Just like that (slow and meandering), the classes are over…minus the seventh surprise-not-surprise class…but that’s for a different post.
So, a post to commemorate the final semester of classes. Feelings on the classes. The vibe.
My Character Arc
The first thing I want to write about is this character arc I’ve experienced over the past three semesters. Then I’ll go into a bit about the classes themselves.
My Vietnamese is definitely the strongest it’s ever been, especially in an academic context. The first semester, I was learning a lot of new words. Or rather, converting words from Mandarin to Vietnamese.
In an academic writing, the vast majority of words come from Chinese. So classes in that first semester were things like hearing xã giao (to socialize) and either looking it up or going in my head, oh, xã hội (社會) is society so xã must be 社 and giao is probably the same giao as in giao thông (交通) so xã giao must be from 社交, okay got it, I know what this means (roughly, Sino-Vietnamese words don’t always mean the same thing as the Chinese word, and sometimes the connotation is different, but it gets me most of the way there)
At this point, the process of realizing what a word means is near automatic, and I’ve also encountered enough academic vocabulary that I actually know most of the words being used in class. So now there’s not the added stimulation of learning words. That makes classes significantly more boring.
I also know what I care about — language. I don’t think I should only take linguistics classes. This would give me a very narrow view of Vietnam. The way I approach language learning is very culture focused. They can’t be separated.
But at this point, I have a decent enough working knowledge of Vietnamese culture, both academically and experientially, that I don’t really feel the need to be totally invested in every single class I take, especially when the content is so repetivie. Since we don’t learn a variety of narratives and perspectives, the content is near the same in some classes, especially history classes.
My character arc over this program is honestly fascinating to me and I imagine very confusing for my classmates. I brought in homemade birthday cake (chocolate, buttercream ice cream) the first semester. Isn’t that wild? Who was that guy?
I sat front and center of every class that first term. I was super active in class. I asked questions. I provided feedback. I always did the reading. My presentations were thorough. I turned in all my homework early.
The second semester, I eased off a bit, mainly because I was realizing there were classes I just didn’t care about. But I still gave what I thought was the most basic thing I could give in class, which was attention, gentle nods to show I was listening.
Okay sidenote, but the nods, I realize, are also definetly related to me being the only white person in class and being very conscious about this and very conscious that most teachers think the foreigners don’t undertand much and wanting to show that I was following.
And now. And now.
I’m mentally already pretty checked out when classes start because I’ve been working from 8am-5pm. I’m not that upset about this. I don’t want to be too checked in for class either.
I wrote this term:
I’m so over this, and I’m ready to be doing my own thing.
I feel so angsty in class. The teachers make me angsty. My classmates make me angsty.
This term, I really just wanted to be writing my thesis and reading the things I wanted to be reading and doing the things I wanted to be doing. I was present in the two linguistics classes, but for the rest of the classes, I was in a state of intentional distraction.
I worked on Substack posts. I did homework for other classes. A lot of my essays for my midterms were written during clas. I organized my after class…activities…I cleaned up my inbox, planned trips, texted friends, doodled in my diary, journaled.
I also only half-paid attention when my classmates gave presentations, which is radically different from any other semester. I stopped giving feedback, which I thought about a lot. I used to want to be supportive of my classmates, nodding not just gently, but vigorously, to show that I was paying all my attention. I wanted to give thoughtful critique.
I honeslty think the quality of most presentations is pretty meh, but that actually wouldn’t normally stop me from giving feedback (constructive, I promise! I sat in enough creative writing classes where people were rude af that I do not do this anymore).
I don’t really find a lot of the feedback I get useful, but that also wouldn’t stop me. I don’t think there has to be an equal exchange of ideas in the clasroom. I like the intellectual exercise (wow that’s an obnoxious phrase) of seeing a topic and what someone’s thinking about it and looking for what’s working well, what could be improved, and just general comments on it. I actually used to love giving feedback in creative writing classrooms. I remember once someone wrote a story about Hong Kong and had never been there. The story wasn’t bad, but it had some factual information about Hong Kong wrong, so I made a list of Honk Kong details they could consider including.
