Blue Classrooms

I arrived at Thanh Nhan Village Cultural House at 2pm. The slanting sunlight shone through the faded wooden windows, illuminating the green shirts in the distance. The voices of children reading their lessons sounded clearer and louder in that sunny afternoon.This is a class organized by volunteer students from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Thanh Xuan Commune (Soc Son - Hanoi) and directly standing on the "lectern". Although organized for all children in the commune, due to travel conditions, this class mainly attracts students from Thanh Nhan village and neighboring villages such as Trung village, Na village... The number of students in the class is about 50, including primary and secondary school students. The "teachers" have to arrange to divide the cultural house into different areas, one is diligently doing primary school Math, another is mumbling secondary school English, another is busily copying dictation and reading Vietnamese. Therefore, it is quite difficult to stabilize the class while still ensuring quality for the students. “Teacher” Tuan (K54 Political Science) looked at me and smiled: “The students are also very naughty, sometimes even when it’s time to go to class, they are still running around, laughing and talking excitedly. It took a long time to settle down.” However, once they got to class, the students were quite focused, diligently doing each calculation, copying each letter. In particular, the students seemed quite excited when the teachers taught them English. When I asked them to read the numbers from 1 to 10 in English, they eagerly competed to read them out loud for me to hear: “One, two, three…” Then when I taught them the most basic sentences, they were also excited to read each word clearly in unison: “Good morning, Good afternoon”. Not being a teacher, seeing this bustling atmosphere, I suddenly wished I could be a teacher… In the innermost corner, they were engrossed in doing math and copying dictation. Due to limited facilities, the students studying Math and Vietnamese at primary level had to sit together. The teachers held each student's hand and diligently guided each letter. Binh (K55 Political Science) was marking the calculations that the students had just completed. The students were standing around excitedly, even "asking" the teacher to give them red pens instead of blue pens so that "when I get home, I can show my parents". When I asked which place I liked better, studying at school or studying here, a child about 7 years old honestly said: "I like studying here better because here the teachers don't scold me and I can play freely!" Each class like that lasts 2 hours, but it usually doesn't stop at that time. At the end of the class, it is an opportunity for the students to bring in advanced math problems and unfinished English lessons from class to ask how to do them and how to present them, and sometimes just to innocently but sincerely ask: "Will you come back here to teach us again next year?" There was a student who lived nearby who took the opportunity to run home and bring a glass of cool water for their older siblings to drink. The distance between them just kept getting closer. “I don’t know since when I started to consider them as my younger siblings at home. When I come home at night, I miss them again” – Chi (K54 International School) shared. Next year, there will be other “teachers” wearing green shirts to teach the students, but no matter what, these days will surely enter the children’s childhood as a beautiful memory. All the “teachers” are waiting for the day to see the students wearing green shirts…