This week the Cambodian school year officially came to a close. Today may or may not have been the school closing ceremony. I went to school at the time the school director told me the ceremony would start, but none of the teachers were there, nor was the school director. One of my coteachers showed up maybe 20 minutes later and told me no one knew if the school would close that day, because it would happen whenever the school director got there. I asked him to call me if would be that day, and he didn’t, so I’m assuming the school director didn’t show up. I’ll try again tomorrow. I watched Sleepless in Seattle all the way through for the first time, so it wasn’t a total waste of a morning.
The Cambodian school calendar is very bizarre. It begins in late September or October and finishes end of June. School runs Monday through Saturday, and in my village upper secondary (grades 10-12) is 7:00am – noon and lower secondary school (grades 7-9) is 1:00pm – 5:00pm. There isn’t enough space to have two schools run all day, so they share. This is fairly common in poorer areas. Lucky for me I only teach high school so I don’t have to go back to school in the afternoon when it is blazing hot out.
Since the beginning of April school has been kind of a joke… more so than usual. Vacation for Khmer New Year lasted the whole month of April, more likely than not because it is just too hot to teach/learn then. In May some students returned, but numbers were definitely lower than before. There were more days when teachers just wouldn’t teach than before. By 11:00am most students had gone home, and the school was a ghost town by noon. Considering that even during the first semester when my classes actually met every time they were supposed to each “hour” of class was about 40 minutes, students barely get any instructional time compared to the US
I am extremely happy to put the first year of teaching behind me. My experience teaching in the classroom has been more or less a disappointment. I had fairly high expectations of the results I would get by the end of one year. While we were appropriately warned about the condition of the Cambodian school system during training, I was unprepared to have so many students who just did not know any English. The low level was a total shock. Additionally, neither of my coteachers were interested in lesson planning. I tried a few times to set aside some time each week to meet with them and plan our lessons, but it was pointless. They teach the same book every year, and don’t deviate from the activities and material in it, so there is no reason to lesson plan. I was taking up their precious free time, so I let it go. When I came with a warm-up activity prepared they were both usually willing to let me have a few minutes at the beginning of class. That is something I hope to implement consistently next year.
I’ll admit I got lazy after awhile. I tried different things to get students engaged, but usually my tactics just took up too much time for my coteachers to be willing to let me consistently use them. For some months I was typing up worksheets for my tenth graders with a definition and example sentence for every vocabulary word and some activities for them to do at home for extra points. I think this was helpful, but just not something sustainable that my coteachers will continue after I’m gone. It took me hours to grade and correct all the papers, sort out the cheaters, record the scores, prepare the worksheet for the next chapter, etc. Then I had to make copies which was a HUGE pain in the butt. The copy room at school is never open, and they wouldn’t trust me to make copies on my own. I had to wait around for a student who worked in the copy room part time (? I am still confused about exactly what the deal was there). Then I had to collect money for the copies, which I felt badly about since students have enough expenses and most of them didn’t give a rat’s ass about the worksheets.
I am, however, optimistic that I can use what I learned this year to improve my teaching next year. I plan to be more consistent about warm-up activities. Also, I usually tried to really emphasize the grammar points that I thought were useful. I hope to communicate to my coteachers which points are really good and are a good use of time to practice, and which are less useful. Some volunteers have really developed great resources which I could have used more in the classroom this year, and I will refocus on those next year.
While teaching in the classroom didn’t exactly go as well as I’d hoped, my English club and health club were both very successful. I’ll have a better idea for next year how to structure a successful English club. I should definitely make it more specific, rather than just a random selection of stories, songs, activities and what not. Hopefully my health club continues to go as well as it’s been going these last few weeks! I have high hopes that the girls in the club will stay committed through the summer, and put together a great project at the end.
And now I can just prepare for my parents and friends to visit!!! Thank goodness it’s summer!
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