My throat was aching from screaming at a class of teenagers because they simply refused to listen to what I had to say. This was something I experienced recently, but it was the solution that surprised me and taught me a valuable lesson in culture and classroom management.
Vietnam is a country of great complexity and wonderful culture. When you spend a little time here, you start to see more similarities than differences in human nature. A profound realization was that we are really all the same—just with a few different habits or languages.
In the classroom, I carried this same attitude. I reflected on my days back in my home country and my own experiences as a student. I remembered that students didn’t speak unless spoken to, and when the teacher gave a direction, it was followed. To me, that was a reasonable environment to facilitate learning.
Vietnam is a country of noise
If there is one thing I cannot bring myself to get used to in Vietnam, it is the noise. Vietnam is a noisy country. From the chaotic traffic to loud karaoke and the unbearable noise in schools, silence is a rare commodity. This is one reason I paid excessive amounts for noise-cancelling headphones.
And while they are not usable in the classroom, my expectation was that when I spoke, all students would be silent and listen to my instruction in order to improve their language skills. But that expectation failed. Year after year, class after class, as I spoke, students continued to make noise at varying levels.
My classroom management was simple at first. I would stop the lesson, take up a set position, clap my hands, and wait until order was restored. But this approach turned a 45-minute class into little more than a few English words, with most of the time lost to managing behavior.
Throughout my career in Vietnam, I have used a range of different techniques across different grade levels, all with the same goal: to achieve silence in the classroom while I delivered the learning material. Ultimately, I never once succeeded in achieving total silence.
Then, after a few frustrating weeks of rising disregard for my lessons and other issues, I arrived at school with one motive in mind. I was going to deliver 100% of the class material in the 90-minute session allocated. I was not going to stop for anyone. I was going to keep talking regardless of how much noise and disrespect there was in the room.
In my first class—grade 12—the noise was deafening. However, with a microphone in hand and the class textbook, I just kept talking and kept reading. I started at exercise 9, then moved to 10, and eventually reached exercise 15. All the while, the noise slowly receded to a point where a majority of students began to listen.
In the second class, the reaction was totally different. It was much more active and positive, with quick responses to my instruction and significantly less noise. Sleeping students woke up, and generally, things went well.
At another school, however, this technique completely failed. But it was grade 6, not grade 12. In this case, writing lines that said “I will not speak in class” seemed to capture the attention of wayward students. As the number of lines increased—from 10 for the first offense to 15 for the second and 25 for the third—I slowly gained control of the group and saw learning outcomes achieved.
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What did I learn from this experience?
As a tall man with a strong voice and large presence, it is often said that I command attention. Whether it’s my booming voice used in anger to gain control or the look of total frustration when students don’t follow classroom procedures, I am rarely ignored. But even with this presence, I realized that young learners need more than threats, aggression, and punishment to find their place in the classroom.
The secret to classroom management is not to focus solely on student behavior, but to understand the culture of the school. In my experiment, I realized there was a level of noise in the classroom that was accepted by local teachers. When I accepted that level of noise as well, things began to run more smoothly.
I fully accept that some students do not learn and some have zero motivation to improve their English. But with 50 students in a class and only 90 minutes of contact time per week, sometimes we need to accept that we cannot deliver perfect learning to everyone.
In 2025, a quick count of my 24 teaching periods per week estimated that I deliver English instruction to between 750 and 800 children weekly. Most of these students receive my attention in groups of 45 to 50 for 90 minutes a week, while others—also in similar numbers—receive only 45 minutes a week to improve their listening and speaking skills.
Once I understood the school’s culture, I found that students were, for the most part, more receptive and attentive in the classroom, even though the atmosphere was not one I was particularly comfortable with.
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Don’t drop your standards
While I have undergone this massive change in approach, I have not lowered my standards for learning. Five to seven times during each lesson, I seek feedback and confirmation of learning outcomes through questions or conversational activities. If it is clear that students have failed to apply themselves, there are consequences.
This is the big shift: classroom management is no longer focused at the front end of the lesson, but at the back end of the process. Allowing the classroom culture to be maintained while setting clear standards for learning outcomes seems to work better in most environments.
Every class is different
However, with more than 10,000 students having received my educational services over the past decade, I can say this is only one theory and one practice that seems to work at one school. It is not a method that will work across the country, because every school and every class has its own culture.
And that is the secret I have learned: understand the culture before applying a classroom management strategy, and you will find that outcomes differ greatly—especially in those classes where it seems hopeless to gain the attention and respect of students.
