The “Volunteers” English Club
1. Why and How?
Six years have passed since the first day I gave English lessons to the children in this neighborhood. Sometimes I felt successful and many times frustrated that students have not improved as I expected. However I always feel two things: lack of time and lack of… something! I tried to catch that “something” idea but it was never clear to me till the day Tam got the invitation for a scholarship’s interview. I realised I wished to prepare so much for her, and suprisingly English was not the first priority. What I thought she needed to win the scholarship were life skills and life attitude. Luckily, Tam is a mature and intelligent one who absorbs skills and ideas very fast and even better, she can apply them into her life without hesitation. Tam got the scholarship and went for an English course of two months provided by an oversea organisation.
When Tam came back and heard about my idea of the club, she volunteered to pioneer the effort. Our first intention was improving English and teaching life skills to the members and if we have chance, doing volunteer jobs. The whole group of class 11 was encouraged by Tam’s enthusiasm and agreed to help. We decided to start the club on Sunday, September 17th 2017. Tam is the President and Quynh is the Vice President. Four others are Leaders in different fields. We agreed to choose “The Volunteers” as the club name with motto: “Better English. Better Life. For me and others.”
2. The start
All my students were informed about the club. They are encouraged to join, but I also made it clear that it was voluntary and they should make the decision themselves. Finally 24 students of in total 33 students attended the first meeting. I found it fantastic.
The Leaders actively took on the responsibility to handle the program. The first two meetings went well, with games, communication practice and group forming. Then, our Leaders were in a sort of “short of ideas”. At that time Tam was under certain stresses at school so I decided to intervene. I provided ideas and instructions for them to go on. I also gave some lessons on career orientation, IQ and EQ improvement. The club found the questions for “thinking out of the box” interesting, the case analysis to improve EQ just fine but the career orientation a bit boring especially with the young ones. Not “just on time” I know ;-(
Tam, Quynh and some others are quite active in social case analysis, which shows how much mature they are. Tam is the exceptional, she alsways has more solutions with positive attitude. Trieu, a grade-six student, shows her talent as a confident public speaker when she represents her group in the analysis. Trung, one of the Leaders, also let us see he can do much more than he thinks. Others haven’t gone out of them yet but the fact that they join every Sunday is enough to stimulate the Leaders’ and my spirit. I believe when they are nurtured in the right enviroment, they will develop on the right path. By the way, the Leaders are good at using candies and sweets to attract menbers ;-) (I swear, I didn’t advise them that) These are bought from the club’s fund contributed by members. One Leader is responsible for handling the fund, she is Leader of Celebration who also holds parties for members’ birthday monthly.
3. The Super Group competition
The club has four groups: Rose, Sunflower, Carnation and Paperflower. (Tam suggested these names, she is really a girl! Sorry I’m not a girl, I’m a woman so I told her to choose some short and strong names like Sun, Moon, Earth,… but she ignored my advice ;-( ) Each group has a Group Leader and about 3-4 members.
To boost the teamwork spirit and discover “new talents”, I launched The Super Group Competition in October with the Leaders’ support. Each group receives an assignment with three tasks: teaching a song (including dancing), instructing a game and giving a quizze of 5 questions. They have two week time for preparation. Groups will be judged on how their representatives handle the tasks. There are also four tests: IQ Test with Trung as MC, two social case analysis given by Quynh and Tam (Quynh and Tam provide case and answers themselves) and a memory test by me.
Storm No 12 (= typhoon Damrey) interrrupted our competition. Our club had to stop two weeks before coming back to normal meetings. Some members don’t have Internet yet, others start being busy with the semester exams. Anyway, our Competition is going on, and until now three groups are competing hard with almost equal scores and one group falls behind due to their absence in one test. We will let you know the result once the competition completes.
Minh