After leaving Shanghai the other day I traveled south to Hanoi, Vietnam. My Sydney school has an “arrangement” with a Vietnamese school here. The school is called the Vietnam Australia School, or VAS Hanoi, and the arrangement is that as well as the school offering a standard Vietnamese curriculum it also offers a scaled down and modified Australian curriculum focusing on English and Commerce. This Australian component is taught by native English-speaking teachers, using courseware and textbooks developed by staff back at PLC Sydney, and the goal is to get the kids leaving school with qualifications in two languages and two countries. I’ve been keen to get to VAS for a while to see what it’s all about, so when I asked my principal for permission to attend Learning 2.010 in Shanghai he suggested that I drop into VAS Hanoi on the way home and do some training and support for the staff here.
So for the past few days I’ve been at the school, seeing how it operates, talking to staff, meeting the kids, and generally trying to offer some support where I can. There are certainly places where that support is needed, so it’s rewarding to be able to offer it. Now that I have a clearer understanding of what’s going on here at VAS Hanoi I’d like to visit again at some point to really follow through on a few things. For now though, that’s a decision that’s out of my hands.
I can’t say I’ve fallen in love with Hanoi though. Don’t get me wrong, it has a definite charm, if charm is the right word. Perhaps ‘character’ would be a better word. The city of Hanoi is celebrating its 1000th birthday this year, so although I don’t know much else about its history, 1000 years is a long time, and it’s had plenty of time to cultivate that character. The people are generally friendly, the food is excellent and inexpensive, there’s plenty of interesting culture, and the Vietnamese women are amongst the most beautiful in the world. So what’s not to love?
While I’m enjoying seeing a new place and experiencing a new culture, there are a few things about Hanoi that I simply couldn’t deal with long term. The obvious one is the traffic. It’s crazy. I mean, seriously crazy. It’s one of those places where people can tell you it’s crazy, but until you see it for yourself you just have no idea. I made a little video below to give you a look at what I mean.
The traffic also creates another problem… air quality. The pollution from all those millions of bikes is frightening. I’ve had a hacking sore throat from almost the minute I stepped off the plane. At times it’s been hard to speak and hard to swallow, and I really don’t think I could live here for an extended period because if it. In heavy traffic, the swarm of bikes also kick up a cloud of dust that further dirties the air. I just couldn’t live with it long term.
The other thing that tarnished Hanoi a little for me is the fact that my iPhone was stolen the first night I got here. I went for a walk along the streets to do some sightseeing, and a couple of rather pretty local girls pulled up on a motorcycle and asked me if i wanted to go for a ride around the block with them. Naturally I said no… I wouldn’t jump on a bike with total strangers in a city with sane traffic, but especially not in Hanoi! One of the girls was standing next to me, and started to rub me on the arms and shoulders and was trying to convince me to get on the bike, while the other talked to me. I basically said thanks but no thanks, spoke them to them for another minute or so, and then started to walk away. As they rode off, I reached into my pocket to see what time it was, and there was no iPhone in my pocket. I was so pissed off!
Luckily, I’d taken out travel insurance for this trip. I don’t normally take insurance, but it seemed like a good idea for travelling in South East Asia just for the medical coverage so I ticked the box for that option when I booked the plane tickets. I was a little less pissed off when I remembered that I had the insurance because it meant that the phone would probably be replaced, probably with an iPhone 4, so given that the insurance cost me all of $10, I’m very glad I took it out! However, what won’t be replaced is the data added to my phone since the last sync, including a few very special podcast recordings and photos, etc. Gone for good! So annoyed!!!
The insurance company said I needed to fill out a police report before they could process the claim, so I went to the local station, conveniently just across the road from my hotel. What a pack of losers. I’m told there is massive corruption in the police force here, and while I can’t personally vouch for the truth of that, I can certainly say there is massive unprofessionalism. The police on duty were a bunch of slobs; dirty, lazy, slow, unsure about how to fill out a report, and they treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke. They seemed more than a little put out that I was actually making them do some work instead of leaving them alone to sit and watch television. Of course, they didn’t speak a single word of English, so I had to go back across the road and get the hotel concierge to come over and try and translate for me; this seemed to annoy them even more, since when they thought there was a language barrier they figured they could just fob me off. I think the concierge did an ok job of the translation, but really, who would know? Overall though, if that’s the level of service and professionalism you got from official bodies like the police, I could never enjoy living here.
