School, school, school

After ending the weekend with a nice Skype call to my family, I've had a rather discouraging week. Monday started out okay with our usual school assembly. Instead of student performances this week however, the principal from our counterpart in Hanoi (Truong Doan Thi Diem Hanoi), came and spoke to the school. After the assembly we had our morning classes and ended before lunch with Physics. After an incident on Friday where the teacher took my test away before I was able to finish it, I was dreading the class very much. Sure enough, we got back our tests and I received a rather low score even after trying to explain that I just needed time to finish. Translating each question using only a pocket dictionary takes a long time! Anyway, I continued on and went home in the afternoon for math then back for 8th period Chemistry. Chemistry was definitely better as I'm able to understand the class pretty well and after talking to Emma for a little while via iMessage, my spirits were lifted. What I was really dreading the most about this week was a signing performance I had to do on Tuesday.

For our life skills class, the teacher assigned all of us to sing a song and explain the meaning. Though the assignment was very unclear, I was able to join a group with my friend, Ha and we sang a song in English called, "Proud of You." The performance actually went very well, one of my group mates missed a cue in the performance but I picked it up and we earned the best review of the whole class. Surprisingly, the thing I was dreading most, went the best. What I was most frustrated with for this assignment was that we had no freedom of artistic expression. If there were an assignment like this at Garfield, or at any other school in the US, you would be allowed to choose an art medium that best suited you. This requirement for everyone to sing a song just resulted in a lot of painfully long and pitchy performances. Anyway, it ended up okay but because of that, the teacher is trying to make us perform the song in front of the entire school on Monday morning! I'm hoping we're able to sway her out of her decision because I think for her to require us to sing live in front of 1000 people is just not fair. So, after that successful but also detrimental performance, I was discouraged yet again on Tuesday evening. I went home and did about 2 hours of math for my online class; I had planned to walk with Anna as we usually do but it was raining so we couldn't go.

Wednesday's are usually good days because I have a wide variety of classes and they're all classes that I enjoy. The day went mostly well and QP (our military class) was especially fun. Today, the teacher led us outside onto the field and we learned the correct stance of a soldier and how to turn on command. To do this, we started in three lines with the teacher leading us. He would call out "niem!" (attention) and then "den phai, quay" (turn right) or "den trai, quay" (turn left). After we learned these simple directions, we went off with our own group and tried them out. When it came my turn to shout the commands, everyone fell silent. I haven't really had the chance to yell in Vietnam as I did today and I don't think anyone expected my voice to be so loud. The teacher said I did a good job and when our group had to demonstrate in front of the rest of the class, my classmates applauded me. After we finished, we went up to the computer room on the 5th floor and got started with some new calculations in Excel. I understood the formulas well and so when The Anh said we were having a test, I wasn't worried. I filled out all the boxes correctly (after fixing a mistake I made in one of the calculations) and asked to teacher to check my work. She told The Anh that she had already checked it and wouldn't check again but I asked "how?" since I hadn't finished before. Apparently there was a time limit and instead of telling me I was out of time, she checked my work over my shoulder before I was finished. When I saw her review she had put an x in every single box so I asked her to check it again and she said no. But then, she went on 5 minutes later to check everyone else's work! I don't understand how I could've run out of time if everyone else's work was checked 5 minutes after mine! I was very frustrated but she refused yet again to look at my spreadsheet so I'll just have to wait until next week to she how she really evaluated me. After a great day, this really brought me down because I was already frustrated by the similar incident that occurred in Physics. I'd already asked about being allowed to have extra time on tests in order to translate but I guess the word didn't get through to my Computer teacher.

I'm sorry if this is a disappointing (and rather rant-y) post to read but I'm feeling very frustrated at the moment with school and my classes. It's hard to go through every day and know that you know the information but not be able to show your knowledge, and then be penalized simply because it takes you longer to demonstrate what you know. Anyway, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to receive the extra time I need for tests so that I can succeed in the future and demonstrate my ability.

Thanks for reading! I don't have any pictures to post from this week but I've heard that

people like the pictures of my family and other students so here are some that didn't make other posts.

You can see me in front of West Lake, my host father (Anh) at dinner, Anna at lunch, class 1A1 marching at the Start-of-School event, and me sitting next to my host grandfather at dinner a couple of nights ago.