After a few months here my sense of exciting vs. boring has been severely warped, and I have little sense of what is interesting and relevant for people to read, so I thought I’d just write about what a typical day here is like and see how that goes.
I usually wake up a little before six or seven depending on what time I have to teach. It has started to cool down so I don’t have to shower in the morning because I am not drenched in sweat at night, so I wash my face and put on my Khmer teaching clothes. We have to wear traditional Khmer skirts, which are ankle length and made out of fabric that feels like a couch. It is heavy, itchy, upholstery fabric basically, worn with a collared shirt. During training we kept hearing that appearance is very important in Khmer culture, and I find that to be true among the teachers at my school. If I run out of the house and my collar is a little askew my co-workers are quick to point it out. Also, popping your collar is not an option. I went to school one day with my collar popped without even thinking about it because that is just how I roll, and my teachers came up to me within minutes very confused and “fixed” my collar for me. I guess it is frowned upon to be awesome here.
I teach a few hours a day. High school is in the morning from 7:00am to noon. In the afternoon the younger students have class, so I am free to do other things. I teach with co-teachers, so depending on what day and what hour I am teaching with one of three Cambodian teachers. We work together to cover the material in the text book, although since I am still starting out I basically just fill in where they ask me to and sometimes throw in an activity I think up. As I get more into my role we will lesson plan together and I can try to integrate more student-centered learning techniques and activities into the classroom. Two of my co-teachers are actually great teachers and studied educational science so they know a lot of good teaching techniques. Unfortunately, they have told me they are under pressure to get through the text book so they don’t really have time to use many of these techniques. I think the students will learn more if my teachers can ease up from the grind to get through the book and just focus on learning fewer things more thoroughly and more accurately. A lot of the vocabulary is pretty useless and the students get about ten new vocab words every other hour of classes, which they are never really tested on and which are not reviewed so there is little point. To be fair I do not know what private classes for English look like, so maybe they review the words there.
After class I return home and change into normal clothes. It is about noon so I make lunch. I eat dinner with my host family but I make my own breakfast and lunch. I am not totally comfortable using my host family’s kitchen because I don’t want to use up too much of their propane and they still won’t let me do the dishes so I don’t want to make too much of a mess (they think I don’t know how to wash dishes, which is a fair assumption since it is quite different than in America but it is not like its brain surgery…). I usually just boil some water for oatmeal and coffee in the morning and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. It is like fourth grade all over again. I am lucky to have bread in my market and I stock up on the peanut butter and jelly in Siem Reap town at the Lucky Market, which is like an American supermarket except that the products from America are wildly expensive. A box of Special K cereal costs about seven dollars! Sometimes in the morning I take my coffee to school with me. Teachers are very confused as to why I drink coffee in the morning. A few of them joked that it is probably beer in the mug; they were speaking Khmer and thought I couldn’t piece together what they were saying. They make me wish it was beer. But that is beside the point…
After lunch I have relatively little to do. I haven’t started doing clubs yet because I don’t really know my students that well and think it will be better when my Khmer improves and they get used to my accent more. Some of them are really smart, but most still have problems understanding me since they have only ever heard a Khmer person speaking English. Until I start clubs I pretty much just read all afternoon. I have an hour of Khmer lessons at 3:00pm which is a nice break and helps me feel like I’m accomplishing something. The teacher who agreed to tutor me is really nice and has almost finished teaching me the consonants, and then we will do the vowels so I can learn to read. I think that will be really helpful so I can use a Khmer-English dictionary when I don’t know a word I need, and it will help with my pronunciation a lot. I have also learned some new vocabulary.
I usually go for a bike ride in the late afternoon, once it has cooled down a bit. Even though it will be cool season soon it is still ridiculously hot and often humid during the day. It gets to be much nicer around 4:00pm though. After about an hour of riding I take a shower and read some more, just to try something new, until dinner time. Khmer food at my host family’s house is always rice, usually with some stir fried meat and vegetables. Occasionally we have curry, which is really tasty. It is very difficult to explain American food to Khmer people, because they ask what we eat instead of rice. It is almost impossible to explain the range of possibilities because that kind of variety doesn’t exist in rural Cambodia. Usually I think I end up conveying that we eat bread, which people take to mean we eat bread three times a day with varying things on it. In the same way it is extremely difficult to explain what people do in America. Several people have asked what the most common job is in America, and it is so hard to explain that there are more options than I even know of or could imagine. Most people in my village either work in the rice paddies, sell something in the market, or teach. Some work for NGOs as well. The part of my job that is teaching about American culture and society has proved to be somewhat more complicated than I anticipated in that many people I have tried to talk to cannot even fathom the things I describe. Not all people are so limited, but many are.
After the awkward dinner discussion I usually just head to bed. I read for awhile or write some letters, and then tuck in my mosquito net and hit the hay. Then it is off to dream about America… The sweet land of opportunity and running water and cable TV and salads and paved roads and minimal parasites in my food.
I hope I answered some of the questions about what I’m doing over here! Hopefully soon I’ll have some more interesting and enlightening information to relay about my wonderful world-changing side projects, but for the moment I’m really just trying to make each day pass as quickly as possible. I miss you America!
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