by far the soundest TA on Fridays; Linh.

She was a college student that was friends with the teachers, and would be great to talk about almost anything over the course of the internship, be it other countries, . Sara’s TA Hiền was equally fun, and both of them became facebook friends. Hiền at first was coming on to me quite a bit at first, but I told her I was taken and she was cool after that. It turned out long distance relationships were tricky in Hanoi (more on that another time). Either way, Friday had awesome TA’s, and it made the incredibly noisy final classes bearable. Even when another special needs student was trying to punch other students and throw students down the stairs outside the class I was not as bothered as in Co Nhue. Maybe I was more of a hardass and disciplined him more than the other student, having him against the wall as he would dry hump my leg and be destructive in class otherwise. I still felt for him because if he was allowed outside the classroom any other Vietnamese teacher would grab him by the shirt and bring him into another room, not to be seen for 30 minutes and likely given corporal punishment despite his condition. Staying by the wall in my mind was the lesser of two evils.

As mentioned, the classes were noisy, but on Friday the levels were similar to jet engines. Fortunately the classes went from worst class first to best class in the end. The first class was the least engaged and difficult to participate in classroom activities. It was like wringing something out of very noisy stones.

Now the second class was much better. The students engaged in the class and while they weren’t as strong in their English skills as the last class, they were far more creative. If you had a story with blanks to fill in to complete it, theirs would be the most entertaining. They would have stories about Spiderman getting arrested for being at an Iron Man movie screening, then getting stuck in the prison toilet while escaping and using spider powers to find his freedom. They would think outside the box and use a lot more pop culture in their answers. They even had a strong basketball player who would more often than not score a team winning shot, throwing a piece of paper from one side of the classroom to the bin by the teaching platform. As noisy classes go they were good.

Finally the last class was full of excellent speakers. Some more unusual and challenging exercises were used, and I gave them some real world English examples for them to use in future. Being the better speakers I let them use their skills more with less sheep herding to answers and encouraging any other words or phrases they may have heard. This let to team names inevitably being called ‘Slenderman‘ ‘Jeff the Killer‘ and other creepypasta stories for teams…And Jason.

And…that was it…

The week was over.

All that was left to do was get into Tommy’s taxi with Sara. Sometimes other teachers would be there from a few different schools, but either way we were heading back to the main accommodation to start the weekend. We would often take the highway route back, checking out the Five star garden apartments, the Handico building’s sparkling lights and the convention center on the way. At the endI would sometimes just head to the corner shop and get some snacks, maybe some sesame crackers, or even cheeky cans for the weekend. The time to chill had begun!