Practicum

8-14-08

For the last week we have been doing practice teaching at the local High School here in Tuk Phos. School technically is on summer vacation, but at the end of the school year, after the Peace Corps had met with local school officials and determined that this would be one of the training villages, the school had asked people to sign up for these practice lessons. In the United States if you asked kids to volunteer to go to more classes during the summer you would have maybe four or five kids whose parents forced them to go. Here, though, there are four separate classes, and they are all full. I had eighteen kids in my class the first day. Four days later I had 32.

My group of students is going into grade 11, which puts them at about age 16 or 17. The Cambodian Ministry of Education mandates that all students wear uniforms, so all the students wear white shirts and dark blue skirts or pants. The schoolroom itself is bare-bones; the rooms are pretty much just bare concrete with wooden desks that are probably as old as I am.

The Tuk Phos trainees were divided into four groups of three. Each person teaches for 45 minutes, and then there is a fifteen minute break, the kids come back in, and the next person teaches. So not only are these kids coming in during summer vacation for classes, but they are coming in for three-hour long classes.

I have never taught before; my “teaching experience” that I needed to accrue before being accepted into the Peace Corps was nothing like this. While we are encouraged to collaborate with our group on lessons, during our teaching time we are basically on our own. As if the pressure of teaching for the first time wasn't enough, there are also Peace Corps advisors sitting in the back of the rooms during the lessons. Sometimes it is our local LCF's, but sometimes it is some of the training staff, or even the training director. The deputy director of the school is also lurking about and watching our lessons; he speaks a good bit of English, but has a very Cambodian outlook on English education.

The only English textbook available in Cambodia was put together with the help of the British I don't know how many years ago. The book is...not the greatest. But it's all we have, and we are pretty much required to teach what it wants. I think I made an ok go of it; I chose a chapter based around a “letter” talking about employment opportunities. The first day I helped them read through it, then I had them pick out the words they did not understand. Then we defined them and worked on pronunciation. The next day we did more pronunciation work and played hangman to really get them to know these words well. This was the day that the school's deputy director sat in on my lesson. His opinion was that games were not the best way to teach the words and that we should teach one chapter a day and then move on. Whatever.

Yesterday, my third day of teaching, I had the group divide into groups and work on some of the questions related to the chapter. I failed to take into account that they all had used, hand-me-down books with all the answers already filled out. So I did some quick thinking and revised the questions so that the answers were different. By this point they were probably getting pretty sick of this particular chapter. Too bad.

Today, the last and final day of our formal teaching, I read through the story and then read it through again deliberately making mistakes. They never caught that I was leaving the “s” off the end of words, so I segued into a lesson on plurals. I think it went well. Tomorrow we have another class, but it is supposed to be an “in-formal” lesson of some kind. I'm going to send the class out on a scavenger hunt. Assuming they all come back it should be fun.

Whether or not they have actually learned anything over the last week is certainly debatable, but in the end I'm still alive.