A Shared Classroom | Teaching in Hà Nội

Between seven-thirty and eight o’clock each morning, in unison all across the city, flocks of motorbikes depart the rush hour, dive out of the roads and drive up a short incline into hundreds of school gates, greeted by a panoptic courtyard architecture and janitors with wooden truncheons. In a near perfect synchronisation, they all rhythmically bang on barrel-shaped wooden drums that sound like a call to prayer signalling the start of the day’s play. Proceeding in intervals of thirty-five minute lessons, a rock-and-roll intensity begins: the school day in Hanoi.

Up to fifty students pack into each classroom. If, as a teacher, you were feeling weary, the introductory noise soon whipped you into shape. What followed was a precise race against time; the students outweighed the minutes. This communal but fiercely competitive environment, coupled with a homogenised syllabus, posed the question of what exactly a teacher could do in such a short time. Across three years in Hanoi’s public schools, the personalities of students cut through all of this academic repetition, turning teacher into student with their aptitude and intelligence.

Nothing prepares the teacher for the sheer level of academic ingenuity; the syllabuses, after all, are by no means simple but do have to cater for all abilities. One Monday morning early in the school year I walked into my first class of the day, still bonding and gaining the trust of my new class, to find a student reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in the original. At that age my principal concern was whether to have my football socks above or below the kneecap; the lessons I’d planned for this grade 5 class weren’t going to teach her much. While the rest of the class set upon a task in their workbooks, as would happen towards the end of each lesson, this student, bored with the ease at which she could complete it, wanted instead to converse as freely as possible on a range of different topics. For the next school year, that’s what we did.

At the weekends, this 10-year-old student was part of an English-speaking debate group that discussed and wrote essays on social, political and philosophical ideas. Entirely of her own volition, and partly because she’d mastered the grammar rules written on the blackboard, she would digress into topics such as free will, globalisation, and the pros and cons of a centralised government. It’s as though she’d transcended the rigidity of formal education, uncovering its limitations and tricks. My lasting memory of this girl was when I asked her what she wanted to be when she grows up. Expecting her not to have an answer, she said, ‘I haven’t thought about it too much, but perhaps what I’ll do first is study psychology at Harvard.’

The Vietnamese classroom, bursting out at the best of times, became an inferno as summer approached. It becomes an extension of the city, with all the weather extremes for good measure: bustling with overworked fans and anarchic chair rearrangements, as loud as the streets below. Although individuals created unforgettable details, it was the collective learning environment, at times excessive and consuming, that proved startling. Studying goes on long into the evening, whether at private centres or at home. The modus operandi for the short time I spent teaching each student was to be a light counterpoint to their rigorous routines and high expectations.

The more rebellious students, however, of which there were plenty, ranging from disinterested to passionate about non-academic areas, were equally talented and admirable. Whether it be students drawing, making comic strips or discussing the previous night’s football, the younger students are, after all, learning English while still forming a full understanding of their mother tongue. Never would a student walk past a teacher without greeting them pleasantly and with enthusiasm; as the students reach grades four and five, many of them come to shake your hand and speak with the autonomous confidence of an adult.

Hồ Chí Minh, the luminary revolutionary leader whose portrait watches over every classroom in the country, said, after Vietnam gained independence from the French in 1945 that ‘youth is the spring of society’:

The sprouting buds haven’t let him down.