I think I’m pretty good at giving feedback in an acdemic context because for me, it’s oftentimes just a process of editing down ideas. A lot of my classmates have decent ideas, but they have too many ideas and struggle to focus their papers. I can look at a presentation and think, “This will take at least 30 pages, probably more, to do justice, but the page limit is 10, so these are all the things I would cut to focus the paper.”
I think the not giving feedback is really just reflective of my general lack of interest and particpation in all aspects of class, not just presenation. I still thought during the presentations and came up with ideas, but this term, I only gave feedback if directly promted by the teacher.
My classmates have changed as well.
It’s really interesting to me as well that the four Vietnamese classmates from my cohort have seem to have bonded. My guess is that this happened when they took the philosphy class that the foreigners don’t take. They talk a lot more than last semester, and hang out during breaks. They joke. They are way more supportive of each other, and feel like they’ve formed a unit (clique?) in class.
In some ways this is natural, right? They’re in the same situation, and they spent weeks and weeks taking a class together. The teachers also make a clear distinction between the foreigners and the Vietnamese students, which furthers the divide.
I honestly don’t really want to socialize with them (or classmates in general), but it’s interesting to me how they clearly feel a sense of closeness with each other that I just don’t feel. I mostly don’t mind except that a few times this terms they made a group decision and informed the department without consulting me (and I’m assuming the other foreign student). I don’t have to be friends with my classmates or even interact with them too much, but I can’t accept people claiming to the department that the whole class feels a certain way when I haven’t even been asked.
I also realized, after a long discussion with a dear friend walking around a lake in Dalat, that I don’t really like who I am in class, or at least how I used to be. I have these incredibly high standards for everyone, including myself, and when they don’t get met, I get upset and angsty. I can be direct in a way that borders on rude and confrontrational. Or at least the first semester. And now I’m just dismissive and detached, which is about survival and just getting through, something I don’t like either.
I’m glad classes are ending. I’m tired of being in and environment where I don’t like myself.
Was this what I was supposed to be doing?
Since I’m no longer lớp trưởng Someone has kind of stepped into the lớp trưởng position, and it’s kind of annoying. But also fascinating because it makes me think, “Is this what I was expected to do?”
They email us updates organized with all the homework due. I saw they have a class list and seem to be taking attendance….but they also don’t show up to every class, so…anyway….During class breaks, they also make annoucnments about homework and things for us to pay attention to when doing our thesis.
But the thing is that, they don’t always get the info right (telling wrong info on presentation times, telling wrong information about final assignments). The majority of the info is right, don’t get me wrong…but it seems like…none of it should be wrong.
I guess the thing I find annoying in it all is this feeling that we’re all adults in an MA program and we really should just be responsible for this info ourselves. It’s nice to remind people, but the info should be 100% accurate…because actually what happened after some wrong info was sent is that then I got messages privately asking if it was right…and that’s no longer my job.
Also, something I’m terribly uncomfortable with is that we turn in some of our papers into this new semi-lớp trưởng person. I used to be the person to collect them (on rare occasion), and I guess I shouldn’t admit to doing something this unethical, but once I skimmed over everyone’s papers because I was kind of curious what the quality of what people were doing was. I won’t talk deets, but it was honestly very comforting to be like, oh, this is the quality here, and I can match this fine.
Anyway, because I’m an ethnical sometimes unethical person, I also know other people can be this way, and I really don’t want anyone else reading my papers. I guess I could just turn them directly to the department. Oh yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Duh.
The Zalo Group Drama Continues
Someone in my class messaged our Zalo group chat requesting we have a seminar to talk about our thesis topics with the deparmtment head. This seminar and the thesis will be another post. It was juicy.
Anyway, wanting to meet the department head isn’t inherently bad, but the way it was framed was….rough. The person sending the message said that, now that we’re studying with other cohorts, they realize that the overall academic quality of the program needs work, and that we all should work together in order to improve the quality of scientific knowledge being produced in our department…(vomit emoji)
I didn’t think it was cute, the message. I don’t disagree. Just that week, a group had presented on food in the south of Vietnam, had only given fun examples of a few dishes, didn’t cite a single source, or really talk about the history of the food or the land or provide context…The students in that group were in their first month of the program, which seems important to add…becaues honestly my cohort (myself included!) was rough that first term, too.
