On The Subject of Teaching

On a recent Tuesday morning, I completed the teaching practicum portion of our training here in Kampong at the nearby Hun Sein High School. The entire session included a week of teaching by myself, and a few days of teaching with a Cambodian counterpart. Groups of two or three trainees taught a single class of 10th and 11th grade students for three hours every morning of the practicum. This being the case, each trainee had to teach for at least one to two hours a day.

Contrary to what I expected, I found the experience to be rather enjoyable. To stand in front a classroom of students for the first time is daunting, to say the least, but by the end of our practicum I felt much more comfortable with the position. I must admit that I did expect a few more items of instruction from the Peace Corps as to how to teach, but it gradually dawned on me after the first day of the practicum that they have a "sink or swim" policy for this. The most probably cause for this is that we have a limited amount of time before we have to head off to our individual sites, and there is only so much that they can tell us. While the Peace Corps training staff did give us a few lectures on teaching styles and methods, most of what they said can be summed up like this:

"Okay everyone, let’s get started. Here is how you organize a lesson plan, manage a classroom, and write neatly on the whiteboard. Now here is a classroom full of 61 Cambodian students for you to practice with. Have fun!"

To be fair, this is partly an exaggeration. I say partly because I really did have to teach a class of sixty to seventy Cambodian high school students at a time. The instruction that the training staff gave us was useful, but I often found myself skimming through pages of TEFL books during the first week looking for sources of inspiration. I would often search for activities in these books, which would either be useful for grammar or reading practice, or be wonderful at filling the time of the lesson. I am also still at the point where I need to meticulously prepare my lessons, but I think that this will be something I will get better at over time.

Teaching At Hun Sen High School

The school where we practiced teaching was located off the national road on the outskirts of town. When I rode my bicycle there, I would enter the grounds through a blue, steel framed gate that would open to a wide driveway. The classrooms were located in short yellow buildings that formed a rectangle around a large open field. Skinny, white cows grazed almost everywhere that there was an open patch of grass, and they ate the flowers that lined the central driveway and other paths. The classrooms had blue shutters, which the teachers had to open and close after class, and the students sat in pairs or threes at dark, brown wooden desks, which were pointed towards a small, raised cement landing at the front of the class. On this platform was the desk of the teacher, and on the wall was the whiteboard. Trash lined the aisles between the desks, and the air inside had a distinct smell of used white-board maker and stale sweat. Even with the windows opens, it was still very hot inside there. It was unbearable to be in there by noon, and I would often be drenched with sweat after teaching after my group’s third hour of teaching.

The students themselves were in eleventh grade, and while I did not know their age specifically I would have guessed that they were around sixteen or seventeen years old. Most of them dressed very neatly in black slacks or skirts, and a white shirt. There was some deviation in this and some exceptions, but most of them tried to look their best. Physically, they resembled most Cambodians in all but age. Many of them were an average height of about 1.62 meters, with neatly arranged, jet-black hair, rounded adolescent features, and a skin tone that varied from being either very dark or light.

Shyness and perhaps a lack of self-confidence were clearly shared among the students in the class. This was readily apparent when I asked for volunteers to either read certain paragraphs aloud or write something on the board. In response to this request, no one would dare to move or make eye contact with me. This was particularly true for the boys who sat in the back. On some days, I felt like much of my lesson was spent trying to get the least kind of reaction out of them. During the first week when I was teaching by myself, I went as far as to put on a raincoat and pour water on my head to illustrate the meaning of downpour. A few of them laughed, but I think that most of them were more confused than anything.

Teaching pronunciation was the easiest task I could do because I could simply do it by ear, and teaching grammar was the hardest. The subject matter for the latter can be easy or difficult, but what makes teaching it burdensome is the fact that you never really have an idea if the students are getting it or not. Cambodian students in general seem to love to repeat every word that you say and copy down everything that you write down on the board. Whether they understand it or not is an entirely different question. It is good to do some kind of evaluation at the end of class to see if they need more work on it. Another strategy is to use the more advanced students to teach the less advanced students what they do not understand about the lesson; therefore, improving the comprehension of the students and making my life easier.

Working With a Cambodian Counterpart

Part of the Peace Corps’ mission in Cambodia for English instruction is to try and shift the education system away from teacher centered approach, to that of student centered learning. What this means in simpler terms is that the focus on any given lesson should be on the students learning the material, and not the teacher. This may seem rather obvious to those of us with a modern, western education, but for students in Cambodia and other parts of Asia this is a major shift. Many English teachers simply stand in front of the classroom and lecture to the class without any concern or thought of the comprehension of the students. To further this process along, PCV’s work with Cambodian counterparts at their permanent sites. During the second week of practicum, we were assigned counterparts with whom we would teach with for two days at the high school. It is through this way that we would be familliar with how to teach classes when we are at our site.

Teaching and working with a counterpart can be quite challenging. To begin with, most English teachers in Cambodia are trained to think that the government issued textbook English For Cambodia, is a perfect book. This is not an exaggeration, for they follow it like the NRA follows the second amendment of the constitution. The first day that we met with our counterparts, they sat us down and gave us a long lecture about the proper way to teach English, and this consisted of understanding what the lesson plan was that the book laid out for the teacher to use. There was hardly any deviation from this, and some ideas for creatively using the book in different ways were rejected immediately.

The real difficulty in this is that English for Cambodia is a horrendous source of material for anyone who is trying to study English. It was published through monetary assistance from Britain, and is full of British spellings, vocabulary, and terribly confusing writing exercises. Trying to teach what the government has insisted that the students learn, and not have them a form of English that would incomprehensible to a native speaker is a difficult balance to reach.
This is not to say that there was not anything to learn from our counterparts. Their knowledge of English for Cambodia is extensive, and the shared knowledge of it is incredibly helpful since this is the book that we ultimately have to use throughout our service. They also have different and intricate ways of teaching grammar to Cambodian students that would baffle a native speaker. For example, I introduced the second conditional to the class on the second day of the practicum, and found that my counterpart had a wildly complicated method of explaining in Khmer how the second conditional functioned in English. How it was laid out is hard to describe, but I can say that it appeared as a six variable math formula on the whiteboard at the end of the explanation. While I did not quite understand it, it seemed that students did. It would be very useful to learn how this formula for teaching grammar works, and I can only hope that the counterparts at my permanent site would be willing to teach me.

I still do not know what I will find when I move to my permanent site in October. Whether the experience at Hun Sein High School will be repeated is a question I ask myself daily. I anticipate, however, that the answer will come sooner than I expect it.