The Assignment So Far

In the four weeks now that I have lived in the Anchor district, I have had the opportunity to spend about three weeks at the high school when was in session. In that time, I have observed and noted the abilities of both the students and teachers to communicate in English, and I have come to several conclusions about each of these groups. The long and the short of it is that both the students and teachers cannot speak English very well, with the exception of my counterpart, Mr. Nou. My work as an English teacher in this community is clearly laid out for the next two years, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I do not write this entry in an effort to be condescending or overly critical of the community or its students, for I am merely trying to describe the naked truth of what I have seen and heard. In examining it, I have found that the student’s lack of English skills has to do with a lack of learning resources and some cultural elements that inhibit the pursuit of study. The latter is something that I will discuss first, because it affects my teaching most directly.

Culture is a curious subject, and understanding it is often a lesson in humility. After living here for a few months, I thought that I would move beyond the scratched surface of understanding how Cambodians think. However, this is quite the opposite. In trying to understand the cultural rules that seem to inhibit a student’s ability to learn, I have scratched my head repeatedly in trying to understand why they do the things that they do. I have yet to figure out ways of overcoming them, but my hope is that by recording and taking notes on them I can understand them a little bit better.

While observing the students during my first week, I was struck by how incredibly shy the students were. When I introduced myself in front of my new classes of students during the first few days, they looked at me with a terrified expression on their faces. I could not help but find it similar to the way that my two-year-old neighbor looks at me. The eyes are wide, the mouth stretched open or in a vague smile, the head is bent over (along with the overall posture), and all of the muscles in the face are frozen. Some of the students still look at me in this way even after I have taught in their classes several times and implored them to speak in class. The co-teachers I work with tell me that while the students welcome the idea of learning English from a native speaker, they are too shy to approach me and ask questions. Some of them have warmed to me, especially when I quoted a Cambodian proverb Khmer in class that translates into English as “If you are shy with your teacher, you will never learn. If you are shy with your wife, you will never have children.” However, for most of my classes this shyness inhibits them from speaking out loud at all.

During a class that I was observing, the Cambodian English teacher called on a female student to read a passage that was written in the book. The student refused, and said in Khmer that she could not read English. At this point, I had heard this from multiple students. In a moment of curiosity, I asked her privately if she really could not read English, or rather she was simply too shy to read in front of the class. She mumbled something unintelligible, averted her eyes, and made it clear with her body language that she had little to no interest in speaking with me any further. A little while later, I could hear her reading along with her friend from the book. In a culture where yes means no and no means yes, saying things like “No, teacher, I can’t read English” are part of an age-old tradition of saving face that is common in many parts of Asia. The student probably could read English, but she did not think that her English was sufficient enough to read in front of the class. So she claimed that she could not read English at all. I initially thought that if only this shyness was overcome, then the students would speak English well. When I gave my students an English test for the first, I was proved wrong about this theory.

A few weeks ago, I helped give a test to the entire tenth and eleventh grade class in order to test their understanding of English. Plan International, which is an active NGO in my village, recently donated several new computers and a spiffy solar powered generating system to the school, and the test was a way of determining which students should be given the opportunity to use them and learn computer skills. The test was fairly straight forward, allowing the student to conjugate English verbs and determine appropriate tenses. The students themselves are supposed to have had at least three years of English so far, and the difficulty level of the test seemed appropriate when I looked it over. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The problem began with the word “choose.” While proctoring an tenth grade class, I had to write the test on the blackboard for the students to copy and then do. Since our school does not have the resources for generating large amounts of photocopies, simple tests and quizzes are often done this way. The word in question was in the overall instructions that required the student to choose the correct verb tense from two that were given. For example, “While Susan was driving, she was receiving/received a call on her mobile phone.” After a few minutes of looking at the word, one student finally approached me and said that he and the others could not understand what this word meant. I tried to explain it as best I could in both English and Khmer, but the students still had no idea what this word meant. It was not until I grabbed a Khmer teacher who was passing by the class that I was able to translate what this word meant. For the rest of time remaining in that period, I sat behind a desk in front of the class. The faces of the students were reduced to black in the light of an oncoming morning thunderstorm, and I stared at them in a state of bewilderment. Three years of English, I thought. Three years of English and they can’t understand the word “choose.”

It is hard to understand why this could happen unless you know something about the district’s industry and geographical location. Eighty percent of the workforce in Anchor is involved in farming. Whether they are involved with growing rice, tending the stocks in a fish farm, raising livestock, or some other activity, most of their lives are spent in the fields. For the children of the Anchor, this is ultimately their destiny whether they like it or not. Like their forefathers before them, they too will probably become farmers themselves. Siem Reap is only around 50k away, and one would think that the promise of money and better jobs in the tourist industry there would be a luring opportunity away from the back breaking work of picking rice. A lot of people who I have talked to know someone who works there, and the their success is widely circulated. While the promise of moving there and earning more money is certainly present, the reality of going there is not. For the children in towns closer to Siem Reap, it certainly is. The town of Pourk (pronounced with a silent k on the end) is close enough to Siem Reap for this dream to become an attainable reality having better human and material resources.

When I taught an eleventh grade class in Kampong for a week, the same sort of problems existed. The shyness, the lack of comprehension, and the inability to pronounce certain words were all there, but they were all there on a much smaller scale. In general, the student’s ability in that district was much better this one. However, Kampong is a much bigger town with greater resources for learning. The high school has many English teachers, the town has many bookshops, and it has a road connecting it to the wealth and opportunity of Phnom Penh. Anchor district is a much smaller place, with fewer resources. Here the students can barely understand the words in their books, much less the words that come out of my mouth. This may sound exaggerated, but I swear that it is true.

So, why teach children of this district English if they are just going to forget it when they have to go and work in the fields when they finish school? It is a hard question to answer, and I would be lying if I said that I had no trouble answering it. A simple way of looking at it has to do with the overall mission of Peace Corps in Cambodia itself. Essentially, what we are trying to do is improve the teaching methods of Cambodian English teachers. The reason why we teach primarily with counterparts is because we are trying to ease a shift from teacher centered learning techniques that those that are student centered. It is more of a teaching training assignment to give Cambodian teachers techniques to use in the classroom. These skills will hopefully be passed on to other teachers in the future for the benefit of the students. Aside from this, however, there is another way of possibly looking at it.

As part of the Peace Corps mission, we are charged with being unofficial ambassadors of the US in order to provide people in the world with a better image of America than what they know already. As the country director noted in our swearing in ceremony, “These are not the Americans that you have seen on television.” Part of this responsibility is explaining to our community about the positive aspects of America culture. The quest that many Americans have had to make a better life for themselves is one of these aspects that I can tell them about that could possibly have an impact. Whether or not this would create an entire generation of Willy Lomans is unforeseeable, but perhaps through teaching English to the children of Anchor, I can give them a skill that can enable them to do something more than be a rice farmer. This will probably not become a reality for many people in this community, but for a few who understand the value of education it might be.

It is difficult to determine what impact I will have on this community after I leave for America, but perhaps with a little education the people working at the bank will someday be from this town instead of one over forty kilometers away. I friend of mine recently asked me if I thought this whole thing was worth doing. I would have to say that yes, it is worth doing. There are more reasons behind this answer, but I think that having any kind of impact at all on this community will make the experience worth it because it would give the people of Anchor to have something that they would have otherwise never gotten.