Safe and sound!

I freaking love train travel as a means of long-distance transportation. It is as if you have decided to have a lazy day and stay in bed for the entire day, but EVEN BETTER and more productive, because when you wake up, you have actually travelled 700 miles and arrived in a new city.

Of course, the problem with me finding a horizontal surface anywhere is that I will fall asleep at just about any time. So when I boarded the train at 2 in the afternoon, of course I fell asleep. And after dinner at 6 in the afternoon, I fell asleep again. So by the time 11 rolled around and it was actually time to sleep for real, I wasn’t tired at all, and proceeded to keep my bunk-mates up all night with my reading lamp. Oops.

Overall, I had a fine time. The bed was a bit hard, and the air conditioner wasn’t working so the cabin was STIFLING with the body heat of six people all crammed in there. But I was with two grandfather Vietnamese men, and we had a lovely dinner together, drinking beer, and trying to speak to one another.

Overall, I am HAPPY to have arrived in Nha Trang, 24 hours later, and be off the train FINALLY.

This week has been a good one with regards to my students. Four of my six classes had their speaking exams this week, and overall I am quite pleased with the results. It was also SO rewarding to know that I am done with four of my classes for the semester. Now I just have to teach two classes on Thursdays for the next few weeks. Lovely stuff, really.

In addition to my pride at my students’ exam results, I am also proud of four of my students from K2B English (what else is new?! I love that class!). I had given one of them an 8 and the other three 7s on the exam (all scores are out of 10 points).

I should add that apparently in Vietnamese culture, it is perfectly acceptable and expected to read the list of grades out loud after the exam has finished. As a result, there is no semblance of grade confidentiality or privacy. And as a result of that, everybody talks. They talk about the people whose grades they think are too high, and they talk about the people whose grades they think are too low. And since they are in classes together all day and are very heavily ranked against one another, I think there is an expected outcome for exam grades as to who comes out on top and who does not. Of course this leaves no element of “I worked really hard to study and practice for the exam in order to raise my final grade, and as a result, I did really well!” but rather, you expect to get the grade that you have been receiving all semester.

Needless to say, they were surprised and unhappy by my grades. The girl with the 8 thought she deserved a 9, and the girls with 7s thought it was unfair that they had 7s because so did Susie Smith, and Susie Smith’s English is so much worse than theirs, so why should they have the same grade?! Furthermore, Jennie Doe should not have gotten a 10 because her English is really not much better than Amy Jones, who only got a 9. And, in general, the gap between 7 and 10 is too wide and does not accurately represent the gap between their various speaking abilities.

First girl-with-the-8 came to me, very upset, wanting to discuss her grade, and she reported that girls-with-the-7s were equally unhappy. She told me about all of this after-class chatter and complaining, which, if I’m being totally honest, caught me off guard and even felt a little disrespectful. How dare she come to me and question my grading policy! Nobody heard anybody else’s exam interview, so how does she know how the other people did or what scores they really deserved?

However, I realize that the extent that I care about my pride and my authority is very much outweighed by the fact that I simply do not care about the grades.

Speaking-and-listening class is probably the most difficult class for my students, only because it is the one skill in learning English that they cannot use rote memorization to succeed in. To succeed in speaking-and-listening, they simply have to raise their hand in class, practice speaking, and make lots of mistakes- all in front of everyone else. As extremely proud Vietnamese students, naturally, this is a very difficult task to ask of them. So I understand that there is enough pressure for them to step out of their comfort zones in order for them to succeed in my class (all other classes require mostly just listening, taking notes, and regurgitating the information on an exam later). The last thing that I want is for them to be scared away from trying in class because of the fear of getting a low grade. [Of course this logic makes absolutely no sense, since I give good grades to people who speak in class voluntarily, even if they make speaking errors, and worse grades to those who don’t speak at all, but that is besides the point.]

Furthermore, as little as I care about giving my students grades (if I had it my way, I would simply make my class pass/fail and fail everybody who never speaks), I realize that they care a LOT, and their ranking is of extreme importance to them and to their futures. So while I do not buy into the whole ranking system, I realize that it is not my battle to fight, and I have to go with the flow of the university’s status quo.

Furthermore, after I talked to student-who-got-an-8 for 15 or 20 minutes and heard about her complaints, not only about the grading system, but about the university and her inadequate education in general, I realized, “Wow, I have been talking to her for 20 minutes about a fairly advanced conversation topic, and neither of us has been confused or misunderstood each other. Wow, is she actually speaking coherent, fluent conversational English?! Are we actually having a conversation?”

In that vein, I’ve succeeded. So I’ve decided that my new policy re: grades is that if anyone is unhappy with a grade that they receive, they can come talk to me for half an hour and prove that they deserve a higher grade. 

I’m not looking for perfect English during these meetings, but if they are willing to take the time to come to me, speak one-on-one, and be vulnerable, I think that they deserve a higher grade.

So student-who-got-an-8 told girls-who-got-7s and they came to me the next day and repeated the process. I think, in this way, we all win. They get the grades that they think they deserve, and I get them to speak more English than they may have initially been willing to speak.

English teacher win? I think so.