The Joy of Kiddies

On my first day off all week, I was needed at the last minute to sub for a class of little children at ILA, a language school run by Brits (i.e. a school who doesn't care that I look Asian). These kids haven't even started attending regular school yet. I'm guessing they are around 3-5 years old. When I asked about what I should do with these young-uns, the answer I got was simply, "play games with them and get them to talk. But they can't read and they don't know a lot of English, so you have to act out a lot." When I tried to ascertain what they were learning, the lady said, "Everything in the book up to their test."

Umm, okay.........and I only have 10 minutes to prepare? To find out what they've been learning all semester and have enough games to keep their attention for 2 hours/120 minutes/7200 seconds? To improvise teaching a class that you're supposed to be "specially trained" for? Sure!!.......

What I learned is that I really do love working with little ones. For 2 hours, I get to entertain these bright-eyed, smiling, bushy-tailed, enthusiastic balls of energy while I "revised" (see weblog entitled "different cultural experiences") over things like colors and fruits and vegetables. Do they know what a vegetable is? No, but they're pleased as pie to say it! Every English word they serve comes on a plate garnished with wide eyes that are looking for your approval. Your dessert? The big toothy grin you get when you tell them how well they did. The cherry on top is the big wave goodbye and the "see you next week!" in a hurried, jumbled, but adorable mess of English. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I wouldn't be coming back next week. I just hoped that they would forgive me.

The best part about teaching them was that I felt no qualms about answering them in English after they spoke to me in Vietnamese. ILA classes are designed so that the English teacher is set up with a translating TA. While this proves beneficial for many non-Vietnamese-speaking people, it also separates the power to discipline. And the classroom should be a teach-ocracy. The students learn that they only have to behave when their TA tells them to be quiet because they can pretend that they didn't understand the English teacher the first time around. Or they just don't care. Many students can tell you the name of their TA, but not their teacher's. This was a big problem for me, seeing as how I do understand most of what the students are saying in Vietnamese but need to feign ignorance in order to retain the credibility of my "English teaching." I haven't quite figured out which students don't care and which students will tattle on me and cause me to lose my job. If I can speak Vietnamese, there is a danger that I will not teach them English well enough because I will, gasp, speak Vietnamese to them! Apparently, I will not be able to control myself.

But with these kids, it didn't matter. They barely noticed that they spoke to me in Vietnamese and I answered correctly in English. I'm not even sure they consciously processed the distinction anyway. There are times when even my broken Vietnamese comes out naturally, and it takes me a moment to grasp why my English-speaking friend is looking at me all perplexed-like (don't worry, I'm still paranoid enough to always keep myself in check in the classroom). The age of these "kiddies" (as the Vietnamese call them) worked very much in my favor because they truly appreciated my immediate understanding and didn't need to wait impatiently for the already-engaged TA to come to the rescue.

And they were soooo much fun! My shining teacher moment was when I played "cat, cat, dog" (they didn't know what a goose was), and I acted out "dog" by getting on all fours and barking while I "sniffed" the children. They got a BIG kick outta that one. And when little kids laugh, they do it with everything they got. It was exhilarating to experience. It's classes like these that remind me how much fun teaching can be.