Teaching, Poop, and Language Tests!

I have felt more relief today than I have ever felt in my entire life.  Okay, that’s probably a slight exaggeration, but today was pretty awesome. 

For the past two weeks I have been teaching an optional summer class at a local high school.  My co-teacher, Kat, and I were assigned to teach the 8^th grade.  English instruction begins in 7^th grade, so we were pretty nervous about teaching English to about 50 students who only have one year of English under their belts when we only have about 5 weeks of Khmer under ours. 

Nonetheless, we planned out a lesson and bravely went where no Peace Corps Trainee had gone before (just kidding, 5 groups have gone before us).  Our first class was…. interesting.  After realizing one of our activities was going right over our kids’ heads, we had to improv a new plan on the spot.  Thanks to Kat’s teaching experience and my “fake it ‘till you make it!” life motto, we managed to pull something together, but it was pretty shaky for a while there. 

When we walked into class on the second day, all of our students were covering their noses, with a general look of disgust on their faces.  My first thought was “Come on, I know I sweat a lot, but I do NOT smell that bad.”  I soon realized that the room really did smell like poop...and it probably wasn’t me.  After a few moments of conferring with Kat, we realized that it smelled like poop in our classroom because there was, in fact, poop in our classroom (the origin of this poop is sill a hot topic of debate).  Never fear, someone came in promptly to scoop the poop away with some paper and cover the rest with dirt.  All clean!

(Sorry I don’t have pictures of the poop)

Things went pretty swimmingly after that.  We soon realized that at least half of our students were not actually in the 8^th grade.  That became pretty obvious when a four year old joined our class.  But he was cute and paid attention, so we let him stay.  This definitely made the language gap a lot bigger, but we made a lot of gestures, used what little Khmer we knew, and somehow made it through the day. 

Later on we were able to teach with Cambodian co-teachers, which is what we’ll be doing for the next two years of our service.  We were very lucky to have extremely competent counterparts, but there is just a very different style of teaching here.  For example, if a student gets an answer wrong, they are simply told, “No” and told to sit down.  There’s no sort of attempt to lead them to the correct answer and certainly no encouragement.  It was pretty fun to watch Kat follow every “no” our counterpart said, with a very enthusiastic, “Good try!”.   

Today was the last day, so we did a short activity and then played some games.  I just have to say, Cambodian students freaking love Pictionary.  When we played that game, people could hear our kids yelling about four classrooms over.   Some of them weren’t even yelling out vocabulary words, they were just yelling.  But hey, they got pretty excited and showed us that they actually learned something in these last two weeks.  Coolio. 

Anyway, I could go on and on about our two weeks teaching in Cambodia, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go!  

Oh!  And I passed my practice language exam today, so YAY! 

The best photo I have ever taken.  Peace Corps, I want this on a pamphlet.  

Just teaching some vocab...

My class minus about 5 students

Yay!  Everyone gets a certificate!

I made one for myself, too!  I made it!