What I Have to Work With

11-19-08

Probably the most obvious challenge to teaching in Cambodia is the schools themselves. From what I understand about the rest of the world, Cambodian schools are fairly similar to schools in most other developing nations. There is a large courtyard (which turns into a swamp during the rainy season) around which six long, rectangular buildings are arranged in a semi-circle. The buildings themselves are divided into the school rooms, and nothing else. Each building has either five or six classrooms. Like all the other schools that I have seen in Cambodia, the buildings are all painted yellow. The walls and floors are bare concrete, with the exception of one building, which is made of wood and has a dirt floor.

Each classroom is crammed with bench-desks, with very little room to move in between them. Sometimes students are crammed three to a desk. The class sizes are large, but not completely unmanageable; maybe thirty to forty kids per class. There is a high drop-out rate between the Lower Secondary School (grades 7, 8, and 9), and the Upper Secondary School (grades 10, 11, and 12). This is mostly due to parents pulling their kids out of school to work on the farm full time. They don't think that their children need to continue their expensive education when they are simply going to be working on the farm for the rest of their lives.

Pretty much the only materials I have to work with in each classroom is a white board, which ranges in quality from poor to unusable. There are English textbooks, which were put together with the help of the British a few years ago. They are not necessarily the best English textbooks on Earth, but for someone like myself who has never taught English before they are a good starting point. Fortunately my co-teacher is perfectly fine with deviating from the book and doing our own thing with the material.

Not all teachers are of this opinion. Even at my school there are English teachers who simply drone monotonously from the book, and the students usually learn nothing from these lessons. These teachers are usually not trained English teachers, but teach other subjects and have been made to teach English because that was the only job open. Some of them can't even speak English. Other teachers are simply going through the motions while they work on getting a different job or into Svay Rieng University. These are the teachers and classes that would benefit the most from a Peace Corps volunteer helping them to co-teach, but they are also the most resistant to new teaching techniques or to the perception that a foreigner is going to “steal” their job. And of course there are other worries too.

One of these teachers is a women, and when I observed her class it was very clear that she was highly uncomfortable with my presence. Even walking to and from class with me was extremely embarrassing for her. This is, of course, tied into gender relations in Cambodia, which is a subject for another entry, but it is clear that I won't be working with this teacher. She has plans to move away at the end of the year, so I don't feel too bad about not being able to teach with her. Still, it is too bad.

The students themselves are a story unto themselves. They are the ones who's families' care enough about education, or have enough money to send them on to Upper Secondary School. So they are for the most part fairly well behaved and eager to learn. All students are required to wear uniforms; dark pants and a white or light-colored shirt. Given how poor some of the families are, the uniformity is somewhat lessoned since students wear whatever their families can get them. You can easily tell which students come from the better off families because those students have two or three different shirts that they wear to school.

I have been pretty lucky in my school; the school director is willing to support me when I make my own schedule, and my co-teacher speaks very good English and is eager to learn and improve. He really cares about teaching, which can not necessarily be said about all the teachers. Getting to know this school has, of course, made me much more appreciative of the schools back in the United States. Even the poorest public schools back home have more resources than this one. Not to say that poor schools back home don't have other problems that aren't present here. But Chosen Valley High School doesn't so bad anymore.

Oh man, this place really must be changing me.