School’s out forever

The school is full of fantastic people. There are the legends like Phi and Pho and the institutions like Mr Lai and Tech Ed.

The average teacher at UNIS knows their stuff, supports students online, at lunchtime, whenever, is ultra-enthusiastic, does extra-curricular activities and smiles around campus. The weak teachers are not common; maybe two out of 50 over four years.

The inspirers are everywhere. Some of the ones we have had over the years include Ms Griffin, Mr Haug, Ms Lepry, Ms Zahid, Mr Ginder, Mr Johnston, Ms Prescott, Ms Arguelles, Ms Drodsz, Ms Rielly, Mr Gill & Mr Gibb, Ms Schneiderman, Ms Renneberg, Ms Sanchez, Ms Kerry and Ms Schneider. NB. Absence from this list does not mean I think you’re rubbish 😉

There have been the genuinely hilarious like the Huffster, Lin Turley and Mr Graña, not forgetting the penetrating and intense Miss Penrose & Ms Key, and the unsung heroes, Mr Hubbard, Mr Sanchez, Mrs Mills and Ms Collins.

All elementary school teachers have given my girl a constant flood of amazing educational experiences. Lucy, you are not forgotten. Laura, too good, Daniel perfect.

The pupils at the school come from 60+ different countries. Numerically, the staff is dominated by contingents from North America, Britain and Australia. The top leadership is American with a soupçon of Britain and about 50% of the teachers are from North America. Notwithstanding the fact that many North American teachers are on my list above, it is clear that internationalising the leadership and the staff would not only bring it in more line with the school’s very nature, it would also improve it. Currently there is truth in the joke that it is really the United Nations American School of Hanoi. Only about 10% of students are from the US, the teaching programmes are inherently supra-cultural and international, and yet, for motives that actually are unclear to me, the school seems determinedly American.

The vocabulary is American (“recess”, “grades”, “freshman”, “varsity”) which you can get used to (though I had to draw the line well before “cleats”). And one learns to distinguish MYP from MVP, and also that Spirits Week is disappointingly unalcoholic. But a school with pupils from so many countries is not an environment where people should feel free to assume that their culture is the default option. It seeps into the teaching, e.g. a unit’s central example of a volcano’s effects on humans: Mount St Helens in 1980 killing 57 people. Is that really the best we can do? One year, all the songs in a medley played by the school band on UN Day were from the US and over the years there were many occasions where one got a less international experience than the the school’s name had primed one for.

One thing that characterises American and British cultures is the poor learning of foreign languages. Maybe it is not a coincidence then that languages are treated oddly at the school. The only subjects where you had pupils from different age groups studying together were languages, on the basis that they had all had the same number of cycles of Spanish or French. It appears to make more financial than pedagogical sense. And also no teaching of the local language to non-native speakers. For me, an astonishing oversight. I think the main thing that pupils learn from this is that, despite the claims to cultural sensitivity you get in the speeches and brochures, English is the only language that really counts in UNsVille. While this may well be true, UNIS should be working to change such attitudes.

I think generally there is insufficient awareness of the historical and cultural context in which one finds oneself. Once, at an elementary school open day, the children presented the stories of migrants, talking in the first person. They recounted life stories in monologue form and there was a fascinating mix of famous people and family stories. Hello, who’s this? Our old friend Henry Kissinger?!? Yes, here was an unknowing child in character, reciting a eulogy to the appalling warmonger. In Christopher Hitchens’ book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, he nailed him as responsible for many deaths in several wars, including sabotaging negotiations to end the American war in Vietnam just as they threatened to be successful. A reviewer wrote “This book is so studiedly defamatory that if Kissinger values his reputation, he really must sue.” He didn’t sue. UNIS: It only feels like you inhabit a bubble, you don’t really and you need to be more sensitive to the context in which you operate.

When one approaches the school leadership to bring up issues, perchance to make educational suggestions, they will meet you and listen to you but mostly they would stubbornly defend the situation, be it the random doling out of detentions, dealing with a teacher utterly out of his depth, or the school’s inability to work out the average of two numbers on a report card. Then, months afterwards, one would discover that the problem had been quietly rectified. It is especially unfortunate that the school doesn’t have the confidence to open itself to informed comment because it turns out that the school itself decides what topics are taught in all but 11th and 12th grade. From 6th to 10th grade (MYP) the curriculum is decided internally, and all assessments are set and marked by its own teachers (with some external moderation). This free hand gives massive scope for parochial decisions to be taken for local convenience which risks leaving gaps in students’ knowledge: So science is taught as a patchwork of units, giving little overall understanding. For instance, rather than being used as an organising principle for the life sciences, evolution is covered here and there, a bit of genetics here, ecology there, and Darwin in the IB.

