The secret life of an English teacher
I feels duplicitous. It isn’t just a small lie, it’s been many hundreds of small lies, all carefully choreographed into one big lie. The truth is, although my day-job is teaching English to Vietnamese kids, I’m not an English teacher. I once thought I was, many years ago in Japan, but I’m not. There was even a glimmer of possibility when I was doing my CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching for Adults) in Brighton in December 2014, but it was quickly extinguished. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m a bad teacher, it’s that I don’t feel like I am an English teacher at all. It’s a sentiment that seems to be fairly prevalent amongst colleagues, who tend to be a little younger than me, and who are all here for different reasons; to pay for their backpacking adventures, to escape the ratrace, or simply to live a more comfortable lifestyle. My motivation is slightly different.
I’ve been in Vietnam for six weeks now. Most of that time has been in Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City, where I’m working 17 hours/week for a private language school. During that time I’ve set myself up with an apartment, shared with a colleague also new to the city, bought a motorbike (some people would call it a scooter), and got my feet under the proverbial teachers desk. In my down-time I’ve explored the city’s outdoor swimming pools, found running routes along the canal, eaten delicious street food that costs next-to-nothing, visited the local pagodas and temples, and done my best to avoid Bui Vien, Saigon’s backpacker district. But what’s really excited me has been my extra-extra-curricular activities. Meetings with the Research Institute for Biotechnology & the Environment at Long Nam University, visits to Saigon’s Hi Tech Park, tours of the Sac Ky Hai Dang laboratories in District 1, and having tea with the Director of the National Research Institute for Aquaculture (No2) at the Centre for Fish Nutrition. Working meetings around my teaching schedule has been somewhat frustrating, but manageable. It does however create a strange dichotomy in my life – the teacher and the bug farmer, living parallel lives, overlapping only on the few occasions when people know what I’m really doing here, otherwise existing blissfully ignorant of each other.
At this stage I have plans a-plenty, I’m over-flowing with ideas. I could export crickets from producers here to the numerous restaurant, snack & novelty food companies in the UK. Or collaborate with NGOs to improve the nutritional quality of fish for the local market, apply for joint research grants with local universities, or work on an entirely new nutrient-recycling agricultural system with a visionary American engineer. What remains now is to identify and focus on what’s important, what the end goal is, and work out how to get there. Read about how the story progresses here: http://www.nutri-tec.co.uk/our-company
