AN AMERICAN TEACHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SAIGON BEFORE TET 1968

About the Book

Embarking on his very first experience teaching English in a foreign country like South Vietnam with a very diverse student group was no easy feat for this author. He chronicled his experiences as a teacher for 17 months at the University of Saigon for 17-20 year old students, mostly women with some students who were refugees from North Vietnam. Because of limited classroom space for some 400 students, lacking comfortable facilities, and with optional student attendance, he encountered multiple problems throughout the year. A battery of 5 final exam subjects was administered in June and correcting 250 composition essays was quite a demanding job. However, he succeeded in resolving them to his satisfaction. Any adult college student and all teachers at any level can significantly benefit from his teaching methods and techniques.

Additionally, any reader can appreciate the many tours and visits to other Southeast Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Cambodia, and Malaysia, among others, and learn more about their cultural values and traditions, let alone their attitudes and intricacies toward an American foreign visitor, who at the start of his teaching career, was thought to be a CIA or a Communist. Because of the upcoming Tet Offensive of 1968, Dr. Hess had to finish his teaching assignment through the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays grant at Pusan National University in South Korea with happy and sad days at that University. In the final analysis, his teaching in both campuses nurtured his insatiable interest in Asian studies and thereafter incorporated his experiences in teaching Asian History in several colleges and universities in the United States.

About the Author