The other big reason I’m probably not enjoying Hanoi as much as I should be is just the fact that I’m on my own here. Shanghai was fun because I had so much to look forward to, meeting people that I was genuinely excited to be hanging out with. When you’re “hangin’ with your peeps” things are always lots more fun. In Hanoi I don’t really know anyone, so it means eating meals on my own, sightseeing on my own, spending time on my own. Not a whole lot of fun really. At this stage I’m just really looking forward to going home to my Linda.
Anyway, here’s a bunch of photos I took on my walk tonight if you’re interested. I took them with the new Nikon S4000 I picked up duty free as I left Sydney airport, and for a camera without any manual controls (and the fact that I didn’t have a tripod with me) they aren’t too bad for night time shots. The traffic is particularly bad because today is the day of the annual Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, so it’s somewhat crazier than usual!
Oh, and here’s the video…
Chinese people, as a general rule, have dark hair. As a race of people, they also tend to not be quite as tall as some other races of people. And you could be forgiven for thinking that most Chinese people adhere to fairly strict diets because they tend to be fairly slim in build.
Our day started with a taxi ride from Pudong to Puxi and the local railway station. The railway station was amazing… more like an airport. People were lined up to buy tickets at the many vending machines outside the terminal, and you do need to specify exactly what train you plan to catch as all seating is allocated. Once a train is full you can’t get a seat.
As it turns out, I thought we got a great snapshot into some of the sights of Suzhou. We started out at the 
Our driver decided that he would do a little “side job” while we in the silk factory, so we went and had lunch while we waiting for him. We found a fast food noodle and dumpling place where Melinda placed an order in Chinese (thank goodness we had Melinda with us… this would have all been so much harder otherwise!) and we soon has a fast food feast on the table. It was kind of funny, because the food was all soups and dumplings and noodles, but the store felt exactly like a McDonalds or KFC. The menus were all in Chinese of course.
After that we visited a lovely traditional Chinese garden. Well, I guess it was kind of traditional if you don’t count the animatronic figures in the displays! Some of them were pretty funny. Overall though, the gardens were very nice and we all went for a walk up and down the river, taking photos and talking.
I was lucky enough to be teamed up with Melinda Alford, a teacher at Concordia (the host school) on the topic of Creating a Culture of Learning and Creativity. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but having now worked in Shanghai for the past six years, I’d not met Melinda before… in fact she was one of those teachers that wasn’t even on my PLN radar. But after working with her for a few days I have to say she is one of the most talented natural teachers I’ve ever met and it was a real joy to be able to work with her. It’s so nice when you get to work with someone who is really on the same wavelength. who shares so many of the same ideals about learning and education and is so easy to work with.
We spent part of that first planning day tossing ideas around and creating some visual prompts. One of my big beliefs about the notion of creativity is that it should come from both sides of your brain. We were both very keen to encourage the idea that creativity is not something that just applies to “the arts”, not something that you only find in strange “arty” types who dress in strange clothes, not something that is applied to problems occasionally in a superficial way… we wanted to get the idea across that creativity is a critical thinking skill that applies to all disciplines, in all sorts of ways, all of the time. Melinda and I both had backgrounds in the creative arts as well as science and engineering, so we found it easy to weave this into our planning. To make the point, at the social event held the evening before the conference officially started, we got up on stage to promote our cohort sessions, me dressed in Elmo pyjama pants and a set of large donkey ears, and Melinda in a giant chicken outfit. At least we got noticed!
The other component of the conference was the unconference. Again, the problem with traditional conferences is that you sometimes don’t learn what you’d really like to learn, and it treats the “presenters” and the “audience” as two groups. If you believe that learners and teachers can have a much flatter relationship that that, the unconference model makes a lot of sense. At the first social event of the conference, participants were encouraged to write on a large sheet of paper a topic that they’d like to learn about. Equally, they were also encouraged to write down a topic they’d like to share about. These pieces of paper were then sticky-tacked to the wall and people could add a vote to the ones they were interested in the most. The ones that had enough votes then ran in the next unconference session time.
This is really the spirit of an unconference. It’s about flexibly and dynamically connecting learners together to learn about the things that interest them. You can’t plan that sort of thing in advance because you have no advance idea of what those interests will be. An unconference only works if you place your trust in the wisdom of the crowds, if you believe that none of us is as good as “all of us”. If you believe that someone in the crowd will have the expertise to share with others, and the humility to accept that that expertise can come from anywhere, then learners become teachers and teachers become learners and our learning environment becomes flatter and less hierarchical. It goes from being about teacher and student, moving away from being about “us and them” to just being about “us”. And this is so much more reflective of the way true learning actually works.