After two days my students cease to be a bewildering sea of Vietnamese faces and start to remind me of students from my teaching years twenty years ago; delightful, daft and daft-difficult. I am getting old.
Children here seem keen on proverbs. At the end of the two and a half hour's session I lobbed some international proverbs their way as a wind down. They took them unexpectedly seriously.
'Where there is love there is happiness' A boy at the back of the class shook his head and beckoned me over. ' No, no.
I decided to respond seriously. 'Well, love can sometimes bring pain. He nodded. I continued. 'the person you love could leave, or they could die.'
Table 3 threw up dissent.
I decided to wind up. It was a mistake to start bringing up proverbs. No-one seems to want to go. It had been a long hot 21/2 hours. Thank you very much class B12. A good discussion always involves different points of view. They laugh as if I have said something foolish.