It’s just…idk…it’s great to want to receive better academic training. I fully agree the program should be better. But at this stage, it’s so late to want this, to finally be demanding it. I’m also so in my own world this term that I don’t even want this. I don’t want more schoolwork.
Also, and I’ll stop soon before this gets too targeted, but the person who called out the program quality plaigirized Wikipedia in a presentation that very week (as in copied a paragraph from Wikipedia), and I’m like, girl you literally copied Wikipedia on one of your slides, like almost word for word….and I’m all about Wiki, it’s great, but…this is not it….you can’t criticize if you’re not going to hold yourself up to a certain standard too…Reading that slide, I immediately had this sense that person hadn’t written it, so I searched it and found it on Wiki, but I didn’t say anything. I was very proud of myself for not bringing it up in class, even if I wanted to.
So anyway, the department was like, sure, yes, we can arrange a seminar with the department head, let’s do Thursday of this very week. I wasn’t happy about the suddeness, but I also was like, whatever, I can organize my schedule, it’s fine. I made plans to come in early to work so I could leave an hour early on that Thursday.
But then someone else sent a message saying that it’s too sudden, that we’ve all talked as a cohort and don’t think it’s a good time. I was never reached out to. Nobody asked me my opinion. I was honestly so annoyed at this, because even if I’m not really talking to my classmates, I still think I should have some voice in all of this…(this goes back to the new group formed that doesn’t involve me)
Anyway, the department rep responded, and was like, “You all have class that day anyway. We’re meeting two hours before class. Why can’t you arrange your schedules?” Honestly, a great response. Pointed. Savage.
THEN the department messages me privately and is like, “wait, how many in the cohort are still studying?” which is WILD to me. so wild. Is nobody tracking this? Anyway, I respond, tell them it’s 6 now, 2 people are not doing the program at the moment…one dropped out for good. One is taking the semester off.
So then the department responds in the group chat, “Okay, fine, we’ll move the seminar, but we can’t tell you when yet, because the department head is super busy. He has a bunch of business trips coming up.” Oh, the department head is new in the position as well. Tbh I’m a huge fan of him, so no complaints.
We had the seminar more than a week later. More on that at some other point.
Am I finally in grad school?
Omg one of my classmates asked a question, and before the teacher could even answer, another classmates told the student who asked it was a bad question, and that the person asking clearly needed to read more theory, and then the person specifically was like, you should read Levi-Strauss.
I swear to God, this is like a meme event for grad school, it’s like referencing Orientalism by Said without having ever read it (omg is it me, am I the drama, I swear I’ll read Orientalism at some point so I can be obnoxious and quote it). But also like, it felt so mean and pointed and also…ironic…like this is something I would say as a joke, but this person wasn’t joking…I wanted to go Levi Strauss, like the jeans maker? I’m wearing him rn.
But anyway, this is really unacceptable behavior in a classroom. Classroom enviroments should be supportive (I’m guilty of also being hostile in class, I admit). The teacher should really have stepped in and cut the student off…I almost did it…instead, I turned to the classmates close to me and said “Wait, did the student asking the question ask the teacher or ask that dude over there?”
This really was how I imagined grad school to be, though. I felt like I was in a movie.
Okay. Okay. I’ll talk about the classes.
So what did I take this term? How did I feel?
Các lý thuyết ngữ pháp tiếng Việt
Theories in Vietnamese Grammar
Monday 5:30pm-8:30pm
I could sit and listen to this professor talk for hours and hours. It’s not just that I like the topic. The teacher is really good, too. So good. He asks students questions. He checks we’re understanding. He engages us in class.
I learned so much about how Vietnamese as a language works, and I feel inspired to keep learning more. I also am more bothered than ever by the way Vietnamese is presented in textbooks for foreigners, with Vietnamese explained in false equivalencies to English grammar.
I enjoyed this class so so so much. I wish I wanted to research syntax, because this teacher would make such a good thesis advisor. Alas, I’m far more interested in sociolinguistics.
Văn hóa VN trong khu vực văn hóa ĐNÁ
Vietnamese Culture in the SEA cultural region
Tuesday 5:30pm-8:30pm
This is a class I probably would have really liked if this was the first semester. The content was interesting. The teacher compared different aspects of Vietnamese culture (food, religion, etc.) to cultures in the region (especially Cambodia and Thailand).
