Friday was my first day teaching at Vientiane College, which marks the transition into my “real life” here in Laos. Needless to say, the prospect of teaching for the first time has made for an anxiety-ridden few days. Once I got over the mental hurdle of “what on earth do I say and do when I first stand up in front of the class?!?” things seemed to go relatively well, although I certainly have a lot of hard work in store. I’ve been so thankful for and aware of the incredible support and resources available at VC since I sat down to actually plan those first lessons and realized how much help I had, in the form of syllabi, textbooks, and coworkers. The range of students at Vientiane College is vast–from elementary school kids whose parents have signed them up, to adults sponsored by their employers, to university students who are hoping for scholarships to study abroad (mostly in Australia).
This term (the academic year is split into four 10-week terms) I’m teaching three classes, although usually I’ll be teaching four. The classes I teach are every weeknight, plus Saturday mornings, since most of the students come to study after a regular day at school or work. My classes will have about 12-20 students, although many were absent for these first few days. Two of my classes are “young learners” classes, one at the pre-intermediate level (these students are teenagers), one at the pre-elementary level (these students are ages 9-12). For these classes I have two Lao TAs, who help translate directions if needed and generally keep the classes in order, since these are larger classes, with shorter attention spans. My third class is an adult elementary level class, where students’ ages range from late teens to forties.
Each class is an hour and twenty minutes, which was especially daunting when planning the first few lessons, because it seems like such a long amount of time to fill. I ended up doing a variation of the same activities with all three classes, partly out of panic that I didn’t have time to plan anything else, and partly because the basic “get-to-know-you” review lessons can translate to any level with some small modifications. This ended up being interesting because it made the differences between the classes, their interests and abilities, very clear as I saw how each one approached the same activity. In most basic terms, the lessons consisted of a combination of name game, running dictation with “two truths and a lie”-type sentences about me, and vocabulary pictionary. My teenage class sped through all of the activities and worked at the highest level of the three, while the adult students took a longer time to understand directions but followed them best once they did, and the younger students mostly liked any aspect of competition and running around the classroom.
Luckily, most of the students go by nicknames, instead of their incredibly long and difficult to pronounce actual names. These nicknames range from the logical, shortened versions of their real name, to English words, like Boy, Lucky, Ton and Say, or things like Vii, Pi, and Pooly. Now that the panic of the first lesson has subsided, I have the task of getting into a routine to plan the rest of the term, and to learn all of my students’ names as quickly as possible. Tomorrow: classroom rules and language, and review of last term.
Additional Trivia: The Lao stockmarket opened today.