The Classes

I am not the world’s greatest English teacher, nor have I ever held grand visions of being one. How you could ever hope to accomplish this in the environment that I am in is beyond me. That being said, I consider what I do in the classroom to be more entertainment than real and rigorous classroom work. The majority of the students are not really interested in studying to the best of their ability; They know that, and I know that. If they were, they would find some way of leaving Angkor Chum district in search of a better education elsewhere. Every once in a while I bump into these students in Pourk or Siem Reap. I ask them how they are, and they tell me they have found a better school somewhere else. You cannot really blame them for leaving, but it does leave one less student in the classroom who can do the studies assigned to them. And believe me, these students are very rare. So while I am jealous that other volunteers have students who can read Animal Farm, I try and focus on doing the best I can with the students I have.

On a typical day, I walk into a classroom full of students who all rise to greet me. Standing at the doorway, I try to throw to throw my hat on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room to the amusement of onlookers. I always miss. After the students sit down, I begin the class by writing the date and the agenda on the board. I then ask the class to recite the date, after which I choose one student to read it out loud for the rest of the class. It is a routine activity, and I think it makes the students feel relaxed in the presence of a strange foreigner. The student picked at random to read the date is usually reluctant, but the students are usually reluctant to do anything that does not involve copying notes from the board or repeating words out loud. To get around this, I use the simple, beautiful, and effective art of peer pressure. In response to the answer “Awt Cheh” (“I can’t, I don’t want to”), I say the student’s name with vigor, smile, clap my hands, and encourage the other students to do the same. A sudden rousing chorus of voices and claps comes from the other students, and the poor thing is pressured into trying their best at reading the date. If they have trouble, I help them through it.

The next stage of the class is open ended. I can give them a grammar lesson, play a game, do a writing activity, or any number of things. The only thing I really have to do is teach the lesson from the book, which comes later. Anything that requires creativity is the hardest to teach, and anything formulaic and predictable is the easiest. Creativity is not something they are taught in any of their classes or in anything outside the home. Buddhist instruction, which is what the education system is modeled on, typically requires a student to be a blank slate. This is to say that they suppress all thoughts of their own in order to completely absorb what their master tells them. How this translates into the classroom is very simple. Were I to assign the students an essay, they would simply have no idea how to do it unless I spoon fed it to them piece by piece.

Grammar lessons have turned out to be the easiest things to teach because grammar is mechanical, predictable, and easily interchangeable. Grammar lessons also tend to be very dry, so I often try to put a few jokes in here or there to spice things up. In the example sentences I give, I often reference a long running joke between my counterpart and me. The joke is that Mr. Nou is constantly trying to steal or run away with my girlfriend, who is a travesty of a stick figure that I draw on the board. A sentence highlighting the use of the simple past, the past perfect, and the use of the word “By the time” might run something like this: “By the time I arrived at my home, Mr. Nou had already eaten dinner with my girlfriend.” Mr. Nou will then translate this, and raise his hands in triumph. It usually gets a laugh.

Another useful gag can be used when the students practice using the grammar they have learned. After writing an exercise on the board, I ask a student to come up to the front and do it. I carefully watch them as they write their answer, and if it looks incorrect I start to make sour looking faces and moan. The students laugh, and the person writing the answer knows that they must change their answer. If it looks like they are getting the right answer, I smile widely and sigh. The student ultimately has the chance to save face, something which valued very highly in this culture, despite the silliness of my actions

After this first session is complete, I usually turn the class over to Mr. Nou. He will usually write some vocabulary words on the board and go over the reading passage assigned in the book for that lesson. I usually help with the readings and the vocabulary practice, even though I know that the students could care less about what they are reading about. Here is what they often sound like.



The book was written for students in urban areas such as Phnom Penh, Battambang, Kampong Cham or others. It was never meant to be engaging or interesting to those in rural areas without access to significant amounts of resources. However, the government says we have to teach using this book. Most of what I do during this time is walk around the classroom making sure everyone is paying attention and not playing with their mobile phones. If one of those things goes off, I usually answer it and speak to the caller on the other end. Much hilarity often ensues.

After we are finished with the book, it is usually time for the lesson to be over. If extra time remains, I usually ask the students to translate something for me from Khmer into English. It usually works as a good closer. The students learn how their language fits in mine, and I learn a little bit more about Khmer script. Now the students usually complain that they are hungry, and so we let them go.