Day 4 & 5: Walk with Purpose, Walk with Purpose
During our last two days, we continued to meet with local experts to further expand our understanding of the education system here in Vietnam.
Trung Nguyen, joined us to provide expertise on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) including some great examples of evaluations. Sneha Ram, an alumni teacher from Teach for India, joined the Teach for Vietnam for an internship. Her insight has been very helpful and I look forward to further collaboration.
We also had opportunity to conduct an initial Design Thinking workshop with great results. Look at all those Proposti notes (actual name on package)!
Thursday is a national holiday in Vietnam. This allowed the team to work from the hotel for most of the day. Tonight we get the chance to talk to the Teach for Argentina team members from a previous Social Sabbatical Program. Thank you Teach for Argentina!
Now let’s talk about the traffic. I had read prior to arriving that crossing the street could be challenging. This is an understatement. Motorcycles far outnumber cars and they dart in and around the cars. At one point, I had crossed the street to the safety of the sidewalk only to have a motorcycle drive beside me on the sidewalk. My approach is to look straight ahead, and mutter “Walk with Purpose, Walk with Purpose.” Please colleagues (you know who you are), no running ahead as there is safety in numbers.
Food, ah food. Food for me is challenging when traveling due to having celiac disease. I have happily discovered that Vietnamese food is mostly safe. Here is my dinner from Wednesday. I ordered what I assumed was a simple dish from the menu — “Pineapple Rice.” Really I won the best presentation award at our table. If visiting HCM, I recommend Tib, a vegetarian restaurant in District 1.
