The first week of class has come and gone.

It started out rough, but as everyone said, it got better. The classes improved and there was more participation, most likely due to the students getting use to the teachers’ style for encouraging active learning.

Monday was a difficult day due to the limited English experience and exposure of the students. Wednesday and Friday was substantially better, but I learned that this was so because they were advanced English-speaking classes. Monday’s class can be grouped into the Beginner’s category. I am spending all day today working on a new syllabus for the class and how to teach them accordingly. I may have to implement incremental lessons- start off with a small set of vocabulary and number of activities, then increase them and the difficulty as the weeks progress. Speaking in both Vietnamese and English for this particular class will definitely be needed.

My most favorite class was on Friday when the students in the first session sung two songs for everyone. It was wonderful! They asked me to sing a song but my mind went blank as soon as they asked. They made me promise to sing two songs next week since they sang two songs for me. There was no getting out of that situation, but I’m looking forward to “performing”.

I’ll have to add a singing assignment for this group. They are that enthusiastic.

On Thursday, I gave my first lecture to the second-year IT students. There are nearly one hundred students in the class. I encountered technical difficulties with the projector but finally got it working for the last thirty minuets of the class. It worked out as I was able to write everything on the board. There seems to be a group of students in the back of the class that either isn’t interested in the long lectures or have a hard time with English. Their participation level was lesr than the rest of the class. I will try to introduce movement and more activities for the next lecture, which will be on programming logic. The funny thing about the class was that they spoke very quietly but gave a resounding, “AWWWW…..,” when I told them that they were going to have a programming assignment after next week’s lecture. They’re so silly.

This week turned out better than expected and I’m looking forward to the coming weeks of teaching.