Week No. 2

My second week at the school has flown by. The days are action packed with something happening all the time but being a teacher is not easy. I only have a few classes a day and between planning ahead, preparing myself, doing the class, evaluating, evening activities, meetings, etc, l am exhausted. 

I'm starting to settle into a routine now. My teaching day begins at 11am when we take in about 25 local children for preschool hour. This is a new thing in the school but I can already see how successful it is. For example, one little boy called Visa, aged three, was afraid to come into the school on his first day and didn't want to talk to the other children. Now he struts around the school yard like he owns the place, has a best friend he can't live without and has acquired a few necessary English words. Young children are amazing. They just soak up information without realizing it. I don't think they understand just yet that the words we teach them aren't what their parents use and yet they repeat everything you throw at them. The best part of my week was making hats with them. We got some scraps of paper, got the kids to color them, folded the papers into little sailor hats and popped them on their heads. I didn't think the hats would last long but they loved them! It would melt any cold heart to see the smiles on their faces. Well, maybe until it's playtime and you see they've all built guns from the Lego blocks and are taking immense pleasure at the thought of killing 'teeeecha'. We also showed them the intro to the Lion King to have a look at all the animals. They went bananas.

From 12-1 I assist a beginners class with another volunteer. This is the toughest class of the day. It's tough mostly because the children are loud, a bit unruly and there's a bit of an age gap between younger and older. And then of course there's the customary group of pre-teen 'lads' down the back that are just too cool. It's funny, you can go all around the world and no matter what, teenagers will always be teenagers. Anyway, this class is hard to manage but they are impressive in their learning capacity. Despite the howling laughter, students trying to crawl on the floor, minor arguments and constant chatter they all seem to know the answer to the question even before you've asked it yourself. I admire every single student in this class but combined they are a nightmare. 

I hate to say it but the class at 2-3 is the stuff of a teachers dream. They are quiet(ish), fun, eager, full of personality and not afraid of doing new things. Last week I got to see them read their first English book. It's a huge deal for a 7 year old to learn a whole new alphabet and remember a complex system of new sounds, not only to memorize but to be able to take meaning from the words too. I wasn't able to do it when I was 7 with Irish so I have huge admiration for them. I'm looking forward to seeing their progress over the next two months.

My typical day here then ends with a grammar class with high school students. On my first day one of these students asked me how old I was. I said I was 26 of course. He asked why I wasn't married yet and what was wrong with me? He actually sounded a bit like my gran here. Anyway, I think I have to work to win these students over, I don't think they trust me. One student, a monk actually, asked me after class why we didn't do number 1, number 2 and number 3 on a particular page, in that particular order. I don't think they trust me going 'off the beaten track' so to speak. In that case I'm going to work extra hard to get them out of their comfort zone. I set some listening exercises for them at the end of the week, you know listen to this and answer specific questions afterwards, blah blah blah. I thought it was too easy for their level of conversational English but none of them got even one answer right. So Mr. Know It All Monk, we aren't going to do question 1,2,3 in that order, you are going to have to think I'm afraid.

That rounds off week number 2 as a teacher in Cambodia. I am in love with the village. It feels homely somehow and familiar. Right now I'm back in Phnom Penh but I'm not sure why. I really don't like the city. I think it's filthy and seedy. You can't turn your head but there's some creepy white guy with a Cambodian girl much too young for him hanging off his arm. Or for example, last night I was in a bar that would have been too posh for Amsterdam and yet across the road I saw a mother trying to get her infant children to sleep under nothing more than two plastic bags tied together for a roof. Also, I'm sitting in a restaurant here as I type and I can see from my chair a poster warning against the consequences of getting caught sexually abusing a child here. I knew it was going to be like this but the reality of it is something else. I think I'm going to spend a lot of my weekends at the village from now on.