Bài đọc 2
When I signed up to spend three months teaching English as a volunteer in a mountain village in northern Vietnam, I imagined myself standing confidently in front of a class, writing neat sentences on the board. My first lesson ended with me hiding in the teachers' room, trying not to cry.
The school had forty children aged between nine and fourteen, all in one classroom. Some could already hold a simple conversation; others did not know the alphabet. I had prepared a lesson about daily routines, but within ten minutes half the class was bored and the other half was lost. The children were polite, but I could see in their faces that nothing I said made sense to them.
That evening, the head teacher, Mr Thanh, gave me some advice I have never forgotten. "Don't teach the lesson you planned," he said. "Teach the children who are in front of you." The next day, I divided the class into small groups by level and gave the older, stronger students the job of helping the younger ones. It was noisy and chaotic, but for the first time, everyone was doing something.
I also stopped relying on the textbook. The children knew far more about the forest, farming and their village than I did, so I asked them to teach me the names of plants and animals in their language, and in return I taught them the English words. Lessons became conversations rather than lectures. One boy, who had barely spoken in the first week, turned out to know the name of every bird we saw on our walks.
Life in the village was very different from what I was used to. There was electricity only in the evenings, and the nearest town with a bank was two hours away by motorbike. But I have rarely felt so welcome. Families invited me to meals almost every day, and the children walked me home after school.
On my last day, the students performed a song they had written in English about the mountains. It had several grammar mistakes, and it was the best thing I have ever heard. I went to the village to teach, but I am fairly sure I learned more than they did.