One more day and I’m done with my teaching commitment. I taught community nursing to seniors and English to first year nursing students. The program is for Vietnamese students and they’re supposed to be taught in English.

There were a few cultural challenges:
1) my students had to do a community survey and was assigned to go visually look at the neighborhood. One of the questions was “are there signs of decay?”. In the States, that usually means poorer neighborhoods but here- there are signs of molds, decay, litter, broken walls, etc. everywhere. It’s quite a different meaning.
2) Teaching abuse was a big challenge when probably more than half of the population here thinks it’s ok to hit their children or spouses. And probably almost all of them have been hit as children. On a bus ride to the pottery village, one of the bus attendant was teasing a boy of about 7 years old and squeezed his private parts (the boy was sitting on mom’s lap). That would have gotten handcuffs slapped on him in the States but just laughter here. (got my blood boiling though)
3) nursing is considered as the backup plan to medical school. During introductions most of the students said they were studying nursing because they couldn’t pass their exams to get into medical school:( I tried to show them that nursing was my CHOICE and that there are so many wonderful things they can do in nursing.
4) It was a bit harder to connect with the students. Unlike the American students who had an opinion about everything and want to change everything (unsolicited of course), it took me longer to get my students to participate and engage in class. But like American students, playing games in class with prizes sure got people interested and excited, especially when they were playing for money:)!
5) Grading is so inflated. It’s something I think should be changed in both places. And cheating is everywhere.
6) American students are generally richer or at least have more resources. Teaching the students here, I was constantly reminded that we take a lot for granted. In the States I would have no problems assigning web assignments, printouts, books, etc. Students here however may not have Internet access, computers to type up papers, electricity to use computers, money for printing or copying or buying books. It changed the way I taught and evaluated.
7) Language of course was a major challenge. I would really prefer exams and multiple choice questions instead of essays, but it’s not really good at assessing if students truly learned. So I had quite a few essays and were they FUN to grade! Some of the students wrote well, most didn’t. Sometimes it was quite easy to grade: I could pick out sentences with big words, complicated meanings and know it was copied from the Internet. People don’t really understand (or want to understand) copy rights here either. Plagiarism? Nah, it’s same same but different.

All in all, I really enjoyed teaching. The administrative people and students were really nice. I admire the students for learning nursing in a second language. I don’t know how I’d do if I was learning nursing in German. Nicht so gut!

My community nursing class: