On Teaching

Tomorrow wraps up our third full week of teaching - and we have yet to say much about it, so we thought we'd give you a little insight to the activity that fills the bulk of our time. We were both a little apprehensive about teaching going into this, as neither of us are trained teachers, but the curriculum the Spiritan fathers have chosen has proven very flexible.

As of today we have 13 students: six second years and seven first years.  The first year students have just joined the community, and are getting their first introductions life as a brother. The second year students have been living in community for a year, and interacting with the Spiritan fathers largely in English. They have also been taking theology classes and doing pastoral work in the community for a year. All of the students have a basic command of conversational English, though the range of abilities spans from Kindergarten to high school.  All of them studied English in high school, but some of them also studied it in University, and of course some programs are better than others. 

In general we keep all of the students together, and try to make the lesson plan as broad as possible. Right now neither of us have a sufficiency of Vietnamese to separate out the lower level students to teach them on their own: so there is a lot of explaining back and forth between the students.  In general I think this is a good thing, as one of the best ways to learn is to teach. Every third day we split the groups up to do a review day.  This gives the more advanced students time to cover extra material while the beginners catch things they might have missed during the lesson. 

If we have extra time in class we often go through the readings for the day or work on some tongue twisters. The difference between "g", "z", and "j" sounds has proven to be quite troublesome! We thought we'd share some video of the students working through some songs and rhymes.