So my first experience of the Vietnamese national Teachers’ Day passed in the haze of a twelve and a half hour shift, disappointed-looking Juniors, bored-looking TAs and finally culminated in me giving some 13 and 14 year olds a very un-Asian-style bollocking (so much for maintenance of ‘face’).
Teachers’ Day is a national celebration of the esteem and respect in which teachers are held. It is mainly aimed at honouring those teachers in mainstream education, and for many people involves returning to their old school even after many years in order to see their former teachers. Schools hold Open Days with performances by the students and presentations of gifts and messages to the teachers.
But we lesser mortals in ELT do get a look in too, with teachers rushing into the staffroom at every break to deposit yet more gifts of bedraggled roses, chocolates, cakes, shower gel, useless knick knacks, rolls of fabric and, in one case I heard about, a box of washing powder. Not to mention the disconcertingly Mafia-esque offer, ‘If there’s anything you want, just let my mum know…’
Having few very young learners classes, and having clearly failed as yet to warm the cockles of my students’ hearts I didn’t fare quite so well, although I did come away with a Winnie the Pooh mug and an envelope containing 100,000 dong (just over £3). Plus my adult students took me out for sushi on Friday night, which is always welcome! However, dragging myself out of bed before 6am on Saturday morning to cover a Juniors class (average age 8) of whom fewer than half turned up and all of whom looked at me as if to say ‘Oh. You’re not our teacher. I’m not giving you a present’ was not so welcome. Bless ‘em. It was the final lesson of their course, and not only was their regular teacher absent but so was their TA. So they had to put up with a couple of strangers playing pointless games with them.
Not surprisingly there were no gifts from the Seniors class I gave the bollocking to either. Dragging a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds through an Advanced level textbook was never going to be easy. And maybe I’m not used to such young teenagers being at that level. 16 and 17 year olds, yes, but younger ones at that awkward point of painful shyness and cockiness, not so much. Getting any of them to say anything that is audible to the human ear is a feat in itself, unless its from the gaggle of giggling girls who randomly interject questions about sex whenever they feel they’re in any danger of being made to do any work.
Anyway, after having been at work already for nigh on ten hours, something snapped. I caught one of the boys writing on his desk with a board marker, and hit the roof. The lesson ground to a halt as I threw a toilet roll at him and screamed at him to scrub it off immediately. Then I made him spend the remainder of the lesson sitting next to the TA. Possibly not one of my finest moments as a teacher, but it did seem to do the trick. Going into the next lesson the following day with all guns blazing, I read them the riot act again, wrote MY non-negotiable set of class rules on the board (forget all that baloney about giving teenagers a voice) and threatened them with the set of humiliating forfeits that have been known to make 6-foot tall, 18 year old Italian boys cry. They were a little subdued to begin with, but we all emerged unscathed 2 hours later from a perfectly pleasant and productive lesson.
Worried about issues of face, I did apologise to Linh, the TA, but she told me not to worry. ‘Sometimes’, she said, ‘they need it.’
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