Tower of Babble

I've been teaching English at a language center in Hà Đông for about a month now. The director of the school likes me, so once I have my TESL certificate and can get a business visa it should be a pretty reliable job. Most of my classes are for young children between 7 and 10. I have a few classes with teenagers that are more advanced. Starting this week I will be traveling outside of Hanoi about 30km to an area called Hưng Yên to teach four English classes every Saturday.

The kids are always shocked to find out I can speak Vietnamese. None of the other foreign instructors are able to do so. Actually, the Vietnamese teachers I work with are usually pretty surprised as well. It's been a lot of fun. We do vocabulary drills, play games, sing songs and much more. Each class is two hours long, but I only teach for 1.5 hours. The Vietnamese instructor teaches the other half hour.

The school I work for does quite well, they have over 800 students signed up. There are two buildings down the street from one another, one for teaching children and one for the older students. Some of the classes get a little too crowded, but they try to keep it under 18 students for the most part. The rooms aren't particularly large, so that's important. Also, Vietnamese architecture isn't conducive to a quiet environment. The concrete walls and high ceilings tend to create echo chambers that result in a cacophonous roar. That's right, I just used cacophonous in a sentence, what are you going to do about it? Haha!

English Class