Monthly Archives: September 2015

If you are receiving this as an email from me, you won’t see the button that allows you to comment or follow. You have to go to the website (helenaworthen.wordpress.com) and sign up there. Then you’ll see a hot link line at the top of each of my posts that says, “Leave a Comment.” YouContinue reading “How to Comment”

I get blank stares when I tell students that the situation in the US is not all it’s cracked up to be. Saying that our Gini index is 41 compared to Vietnam’s 35 (down from 39 a few years ago) doesn’t do the trick, nor does the fact that one in 100 people in theContinue reading “Another Way to Think about Vietnam Compared to the US”

Getting out of town was a really good idea. Bottom line: Nghia invited us to his house for lunch on Sunday. His house is a really beautiful place. His mom is lovely. His little sister is lovely. His grandparents, ages 94 and 92, are worth a book in themselves. I have a photo of hisContinue reading “Phan Thiet with Nghia”

Joe’s class on a Monday, when the girls wear the ao dai uniforms I was beginning to get cabin fever, combined with mid-term tunnel syndrome, which is when you’re halfway through the semester and can’t tell if your students are learning anything. The idea is that you’re swimming down a tunnel and have come tooContinue reading “Mid-semester tunnel syndrome”

Military training starts at 7 am in the soccer stadium behind our room, sometimes accompanied by orchestral music or commands played on a powerful loudspeaker. New students are inducted into the military right away, issued camo uniforms. After a few days they of mass training they break into groups of 20 or 30 that lineContinue reading “Military training, other celebrations”

I wrote this on September 21, four months ago. Only a couple of weeks ago did I find out what Hoc Mon is. It’s not just any small commune located out in the country west of the airport but east of Cu Chi. It’s at least two other things. It’s a crossroads, for one thing,Continue reading “On the other hand…”

Exams: The final exam will be 70% of the student’s final grade. The midterm exam will be 20% and then there is another exam that is worth 10%. The 10% exam floats around the calendar and the teacher gives it when it is appropriate. The final and the midterm are given during weeks set asideContinue reading “Exams in Vietnam”

There has been a request for more photos, so this afternoon when Joe and I were having a late lunch on the balcony of the canteen on the 10th floor of Building C, we looked down at the neighborhood to the east of us and decided to take a walk there. The street that we would follow isContinue reading “A Walk up Le Van Luong Street”

The rain has started. The mornings are sunny and cool, but mid-day a light wind starts up and by mid-afternoon there’s a downpour. It falls directly from whatever dark cloud is passing overhead, so it starts and stops a lot. The water in the canal is brown and the gutters are full.The rivers are flowing fast.Continue reading “Rain, student projects”

This morning there was a presentation to the faculty and students of the Labor Relations and Trade Unions faculty by Alan Boulton, who recently retired as a labor board judge in Australia, and Phillip Hazelton, who is one of the ILO country staff in Hanoi. It took place over on the top floor of AContinue reading “Further hints about what we are supposed to be teaching”