Care

I had planned to write a beautiful blog entry on the topic of values and happiness during a long weekend. However, my plan has just remained to be a plan. I am now sitting at a dressing table in a hospital ward thinking of how to start with this blog entry. It seems to be difficult as an assignment for a course at school, and it is really much more difficult when the writer, while writing, needs to ensure that her friend, a patient just discharged from the surgery theatre, has all her needs noticed and addressed.

The short hand of the clock on the wall is touching 12. A new day is coming near. A very special day. The day I turned into 35. For every passing year, my birthday came with much excitement about wishes and gifts. This birthday looks different. I am sitting here thinking of what my friend was just now thinking about and why the tear kept running down her cheeks. Everyone needs to live this moment of life to slow down a bit and think of what is the meaning of his or her life. Jewellery, fashionable clothes and expensive cosmetics are all useless materials for this moment. My friend now needs to have her hands held tightly, her tear wiped out, and her pain noticed. She needs to have her family members and friends here to share the pain. Care is a gift of life that can keep her from loneliness in a very cold hospital ward. I am here and happy to be here to live this moment of life though leaving many of my tasks incompleted. Caring for a friend in need is not less important than completing an assignment, but much more important than writing a beautiful blog entry.

Literature and Soul Engineering

I was born and brought up in a beautiful village surrounded by bamboo ranges, paddy fields, lakes, rivers and mountains in the outskirt of Hanoi. My childhood was filled with poems, fairy tales and afternoons flying kites with friends in the meadows. Nature or motherland became part of my life, and I tend to love it more through every page of school text books. My teacher was a slim woman with a very sweet voice. My heart was shaken every time she read a poem to my class. I can feel and learn from the poems she read that a woman bailing out water in the paddy field in a night of full moon is actually playing with the moonlight, that father’s love is bigger than mountains and mother’s care is as gentle as water running in the streams, and that in life we need to have a heart gone with the wind.

My classmates and I developed our knowledge of the world and values primarily from dialogues of relationships through language lessons in class, extra-curriculum activities at school, and childhood games in the meadow. We became close friends and have been traveling on the same journey of life with all the values we own and share together. Every time there is a gathering among us, dozens of stories of our childhood time are retold, and we never forget to mention our teacher and her beautiful poems. We appreciate and cherish all the values such as love, care and forgiveness that we developed since a child. We feel a pain deeply inside to share the same observation that our children today seem to be shallow in love for nature, people, relationships, family, and motherland. They are more attracted to material life and less passionate about relationships. They are more addicted to technological products and less engaged in reading. They are losing deep understanding and affection for the world created by the language of literature.

This is, from my point of view, partially because of the changes in school curriculum today. To meet the demand of an ever-changing and competitive global economy, schools keep changing curricula to prepare students for a bright future of career and for the strength of a nation. Curricula become work-oriented and nation-oriented, which means they are committed to preparing students for occupational knowledge and skills and for a strong national economy. Individuals’ personal development seems to be neglected. Less curriculum content and approach are dedicated to engineering the souls. Values are taught, not constructed. Students being able to think right and doing the right things as named in curriculum is the aim of moral education. The true motive for students to do the right things and their feeling following this is never a school curriculum’s concern.

The implication is that change is not always positive. No matter how much change is needed for the sake of a nation, the school of old days and the school today should always be the second home to our children where children are given opportunities to construct their values, discover their feelings, and attain their happiness.

I was trained to be a language teacher and have been working as a language teacher for 13 years in Vietnam and Singapore. To me, language is not just what I teach, but more importantly how I am going to teach. Teaching, from my point of view, is touching students’ heart, mind and soul partially by the language. Accordingly, my 13-year-experience as a teacher of English and Vietnamese languages has been dedicated to creating considerable changes in my students in term of knowledge extension, knowledge application, behavior, and soul enrichment. Considerable positive feedbacks from students on the quality of course materials, teaching approach, and teacher’s passion have driven me to answering this question – How important is the language in creating these changes? And how important is literature as artistic language in shaping one’s concepts of life and happiness?

My Philosophy of Teaching

My 7-years of being a mother and 11-years of being a teacher with a great number of events have helped me to gradually discover my philosophy of teaching.

One day, my daughter came back from school and looked really sad. I came closed to her and asked why she was so sad. She burst out crying and said “my teacher is not nice”. She continued: “She asked other students to laugh at me when I colored my mango black. She said I should have colored it yellow as other students did because a mango was yellow. I explained to her that my mango was a rotted one, but she kept saying I should never think of a rotted mango in an Arts lesson.” I started to understand that teaching and learning should be a process of teachers and students sharing their own interpretations of the surrounding world. Teachers should inspire their students in expressing their own opinions and ideas about the world and should never control their thoughts. Moreover, teaching is a dialogue of relationships. Teachers should create a safe environment for students to learn, to communicate, to play roles and to improve their interpersonal skills. Teaching also means empowering students to actively take part in the process of teaching and learning, developing learning materials, inventing classroom activities, conducting assessments and improving curricula.

Another time was when I accepted an invitation to teach an evening class for the students who were going to take the university entrance examination. The exam was in 3 months’ time. With all enthusiasm, I started the course with careful and detailed explanation of the whole system of English syntax. However, two of the students quit the class after my two lessons. I felt so sad because there was no precedence for that in my so far teaching career. I started to look for the reason by asking one of the students in the class after the lesson. She revealed that those two students did find the lessons too easy for them, and they had expected to have knowledge of higher standard from my lessons. I kept quiet for a while and thought I had failed to be a good teacher this time. I should have known that teaching is a process of identifying individual students’ needs and satisfying them with the most effective methods. I decided to start an investigation into my students’ needs and made a detailed plan to use different teaching methods and techniques to be able to satisfy their different needs in my lessons.

What is more, the first time I was invited to teach Vietnamese Standard 2 classes in X school was when the key teacher there was on leave for her mother’s death. When the teacher came back, we shared these classes. However, the students wrote to the school director to ask for my lessons only. I had no chance to know their reasons. It was not until the last day of the course when the students wrote to me that I realized how much impression I had made on them. They wrote: “Ms. V, we are so lucky to have you as our teacher of Vietnamese. Up to our middle age, this is the first time we have looked forward to every of our lessons. You are a clever teacher who is able to make your lessons to be a dialogue of life and help your busy students like us to memorize the lessons right in the class. You are a charming Vietnamese woman who can bring here in the class a charming Vietnam image and spirit. You are also a good mother who can feel how hard we have to try to learn Vietnamese at this time when we have family and children to take care of after working hours at office.” I finally understand that teaching is not only touching my students’ mind but also touching their hearts and souls.

In my language teaching career, I have found that this philosophy really works. Failures and successes in my teaching are really contributions to the identification of my teaching philosophy.