It’s been a busy summer. I spoke at a conference in Saigon, I spent a lot of time volunteering. Now we’ve reached the Bank holiday break for Vietnamese Independence day and I’m off to Saigon to see some friends for a well earned break.
Conference
At some point early in the year my employer VUS put out a call for speakers for the annual conference they sponsor. I decided why not submit a proposal, the worst they can do is say no!
So I threw together a summary, got my boss to give it a sanity check then threw my hat in the ring.
To my surprise they accepted and so on On June 28th 2024, I was off to the VUS TESOL Conference. The theme was “Embracing Holism in ELT for Life Education” (a chatGPT job?). So I decided to make my talk about brining personal passion into the classroom, it seemed appropriate enough. It wasn’t my own original idea; I took it from one of my favourite books in the industry: Teach Like a PIRATE. I did also take the chance to show-off some of my projects like my arcade game I’d made for the classroom.
I took an overnight bus to the conference so didn’t get great sleep so look a bit of a zombie in the photos. But we got good feedback.
Volunteering
Out of the blue Hunter messaged me saying the company had a programme to submit proposals for charity projects, they had an idea to help some local minority people but wanted my help reaching out to a village…and by the way the deadline is tomorrow.
So I hopped on my moped and went out to the first village I could think of that could use the help which was Ha Bau. I went to the church and spoke to the priest. I didn’t want to say “hey there’s a chance we’ll be able to get some money so please give some details to a stranger please,” so what I did was offer to teach there over summer and by the way there might be some funding.
Well we never heard back from VUS about the proposal I submitted but I ended up teaching there every morning. Number of students varied depending on the weather but there were between 50 and 150. Some days other people from VUS came to help me but often it was just me. I’d teach the kids first at 8am for 90 minutes then go teach a smaller group of 15 teens until lunch time.
I learned a lot from the experience in terms of planning out what to teach them when there are no external motivations like exams or company mandates to do a certain textbook. Also I had to invent activities that could keep 150 kids entertained! It was challenging and rewarding. Having caught the bug for volunteering I also found an orphanage outside Pleiku where I would teach after lunch.
We ended up celebrating my Birthday there too! It was a crazy party. The summer holidays are over now so those voluntary classes have wrapped up.
Conclusion
I’ve not been to the beach or been out exploring much but it’s been a busy and very rewarding summer time. I think it’ll be one that I remember forever.
Eastward Ho! 