"A tortoise!" I squealed as I once did when I found an orange in my christmas stocking as a child. Looking back, I'd say a tortoise in my classroom was perhaps more shocking than an orange in my stocking.

Of course, there wasn't just a tortoise, that lesson I'd already told B12 to put away four mobile phones and three mp3 players, that they'd brought a tortoise to my class was just the icing on the cake.

Although I might wax lyrical about the wonders of teaching it is true that sometimes, as I stand in front of B12 with my teacher's "you must be quiet or i'll be scary" face on, I would rather go back to bed. Their English is poor, but their parents aren't, as they stump up the $200 a term fee to go to the university ($50 is the average monthly wage in Vietnam). In fact, I encounter much higher standards of English on the street here; people whose immediate livelihood depends on it master English without much if any education.

Last weekend I went to Sa Pa, a market town in the Northern mountains famous for their ethnic minority population. Even with the onset of tourism, these people still live a near subsistence life, with little formal education for their children. Yet their English far outstrips that of B12, who'd rather be playing football in the corridor.

Before I arrived here, I thought that the students would be very well behaved, eager to learn, and that maybe I'd feel ashamed of the people who don't make the most of (the good bits of) the British education system. While many of my classes are perfect examples, there are some, like B12, who make me want to kick them out on the street to sell postcards or embroidery, and give that tortoise to a little girl in Sa Pa.