McWhat?

One main goal of my trip to Vietnam was to help lead a workshop for prospective English teachers at a local university about 3 hours north of Hanoi. James, my old roommate from my first 2 years in Taiwan, is currently serving at this university and helped set everything up to make the trip and the English workshop a reality.

My part of the workshop was to co-lead a session on teachers observing other teachers. As part of the workshop I designed an opening ice breaker activity that would get the group comfortable and segway into our discussion about observation. For the ice breaker, I showed a picture on a powerpoint, but only left it up for about 1 second. Obviously it was not enough time to see everything in the picture, so I would then tell the partipants to discuss with each other what they saw. After we shared ideas, I would show the same picture, this time for a couple of seconds. After that discusion I would put the picture up for good and we would look at what it really was.

For the ice breaker I chose 3 different pictures that we could talk about. One a picture of Ha Long Bay, which is a very scenic and famous place in Vietnam. It would be something the students would immediately relate to.




Pictures from Ha Long Bay when I went later that week.



Another (and the last picture for the ice breaker) was a man looking through a magnifying glass, as if intently studying something. This picture was used as a segway to our session, as we discussed what it is like to be overanylzed or how one feels if someone is watching their every move. One goal of the workshop was to make students understand that this was not the goal of teacher observations, rather they can help us grow as professionals.

Those were my last two pictures for the ice breaker, and everything went fine. My first picture, however did not have the result I intended.

I wanted to pick something that would be eye catching, and yet easy to recognize for people from any culture. So I decided that I should think of something I have found in common in all of the places I have traveled, and I settled on McDonald's. That's right I have seen those Golden Arches (under whose employment I slaved many hours of my life away, ha!) in many different countries, all with similar menus, but each restaurant with something distict or unique for that country or area. Regardless of where, you can always see Ronald McDonald and his bright outfit smiling for the customers.

All of this was true, until I went to Vietnam. You see, as I found out, there is no McDonald's in Vietnam. The government would not let the business set up shop in their country. So the picture I selected of Ronald and his friends was completely foreign to all of the students in my workshop. The photo featured Ronald, Grimace, the Hamburglar, and another McDonald's character. When I asked the students to describe what they saw I got responses like:

"4 people"
"A man with stripes"
"Bright colors"
"A clown"

But not a single person could identify the anyone from the McDonald's picture. A Malaysian teacher who helped in one of my workshops pointed out that, "We have a cultural misunderstanding here."

I could not have agreed more, and was completely surprised that none of the students had heard of McDonald's in Vietnam. It was the first country I have found that does not have a McDonald's.

I thought that was an interesting story from the trip.