Learning to Survive and Thrive in Vietnamese Public School

Four years of teaching in Vietnamese public schools and I’m still hooked.

The journey is a teeming mess of thousands of motorbikes twisting their way through this frenetic city. The heat is already rising. Exhausts blast in my face and onto my clothes and my eardrums are bombarded with a cacophony of beeping horns. By the time I get to school I smell motorbike fumes and fresh sweat.

It's seven in the morning and the school is awash with hundreds of little people all racing around filled with the energy only a seven year old can possess. The noise is like a crazed hymn of life and joy that echoes through the halls.

In class and the excitement brims. The students sit awkwardly, pushing themselves to the front of their seats, eager to get involved. There’s fifty of them, fifty tiny boys and girls, all chattering away and waiting for the class to begin.

Our classes often fly by. What is supposed to be an hour-long class feels like twenty minutes. I’m already covered with sweat and my shirt clings to my back, but the students are happy, and when I take a step back I realise that I am too.

There are tricks to teaching classes of this size and in this heat.

Somehow points and the hope of candy can get the most boisterous of children to sit quietly for a while. I’ve begun to set the classes of fifty students into four or five teams and mark each team up for correct answers and erase points for poor behaviour. Beyond my wildest dreams and expectations, it has actually worked. The class somehow goes from roaring noise to silence simply by placing my hand over the points chart.

The trick to teaching in these Vietnamese public schools was that the education had to be placed in stealthily. If I went in and just bored them with pronunciation drills or grammar lessons their eyes would glaze over within five minutes. All the education had to be snuck in without them noticing they were even learning.

When the first class was over I’d get a thirty-minute break before my next class began. Here I’d escape the school for a while and find myself in a coffee shop across the road. I drank Iced coffee and tried to keep as still as possible until the next class began.

The next class is the same as the first one. Only now there are fifty new students, all filled with the same energy as the last one. I go in with a smile - I do the things I know they love while sneakily trying to get them speaking as much English as I possibly can - and then I go out with fifty goodbyes echoing behind me.

By the time eleven o’clock comes around we are met with the long Vietnamese lunch break. As a general rule, they like to eat lunch around eleven or twelve and nap between twelve and one. This leaves us foreign teachers with our largest gap in the day. Some go home, others sleep, many lesson plan, and some take advantage of all the incredible food you can find in these small family run restaurants for a dollar or two.

My final class begins at 1.40pm and I know that pending traffic I’ll be home by 3.30pm - so I try to give it my all. These final classes always begin in a quiet manner as the students have just woken from their naps and I have to gently coax them out of their daze and push up the energy levels inch by inch until they’ve finally come alive like it's 7am all over again.

When the final bell rings I often race out faster than the students to try and beat the madness of rush hour in Saigon. The roads are always a congested mess but sometimes beating the students out the door keeps a twenty minute journey from becoming a forty minute traffic jam.

I’m soon twisting and turning down back alleys and taking side roads to dodge the trucks and busses until I find my way home. It's there that the air conditioner is cranked up and I finally let the cool air breeze over me.

Teaching in Vietnames public schools isn't all joys. There's the chaotic commute, the sheer number of students, the propensity for schedules to change at a moments notice, and the unrelenting heat all hammering us down.

Yet there is a joy that is hard to define. That pleasure of making one hundred and fifty students smile each day and learn new words and build new sentences to push on and transform something challenging into something that is fun.

I came here to teach in Vietnamese public schools for just one year - yet this life and this job seems to have captured me in a way I could have never have expected. When I look back on it all - on staying so long - I don’t regret a moment of it. Perhaps I could have made more money in the UK, and perhaps my drive to work would have been a bit more safe, and the classrooms would have been a lot cooler. But the thought of never having seen those fifty smiling faces in the blazing heat and feeling the excitement and joy: I would never change a single thing.