Anyway, fun times. The international school experience has enriched our children and they have enjoyed it hugely. I loved the buoyant yet relaxed atmosphere on campus, the big, friendly events, watching girls’ football, basketball and volleyball tournaments, the many hours on the tennis courts with such sporting players (not you, Andrew). On UN Day, the most special day of the calendar, two perennial stand-out memories: Chip getting out his guitar rather than giving a speech, and being moved to tears by the flag parade.

So farewell, UNIS. To improve you need to be more open and less defensive. You are very international and yet not internationalist, far too Disney at times and need to learn to keep it real, but thanks for the whirlwind of sport, learning and fun.

 

UNIS should teach pupils some Vietnamese

For Westerners, Vietnamese is hilariously difficult to learn and most give up after a few cursory attempts. Less easy to forgive is the fact that the kids’ school, the United Nations School of Hanoi, also appears to have given up. From 11 years and up Vietnamese is only taught to mother tongue students. This means that a typical non-Vietnamese pupil knows next-to-none of the language at all. Some might be able to produce a toneless “hello” and “thank you”, comprehensible only to people used to hearing foreigners mangle the lingo. Not knowing any Vietnamese keeps UNIS kids in a bubble separate from the wider community, and by not teaching the kids the local language UNIS is also inadvertently teaching the kids that it is unimportant to interact with your local environment. An irony is that back in many of the countries that the expat pupils come from, people are outraged when foreigners fail to learn the local language.

No-one that I have talked to at the school claims to feel particularly comfortable with the situation, so why does the school not teach any Vietnamese to foreign kids? One reason offered is that Vietnamese is difficult. Yes, and so is maths. Next reason! It is also objected that there is not room in the timetable. This is just about what the school prioritises. Can an hour a week not be fitted in? Some Vietnamese parents aren’t keen on Vietnamese being spoken because they are paying for their kids to receive an English language education. Well, that’s OK, this is not about children who can already speak Vietnamese; it’s about the foreign pupils being taught at the very least the basics of the local language, as is the norm in international schools across the world. It is also claimed that not enough of the foreign parents want it either. Well, that may or may not be true but really doesn’t wash: If you send your kids to a United Nations school then you have already signed up to a culturally-sensitive, meet-people-on-their-own-premises kind of deal. The school teaches lots about Vietnam in various parts of the curriculum and the residential trips really open the kids’ eyes to how rural Vietnamese people live, but the language, nah, we don’t teach them any of that. So in other ways the effort and desire the school shows to link to the community around it is genuine enough, impressive in fact, but the integration of the school with its surroundings would be improved if all pupils were taught to count to 10 in Vietnamese, to ask for a sandwich in the canteen, order a taxi or hold a simple conversation with a local.

So come on UNIS, get with it and teach Vietnamese!

 

Learning Vietnamese

As I suspected, this language is rather difficult to learn. There are examples here of multilingual expats, fluent in another Asian language, who have accepted that they will never manage to conquer more than instructions in a taxi. The problem really is that each word can take on any one of 5 (or maybe 6) different tones, most of which sound almost identical to the outsider’s ear, and can only reliably be distinguished with deep concentration and advanced lip-reading. Then try to actually pronounce them without your Vietnamese teacher collapsing in a fit of giggles. After an hour of this battering, you end up begging pathetically, “Please say “ten” and salt” again, but slowly, and then tell me how to say them.” Sad fact of the day: I have yet to pronounce correctly any word beginning with “ng-“.

All this means that you take any triumph you can get, and so getting a taxi driver to understand where you want to go to, without resorting to showing it on your mobile phone, is a source of deep inner warmth. And if you can get him to turn left and right at your command then you brag about it when you get home.

There should be more hope for the children, neurologically speaking. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, the school only offers Vietnamese for native speakers. If this doesn’t change, then we will find another way to give the girls a chance of picking up the language. I firmly believe that kids should be exposed to as many languages as possible as early as possible, let them bathe in them, and they just pick them up. I learnt Italian at international school before the age of 12 and it has stuck with me. OK, I can only talk about football (and swear like a Roman), but that’s all you really ever need anyway.