Two things really turned me off from this class. First, the content wasn’t new compared to other classes. Second, the teacher emphasized over and over how the foreign students couldn’t understand as much, in front of us, to our faces. Multiple times, foreign students asked questions and he immediately turned to Vietnamese students to say “What did they say?”
For one of the first times here, I just went, fine, I’ll just play dumb, play like I don’t understand. I did not pay attention in this class. I took very few notes.
The mid-term was to write an essay on a topic that the teacher had published multiple papers on. I literally didn’t know how to answer it without basically plaigirizing his work. There was no room for original thought. It doesn’t matter. He told us we could write three pages, especially the foreign students.
Phương pháp giảng dạy TV
Methodologies in teaching Vietnamese Language
Wednesday 5:30pm-8:30pm
This teacher cancelled class twice and I wasn’t even mad because he’s so sweet and kind and can do no wrong.
Very little was new in this class to me. It’s not the first class I’ve taken in second language acquisition, and this is an area I like to read papers in. It was still cool to get an overview in Vietnamese.
I do wish the class had been a little more focused on Vietnamese. It was more general thoeries in teaching.
We had one lesson focusing on flipped classrooms. The most interesting thing to me in the class was being shownt the LMS system of Đại học quốc gia, which looked so much like an American uni system and even setup. It’s a flipped classroom, with videos and essay and powerpoints all to be read and done before class. There’s a discussion board too. I would say this was the norm for my classes in university in the US, and this is what I expect in education. I subscribe to this learning practice. It’s being done in Vietnam….but not in an MA program…or at least not mine…
This is what I have been asking from my teachers. The first semester I would ask teachers for essays to read before class or at least a PowerPoint to review. I would ask what we were going to talk about next class.I almost never got this information, so I gave up.
While the teacher for this class was going over what a flipped classroom is and how it works, he said few times, “But what we’re doing here in traditional learning, going over all the thoeries in class.”
It’s so interesitng to me that he acknowledged this is happening, that he subscribes to this idea of a flipped classroom, and yet…these classes are not designed in this way at all.
Still, he was easily one of the best teachers I’ve had in the program.
Cơ cầu kinh tế xã hội trong lịch sử Việt Nam
Socio-economic structure in Vietnamese History
Thursdays 5:30pm-8:30pm
As expected, this class wasn’t interesting to me. The teacher was very sweet, though. My favorite thing is that for presentations he told us not to waste time giving too much background information and to just get to the point. Same thing with the essay we have to write for his final. He told us it’s just for a class, not a real essay, and we shouldn’t waste too much time on it.
Lịch sử vùng đất Nam Bộ
History of the Land of the South of Vietnam
Saturday 8:00am-11:30am
Ryan has nothing to comment on this class.
Đô thị hóa ở VN
Urbanization in Vietnam
Saturdays 1:30pm-5:00pm
I really liked the way this teacher talked. He talked about social stratification and urbanization with such swagger and such mastery of language, that I wanted to emulate him. The problem is the class happened Saturday afternoon, and honestly I could not focus by the time this class came around.
For this class, we had to present on a topic. The teacher gave us a list of 10 topics but also said we could choose our own. I was the only person to pick my own topic. Some people did the same topic, so we had to sit through presentations on the same topic. That essay topic will become our final essay.
Final Thoughts
Despite all the negative feelings, I do want to end this by saying I think it’s pretty remarkable that I’m even here, that this program exists in Vietnam that allows foreigners to sign up for it. Like, that’s pretty cool. It’s cool that this exists and I do feel grateful I’m allowed to participate.
Obvioulsy the biggest difference this term is I’m working, and I defintiely have days where I just feel exhausted. Saturday classes were especially trying.
I’m kind of glad to get this experience, too, the working + school, because it’s kind of how the program is designed. It’s a full-time MA program that just happens to only have classes at night when nobody is working, and you can show up late if you want, and you can sit in class and do work for other things if you want.
I’m glad this is the final semester of classes, too. I would almost certainly drop out if I had to do more of this.
Now to the thesis.
I have to defend my outline in three weeks.
Planning on making a post on that because it’s its own thing.
Okay bye
