The Assignment So Far Part Two

When I first came to the Anchor district, I was filled with a kind of callow enthusiasm. Having just finished training in Kampong, my head was full of plans about what I could do as an American volunteer in this northern outpost. I arrived at my site ready to take on whatever challenge was in front of me, but I probably would not have been so enthusiastic had I known what I would face. There are countless pieces of vital information that I wish I had known when I arrived. Beginning with the history of the district, I was oblivious in knowing that this community was almost at the end of their first decade of peace in nearly thirty years. I was to discover only later that this current era is the first in a long time in which students do not have to run for shelter when mortar rounds fall on their schools. It is also the first time that the district can offer any kind of higher education than secondary school. It is in this place that a young American volunteer came to teach English, and found himself bewildered by what he saw.

Two months have passed since the day I came here. During this time, I have struggled every day to deal with at least some part of my situation. From teaching, secondary projects, Khmer skills, cultural barriers, the living situation, ants, frightening tropical illnesses, to the very social fabric of the town itself, there are some days when I come home feeling just wiped out from even trying to make any sort of life here. Yet despite all of these hardships, I do believe that this is all completely and utterly worth doing. If it was not, I do not think that I would be here.

Teaching is the reason why I was sent here in the first place, and I think that this is probably the best thing that I can do for the district as a volunteer. It has taken me a long while to figure out what are effective teaching methods, but right now it seems that I seem to be making some headway. Most volunteers come into this country into schools that have students that can read, write, and speak English well by tenth or eleventh grade. As I mentioned in my first report on the assignment here, this is not the case in my district. The student’s abilities in this rural district are really far behind those in more urban areas of Cambodia, and it does not help that their textbooks, the heinous English For Cambodia, is not what they need to be studying.

The problem with the book is that it is designed for students in an urban environment like Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. The subject matter is accessible to students who have fairly easy access to a variety of resources such as dictionaries, the Internet, English books, and foreigners. However, using it to teach the sons and daughters of farmers who lack these resources is an almost futile process. There are entire chapters devoted to learning about airplane travel, the history of London, or Ted’s Favourite Island (with the British spelling). They are bombarded with useless vocabulary such as boarding pass, Hyde Park, and Corsica (Ted’s Favourite Island). I realize that I have not been an English teacher for very long, but it seems to me that a person who cannot answer the question, “What are you doing today?” probably has a bigger problems than not knowing where Corsica is. Combine this with very little grammar and speaking practice, and you have a typical student in Anchor High School.

A favorite teaching episode of mine comes from when Mr. Nou and I were conducting a free writing exercise. There was one question on the board, which read, “Who are you?” The students were given instructions to answer the question in English with responses such as, “My name is Chay Lonn. I live in Daun Sva village, and I have two older sisters,” but they were free to use any vocabulary they wanted. Most of the students were able to do it, and it seemed simple enough. One young man wrote down in his notebook. “My name is (name omitted). I am a minister. I have two younger brothers.” The student had no idea what a minister was. It was just a vocabulary word that meant nothing to him, but he decided he would put down anyway just to have something to put down.

So how do I get around this problem? I have come up with two methods that seem relatively effective. The first thing to do is to not teach using English for Cambodia. I cannot do away with the book completely, due to the POE’s (Provincial Office of Education) regulations, but there are ways in which you can work around it. The classes are divided into two-hour sessions, I have come up with an agreement with my co-teacher to do something different with the first hour of the class. Currently, I am alternating between teaching quick grammar lessons and English comprehension games during this first hour. By doing this, I seem to be making some headway in the student’s English abiltities. It is slow going because the students do not know really how to put English words together correctly, but I see a little bit of improvement so far. It is also useful because I can use the group assignments I give them to go around the classroom and give them individual help.

The second method involves taking that god-awful book English For Cambodia, and coming up with a lesson that makes the material in it remotely accessible. The book is divided into chapters, with three units to a chapter. One unit is supposed to take up the space of an entire lesson, but the section is usually so hard by itself that this does not happen. What I typically end up doing is playing around the comprehension questions at the end of a reading section to make them more understandable, making up some better questions at the end of the lesson that have to do with the vocabulary, or using a particular chapter to teach about something out of the book. For example, some exercises that are too hard by themselves can be used for teaching a grammar lesson. It can be a lot of work, but if you do not do it the class can be very boring and uninteresting for both the teachers and students.

My counterpart, Mr. Nou, does not know how to teach without the book, but he is gradually picking up on some of the techniques I use in the class. I am trying to get him to speak more in English in the class, but he speaks more in Khmer because the students do not understand English very much. There are a lot of moments when the students do not understand the instructions I give them, and he has to explain to them in Khmer what they should be doing. Some of the games and exercises I have introduced seem to be very popular with the students, such as a competitive form of “Telephone,” and I am hoping that Mr. Nou will take some of these games and use them for his classes in the future.

Every once and a while, there a few light hearted moments that help me get through the day. The other day, I was going some vocabulary that Mr. Nou had pulled out from the book in an 11th grade class. I was explaining what an airplane was, and in an effort to explain it I drew a picture of one on the chalkboard. I drew a box, put some wings and propellers on it, and called it an airplane. I am admittedly not the best artist, but for some in the class it looked like something else. One of the boys at the back of the class called out, “Is that a condom?” It was so ridiculous that I could not help but laugh.

I am not worried so much about making an impact in this community because I can already see that happening. I know of one story, which I only learned about recently, where this clearly was the case. During the rainy season, our school was flooded with water from the adjacent and overflowing rice fields. The buildings remained dry, but the students and teachers were forced to walk through wide stretches of water and mud in order to get to class. The first time that the water was very high, many of the teachers did not want to work. The school director was hearing their complaints one morning, when he noticed that I had simply rolled up my pants, took off my socks and shoes, and was wading through the warm and sticky mud to get to class. He then said to the rest of the teachers, “Listen, if that American is going to go teach, then you should go and teach.” This shamed the teachers into going to school, and class was held that day much to every one’s immediate delight or disappointment, depending on how you look at it. Teachers taught, students listened, and life continued on as normal.

Life Outside The Classroom

Other than teaching, there is really not much to do right now. I read a lot, practice the violin, bicycle around the district, and walk through the country. I have a few ideas for secondary projects, but they involve knowing a great deal more of Khmer than I do already. I have a Khmer teacher that I am currently seeing three times a week, and I am hoping that after some time I will be able to do things like start a hygiene and first aid class at the health NGO in the village. Cambodia is a particularly dirty county, and promoting basic cleanliness would probably be a good and feasible project.

I am getting to know the staff at an agricultural NGO in my town named ADRA. I have the idea of possibly working with them to possibly start a garden or some other kind of agricultural project at the school. Most of the kids are probably never going to leave the district, and it would be valuable for them to learn about the different ways they can grow food on their own. The culture here is, arguable, very materialistic. Any attempt to draw their attention away from cell phones, TV’s, computers, or motorcycles and focus it on how they are going to need to feed themselves and their country in the next ten years is probably a good one.

Life continues on here…