The sore throat rapidly developed into a nasty stuffy cold complete with headaches, loss of lung capacity, broken sleep patterns and a lack of enthusiasm for anything very much other than lying on the bed with the balcony door open letting the breeze flow through.
So Monday 3rd January was, all in all, a pretty miserable prospect on paper. The abysmal End-of-Course tests were finally marked and reports written with sinking heart. This adult class has always been somewhat problematic. While observers have said that the students do seem to like me and want to go with me on the activities I set them, it took me a long time to feel that connection myself. This isn’t helped by the graveyard shift time of the lesson (7.30-9.30pm), my difficulty learning Vietnamese names and the fact that half of them never turn up. (One girl made it to the exam after missing the whole of the previous 6 weeks!) And then (the day before the AC job interview) I was told that someone in the class had complained about me – not enough correction of pronunciation (there is, I’m just too subtle for them), no clear focus to lessons (we’ve been on revision!!) and that I was late (LATE?!! ME?!! What? I’m never late for class, and frankly even if I was, they’re so late themselves I’m surprised there’s anyone there to notice). So, you can imagine my feelings about breaking the news to them that even those few who had actually passed had done so with less than flying colours.
Then sitting in the staffroom wading with treacly head, aches and pains and whatever, trying to plan the evening’s lessons, admin staff kept returning bits of the scores and reports to me, telling me I hadn’t needed to work out the percentages myself, and checking them all over again – which made me feel like an idiot. And these marks do seem very low? Yes, well, throw a KET (pre-int level) exam out of nowhere at an elementary class, and what do you expect? This disconnect between ability and exam has been something of a bee in bonnets all week, and not just with me. Hence the lesson plan and the resolution to incorporate exam practice a bit more into the classes. Thing is they are only General English courses. They’re not actually intended to be exam prep – so why use the tests at all?
The post-mortem itself was every bit as uncomfortable as I expected it to be, though to give them their due they didn’t turn it on me. They were just shocked and disappointed, comparing notes with each other. It wasn’t much of a surprise a few days later to hear that the next course has been postponed until the 21st through lack of interest. But, in fact, they did forgive me enough to take me out to dinner.
We went to a close-your-eyes-and-try-not-to-think-about-the-cockroach-you-just-saw-scuttle-under-Tuyen’s-chair pavement seafood restaurant. Actually, cockroach notwithstanding, it turned out to be a very enjoyable evening. The food – various things in shells and claws that once belonged to things in shells – was excellent, particularly something called So Duong (?) which had cooked the inhabitant of something like an oyster shell in cheese (yay, for that French influence!). With the food cooked there on the street it came to the table so hot you couldn’t even touch the shells. In fact, one was so hot I dropped it and it scalded my knee as it bounced off the table onto the floor (no sign of cockroach doing victory dance)!
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