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. 

Teacher training

My first week of teaching in Cambodia is complete! I won't lie, it was a long week. I was nervous to begin with but really started gaining confidence after 2/3 days. I'm not a natural teacher, it's challenging working with children. It's not easy and it's definitely not any easier when the children are from a different cultural background. However, it's so amazingly satisfying to hear a preschool child frantically call me 'teacher' if they see me in the village or hear a student use a new word you know they just learned that week. To be completely selfish, it feels great and it's more than enough to see me through this challenge. 

The school is located in Samrong, 18km outside of Phnom Penh. I've no idea how many people live here, I thought I heard someone say 500 families but I could also be making it up. There are 5 other volunteers along with myself and a few local Cambodian (Khmer) teachers. The Khmer teachers are there to explain in the local language. The students attend English lessons for all levels, computer classes, PE class, football coaching once a week and there's also a hair and beauty course which is quite unique. The aim is to teach local children skills to keep them away from hard labour. Like I mentioned in my last post, a locals wages in a clothing factory here amounts to little more than 75 US dollars a month. Every skill they can acquire in their youth, particularly English, will stand to them getting a better job in the future and keep them out of the sweat shops or worse again, the rampant sex industry here. 

I won't go into too much detail on the classes themselves but below is a quick round-up of my highlights and struggles in my few days so far. 

Highlights:

- preschoolers recognizing me and calling me 'teeeecha' in the village,

- 6 year old girl helping me teach her classmates the 'teddy bear' song (I didn't know the words OR the obligatory dance moves) I thought it was so sweet and brave of her. 

- evening conversation class with some teenage Buddhist monks who are obsessed with the champions league,

- helping 8 year olds read their first English book,

- giving a PowerPoint class to teenagers. PowerPoint has never been so exciting. 

Struggles:

- I've actually no idea of grammar. You may have noticed from my writing. Present perfect, past continuous, conditional 1 and 2..... These sound like names of 80s girl bands to me. Nevermind making lesson plans, I need to study.

- Being tough. Contrary to what my brothers might say, I'm finding it hard to dish out the discipline. 

I'm living in the school itself on the top floor. I've a comfy bed, mosquito net and my own toilet. There's only cold water in the shower but believe it or not, it isn't a big deal. More importantly, you cannot understand the joy I feel at having a room in one place for the first time in over two months. I've basically sprinkled my stuff in all 4 corners of the room which I realize now was a mistake since I'll be sharing with a new volunteer Monday onwards. Ah well. Although, I did get a bit of a rude awakening about my new home. One of the German volunteers across the hall from me said he had an infestation of cockroaches from leaving his window open. Sure enough, that night I woke up to a baby cockroach crawling on the top of my mosquito net. I now feel I have the potential to be a sadistic serial killer. I sprayed that baby cockroach with my most pungent insect repellent and I swear I could hear him choke. I watched him struggle for a long time with a pang of guilt in my chest, his legs stuck to the mosquito net with the repellent. Half of me wanted to free his sticky little legs from the net but the other half won and I beat his lights out with the end of the repellent can. I don't like elephants being ill treated but I swear I will beat that baby cockroaches brothers and sisters should they ever dare into my room. 

And that rounds off my first week in the school. I was wrecked come Friday evening but somehow found the energy this weekend to visit numerous markets, cycle around the city (scary), visit the Olympic park, try find a non-existent silk factory and assist a German colleague in purchasing copious amounts of Xmas gifts. I'm also eating lots of tasty, tasty food, albeit western. The food in the school is great but let's face it, there's only so much rice and fish sauce a solid Irish girl like myself can consume in a week. 

P.S. A baby snake was caught outside the school in the dark this week. No one would/could confirm for me if it was poisonous.