I'm An English Teacher, Lollerblades!

So everything I have written about to this point has been absorbing, adjusting, floundering, reveling…and basically learning. Which, don’t get me wrong, has been awesome and exhausting and definitely important for both us and for our communities who are so enthusiastic about our attempts to learn about their language, culture, and lives. But hey, what about what I came here to do? Teach English, apparently, and finally in our last three weeks of training we were paired with a local high school teacher in Kampong Cham to get some practical classroom experience. However, we were also paired with a fellow volunteer as our co-teacher, as the high school teachers basically wanted to teach one class we could observe, and then wanted to observe us… so since so many of us are flexible and somewhat accomplished (ha) people with a lack of “teaching English” experience, the fact that we had another volunteer with us was definitely an airbag that we could rely on. I worked with my friend Liz for two weeks, and Josh for the beginning of the third, and while they both had different styles I found it really valuable to work with them and broaden my view of things. Then when we were finished we’d go and watch the other 5 volunteers from our district teach, and it was awesome to have such a pool of ideas. My friend Natalie, who lived next to me during training and has become like an older sister to me (SUCH an amazing person, and is a yoga instructor trying to help me find inner peace, we will see how that goes haha), has been teaching ESL for 7 years in a garment factory in Los Angeles, and it was invaluable to watch her work. It was also funny because Nora co-taught with her, and whenever she got kind of stuck she’d whine “Natalieeee” and it became the running joke she wanted to forget.

The teaching itself was definitely interesting. We had been prepped on what students knew, what classrooms were like, what motivated teachers and kids alike, and all that. But nothing beat actually stepping in there and realizing… there are no general rules. Reading and writing tended to be a strong point for the kids. It gave them a physical anchor on the language, and if they got lost at least they could search a paragraph for the answer. Speaking and listening… much less successful. We worked hard to slow down our speech, but often our accent just baffled them. And the fact that 95% of Cambodian children are extremely shy, especially of foreigners, didn’t help when we were pushing them to practice speaking and pronunciation.

Some teachers were motivated to learn and improve their methods, while others saw the chance of basically having a free substitute and just stopped showing up. Though really, in a society that pays most teachers around 40 dollars a month, I could hardly blame the ones that skipped out to work their second job a little more. Some students just had no clue… were either too shy to participate at all, or just didn’t get what we were asking,. This especially struck me with some of the older kids, where you can kind of tell they got lost a long time ago, and gave up on actually learning English way before we arrived. It was just a room they sat in once or twice a week (reminds me of how foreign language can often be in the U.S.) and they were coasting towards the end of the school year. But then again, some students were very clever and had an understanding of English that really surprised us. For example, I had to teach a lesson on heaven and hell in the Buddhist religion (I want you to notice how well qualified I am as a large, blundering American man to teach this to a classroom of 40 Cambodian, Buddhist raised children). A reading comprehension question asked if heaven and hell were easy to see, since they are in our minds. The answer was no, since they can’t actually be “seen”, but the girl who stood up to answer said she thought the answer was yes because what could be clearer to you than what was inside your head? I sort of stared for a second and then said “well, what if your friend wants to know about heaven and hell, what do you tell her?” to which she answered “well, I just explain it to her, and then she understands.” And I deftly said “oh…haha, there are TWO correct answers!” But despite how awkward I probably was in trying to decide how to handle such a rare occurrence of self generation by a student, I was so proud and impressed at the way she approached it. It was definitely one of “those moments” that made you feel like you were doing the right thing, that any frustrations and challenges across an entire week could have been lifted by that one quick-minded girl being brave enough to share her idea.

Good, because we are definitely going to NEED those moments. In our second week, it rained unexpectedly (since it is dry season), and apparently rain = no school because we had maybe 11 out of thirty-some students. On the bright side, “large class size” was a big worry for us as teachers, so while I wasn’t happy more than half my class disappeared at least we had a manageable sign. Then the last week it stopped raining… but it was worse. We would have about 20 students at 7 am, but at 10… it was a ghost town. What was going on, where was everyone going in the middle of the morning? And why weren’t they coming back? Well, we were told “the 12th graders had their regular exam, and Khmer New Year is in a few weeks, so it’s near vacation.” Oh, NEAR vacation, right, why didn’t we see that coming? This became sort of a point of great amusement to the volunteers in all three villages, and many of us commented that we wish we had had this policy when we were in school. Ugh, so frustrating that suddenly our last week of practice teaching was a wash, but overall it was definitely valuable and if nothing else it taught us what to expect… which is anything and everything.