So ... If you follow any news at all, you know that the coronavirus is a thing. Depending on where you live, you may or may not be keeping up with what it's doing in Vietnam specifically. Geography lesson: Vietnam shares its northern border with China. Hanoi is over 1300 km from Wuhan. The whole coronavirus thing really ramped up as Tet (Lunar New Year) was finishing up here in Vietnam. Schools had been off for at least a week already for that celebration. Sidenote: my Tet was nice, thank you for asking. I stayed in Hanoi and got a lot of time to chill and relax in a much less busy city. Lots of bike rides, brunches, reading, etc. But I digress ... as we're preparing to go back to school after the Tet break, the government decides to shut down the schools. Not a terrible idea since so many people traveled during Tet, many of them internationally. At that time, the virus was thought to have a 1-14 day incubation period. The plan was to wait out the incubation period and set up schools to better handle the transition (stock hand sanitizer, masks, cleaning supplies, etc). . . . Guys . . . we're now on our 4th week off of school . . . after Tet break. Math: 1 week Tet + 4 weeks Coronavirus = 5 weeks since I last taught children who were physically inside of my classroom Instead, we've been exploring the wonders of online learning. *Please read that sentence with a mix of sarcasm, genuine interest, and exhaustion* Now don't get me wrong, it's been nice to set some later alarms and stay in my PJs all day . . . but it's been almost 5 weeks and I'm so ready to go back.
My thoughts on online teaching: It's not terrible but it's not my preferred method. Some days I make or find videos on the concepts for the students to watch. Making is better but very time consuming. Planning for virtual learning is way more time consuming than in person teaching (my opinion). Some days we do live sessions using Google Meets. Many students do not want to physically talk so it's a lot in the chat box and me feeling like I'm just talking to a computer screen ... I started requiring students to contribute twice to the class in order to be marked present. It's helped some. Students still have homework and classwork ... but we can't actually check that they're doing it with integrity. It's a lot of responsibility and trust we're putting in our students. I know with like 98% certainty that I'll have at least 3 students when we finally do go back to real school come ask me to explain everything we did in the last month to them again ... FFS kid ... you had a month to ask questions but chose to a) not do anything or b) google all the answers It really sucks that we don't find out about the next week of school until Friday evening. Like we kind of know on Wednesday (ish) because HCMC decides before our People's Council meets (they tend to do the same as HCMC) but nothing is final until Friday around 5pm. None of us want to plan past a week in case we have to go back to in person teaching and change all of our plans. It makes the weekend very stressful. Some Interesting TidbitsWith the excess of dragon fruit, there are quite a few bakeries that are doing "banh mi thang long" or dragon fruit bread (see above google search). While colorful, it doesn't actually taste much different from regular bread here, just a little sweeter. If you're from America and/or have tried "Hawaiian bread", it has a similar taste. One place is even experimenting with Dragon fruit pizza ... have not tried that one.
Vietnam got up to 16 reported cases. I think all of those have recovered now. The new concern is travel to and from Korea. A friend of mine works for Korean Air and all her flights have been cancelled through the end of March. There's discussion about cancelling school through the end of March. This proposal is being considered more so in HCMC ... Hanoi seems convinced we'll go back to school next week ... I'm an optimistic skeptic ... let's just wait until Friday and see. My new concern now is that my school is like 70% Korean and I have no idea how many kids stayed in Hanoi during this time and how many went back to Korea. ... In case you didn't know, Korea is up to like 700 cases or something. Anyways ... I am healthy and safe for now. Just know that life has gotten both real interesting and real boring at the same time here in Hanoi. It'll be interesting to see how it progresses.
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ShannonMath Teacher living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam Archives
February 2022
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