-
MBA Graduation: Reflection, Gratitude, and Adventure
What to do when you graduate from your MBA in the middle of winter and want to celebrate? Take an adventure trip to Lapland!
-
-
-
-
-
Welcome
Thanks for visiting Expat Heather! I’m an international educator, writer, and expat mom currently living in South Korea. On this site you’ll find things about living abroad, teaching in international schools, travel, hiking, and expat life.
As an international teacher, it’s interesting to see how parental involvement in education plays out in different cultural contexts.
I came across this graphic about “Helicopter Parents” from OnlineCollege.org which is written about an American cultural context.
In my experience, it seems Asian parents tend to be more involved with their children’s career choices that typical American parents. A true anecdote: I asked my 7th graders to write short essays about what they wanted to do when they grew up. One girl wrote something along the lines of this: “I don’t know what I will do. My mom said she will tell me next year.”
Of course though, even among my Vietnamese students there seems to be tremendous variation at how much parents are involved in education and career choice. It can be common in Asia for students and parents to request grade changes or re-scoring of tests.
Families often live as joint families, even after children are married, and are therefore more involved in their careers. I wonder how much of this “increase” in “helicopter parenting” is simply representative of a cultural shift in mainstream America due to a rising Asian American population.
The graphic also states that “40% of today’s adult in their 20s have moved back in with their parents” without any reference to the drastic change in economic conditions and career opportunities for new graduates. My husband and I both moved back in with our parents temporarily during our 20s. For many college grads, this is often the only economic choice that makes sense.
What do you think of the graphic below?
Here’s me sitting at my desk at American Academy. Compare to drawing below.
As a teacher, you often wonder what your students really think of you. My 7th graders were reading Walk Two Moons, and one of the themes of the novel is about how our views of people and situations can change over time.
I gave my students the following prompt:
Think of an instance when you formed an opinion about someone without knowing all the facts. How did you feel when you learned the truth about that person?
In the boxes below, make a visual representation about how you thought of the person at two different points in time.
They then had to write a paragraph about how their view of this person changed. Many students drew pictures of friends or other teachers. One student wrote about a friend who he had thought was shy, but then realized was actually very talkative. Several students drew teachers, first with a negative impression and then with a positive one.
And then one student drew me.
Apparently, over a three-month period I managed to morph from "Princess of Evil" to "Queen of Evil."
Winning free flights is even better than finding cheap flights ! Blogger Johnny Jet is running a contest to win two free round-trip economy tickets on Qatar Airways from Chicago, New York, Washington DC, or Houston to any Qatar Airways destination, with the exception of Australia.
My husband and I have flown Qatar Airways before and found the food, service and comfort-level of their economy class to be pretty nice for a long-haul trip. I would have liked to fly Qatar Airways to go back to the US this summer, but the tickets were too expensive!
Wondering where you can go? Check out this interactive route map.
If you win, you can visit us in Ho Chi Minh City! Contest runs until January 16, 2013.
You can get up to three entries to the contest.
Full details on Johnny Jet’s website.
Our school will be going on 3 day/2 night field trips in April, and I’ll be chaperoning the upperclassmen. I’d like to connect our trip to ecotourism and/or oral storytelling, so I’ve spent some time browsing for tour companies that offer homestays and hold to principles of ethical and responsible travel. Here are some I’ve come across that seem worth checking out. Most are members of the Responsible Travel Club of Vietnam.
(Above photo: Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens, which I would not recommend as an example of ethical travel!)
1. Active Travel Asia
Focused on adventure sports.
2. Aurora Travel
Focus on luxury travel and MICE.
3. Footprints Vietnam
I’m most interested in checking out this company for our school trip, although their listed offerings in the south are limited. They have put together custom volunteer and educational trips for groups.
4. I Love Vietnam
Travel co-op that has a partnership with an organization that works with street children.
5. Indochina Travelland
Tours in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
6. Sisters Tours
Luxury and family travel options.
7. Tonkin Travel
Not a lot of detail about itineraries and prices on the website.
8. Vietnam Discovery
Great prices for multi-day group tours. Lots of options.
9. Vietnam Ecotourism
Website offers a limited number of tours but is useful for general information about ecotourism and sustainable tourism in Vietnam. Also offers some “green” accommodation options around Vietnam.
Tonight we attempted to bring Gabriel to the Golden Dragon Water Puppet Theater in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City. He is now 20 months old, and I was hoping that he’d be able to sit through a lively show, or at least 30 minutes of the 50-minute show. He can sit and watch a whole movie at home, but I forgot that when anything involves water he wants to be able to splash and play in it and doesn’t like to sit down.
We only lasted about 5 minutes before he decided he wanted to stand right next to the pool with the puppets, and when he could not do that because the attendant asked us to have him sit down, he had a meltdown. My husband took him out, with Gabriel screaming for “agua!” and I shot a quick video before making my escape.
If your children are a bit older or are happy to sit, this could be a good family outing. Our son loves water, and if you’ve been following this blog you may remember he jumped into a koi pond at a restaurant during our first school faculty gathering. Probably wasn’t the best idea to bring him to the water puppet theater.
He did like watching, he just wanted to be up close with the puppets. After we left, he was screaming “Agua!” to go back so I bought him a 60,000 VND ($3) wooden water puppet souvenir. Maybe we’ll try to go again in a few years, although all of the narration is in Vietnamese so you can’t follow the story unless you know the language.
There is a large park nearby as well as lots of restaurants, so you could make an evening out of it. Shows are daily at 5pm and 6:30 and last 50 minutes. We bought our tickets for 170,000 each (kids under 2 are free, and good thing cause we didn’t really see the show!) from Buffalo Tours, but you can buy them at the entrance.
It’s not worth bringing a stroller because there are steps getting in and out of the theater and there aren’t any ramps. Also, the streets nearby do not have good sidewalks.
It wasn’t a total bust though. Gabriel practiced two new words during the drive: taxi AND motorbike. He says “bo ga dai” for motorbike, and he kept looking out the window of the taxi saying “Oh no bogadai! Oh no!”
Another quick video if you’d like to see more:
Recent Comments