When one door closes…

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!

Malaysia, Truly Asia

There are these great ads that run on tv here promoting tourism in Malaysia. The slogan is “Malaysia, truly Asia.” I’m not sure how accurate that slogan is though, considering most people probably think of Japan or Vietnam before Malaysia, but it is catchy, I’ll give them that.
Christine, my sorority sister, came to visit at the beginning of June. It was my first time leaving the country, which really put Cambodia in perspective for me. We of course saw Angkor Wat and all the sights in Phnom Penh, and then flew to Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. It was a big shock to fly out of Cambodia and right into a real, modern city. Even the Malaysian airport had a Starbucks and a McDonalds, beacons of westernization if you ask me. We explored all over the city, saw the view from the Petronas twin towers (after being forced to watch an incredibly creepy video about the power of oil that reminded me of a futuristic sci-fi thriller), wandered through the air-conditioned malls, and explored China town.
The first day there we headed out to the Bantu caves. The caves are 276 steps up into a mountain and have a shrine inside. They were an amazing sight, though for some people the monkeys running up and down the steps were obviously the main attraction. On the way back our taxi driver gave us his opinion of Malaysia. Doesn’t David Sedaris say taxi drivers are the best way to get to know a new place? I didn’t ask him what Malaysians believe about Santa Claus but I did gain some insight. Before the trip I knew essentially nothing about Malaysia except that the Petronas towers are the iconic symbol of Kuala Lumpur. Turns out Malaysia was a British colony (literally I knew NOTHING going into the trip). There are huge Indian and Chinese populations, but our taxi driver claimed even if your family had lived in Malaysia for generations, as his had, your Malaysian passport will still say “from India.” He also told us only those who are ethnic Malay can vote for the parliament seats, and unsurprisingly an ethnic Malay person has held control of the country since independence. I should probably do some research to back up these claims before throwing them around on my blog, but my internet is slow so for now I’ll take them at face value.
Christine and I took the overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Langkawi, an island off the coast of northern Malaysia. The island was so lush and green, it was really beautiful. The weather didn’t exactly cooperate for us to partake in the activities the beach would normally offer, but we did explore the island. One day we rode a cable car up into the mountains and got a beautiful view of the island. All the way at the top it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything, but it was still cool to see the cable cars basically disappearing into the fog. Afterwards we hiked up a very steep hill to see the seven pool water fall. At the very top it was a fairly small stream, but it was still a very verdant and worthwhile site. On the way down we saw a view of the waterfall from below. Maybe the view wasn’t worth the crazy hike, but it was nice to see a wet, green landscape after months of dried up rice paddies.
We had one more day in Kuala Lumpur on the way back, where I was happy to take full advantage of the ridiculously nice breakfast buffet. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me. What can I say, food is a priority?
We then took our last flight, every single one of which was delayed (Air Asia is no RyanAir… they are not the most on time airline and they do not have a great jingle that plays everytime a flight lands on time), to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. The city wasn’t as totally cosmopolitan as Kuala Lumpur. It was more like a half way point between total modernization and being totally rural and undeveloped. I really enjoyed walking around the city, just seeing the wild difference between two major cities only a six hour bus ride from each other, Ho Chi Minh and Phnom Penh. The streets were clean, though they were packed with traffic, and everyone just appeared so much more modern in both dress and behavior. We saw all the major sites we could in one day including the old Post Office and Notre Dame cathedral, as well as the huge market. The hotel where we were staying had a great live band that played on the 23rd floor so we went up to watch them for our last night. It was so much fun and the band really appreciated us livening up the crowd of mostly people there on business.
It was a rude awakening to come back to Cambodia. Seeing other countries really opened my eyes to how rural and poor Cambodia is. Outside of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh the whole country is essentially wooden houses and motos. There is no public transport system, the roads are far worse than the rest of Southeast Asia, and the cities are dirtier. But at the same time I can appreciate that Cambodia has retained as much of its culture as possible. Even given its horrific recent past, I still feel Cambodians are proud and try to preserve the things about their country that are true and original. It is easy to get caught up in thinking that Cambodia is just so far behind, but there is a simple beauty to the country and the culture that you have to look hard to see. I hope that people who visit Southeast Asia get enough of a sense of the country to take that away, and not overlook the small miracles here in the face of the country’s major problems.