Settling into School

After our first two days of settling in, we got stuck into our volunteering. As we mentioned in our last post, we didn't have too much to do during our first week really because Susie had another volunteer in her classroom (an annoying German guy who wasn't able to teach anything which made it quite painful to sit through the lessons!), and John's Khmer teacher was teaching his classes about Pchum Ben, the Cambodian festival that took place the 2nd week we were here (more about that later!). So we had quite a chilled, but slightly frustrating first week. We both wanted to get stuck into things, but there wasn't much chance to really.

The school is very well resourced, but there doesn't seem to be much help for the Khmer teachers, and the English lessons are variable at best! There's a lot of parroting, and read and repeat, and the student's aren't encouraged to use their brains very much. Their knowledge of English vocabulary is therefore pretty good really, and they can translate all manner of English words, but they are pretty incapable of answering simple questions or making sentences themselves! At the start of every lesson, all the students stand up and say "Good morning teacher" in chorus. You then have to respond "Good morning, how are you today?", and they all reply "I'm fine thank you (well they actually say sank you!)and you?". But they reply like that no matter what question you ask before, so if you asked them what they did last night, they'd reply the same. It's really cute for the first couple of days, but soon you're willing them to tell you how they really are!

That said, they are all really really keen to learn, and they all want to give you the answer or read out the sentence that needs reading or whatever. They don't call you by your name - partly because it's more respectful in Cambodia not to use names, but also partly because they have a lot of volunteers and they probably can't remember them all - so they all call you "'char", which is their shortened version of teacher, and you have continual shouts of 'char, char' whenever the kids need help or attention. They all try their very hardest all the time and so they are great to teach. We're teaching them their 'topic' classes, which means two lessons on the topic of the month (while we're here we've got 'The World around Us', 'Religions and celebrations around the World' and 'Past and Future' as our topics), one arts and craft lesson, one maths and science lesson and one games session per week. Arts and Crafts and Games are fun but language is definitely an issue for the other lessons! Oh well, I'm sure some of it will go into their brains somewhere!

Our trips to and from school are pretty manic too! We've been cycling it everyday. It's about 5km to school, and Cycling here is a real experience anyway - to start with they drive on the right, so that's confusion number one - I'm mostly dealing with it OK, but every now and again I get confused - especially on roundabouts! It also doesn't help when people drive on the wrong side of the road, if they can't cross the traffic to the correct side! Luckily it's mostly mopeds and bikes on the roads, rather than cars, so nothing moves too fast! I'm going to film my bike ride to school one morning though, because it's impossible to describe the mayhem!

Our first week went by pretty quickly, with settling in and getting to know our way round and about. Then the second week was a funny one because the school was closed all week because of Pchum Ben. We had to go in on Monday and Tuesday to do some cleaning/maintenance work, but that was all. John was feeling pretty ill on those two days (and the weekend before) so he didn't come into school, but left Susie to brave it alone! The work consisted of lots of scrubbing the classrooms clean, painting some benches (2 weeks later now Susie still has paint in her hair!) and entertaining the kids that came along to "help"! They weren't the most fun two days, but I suppose they were necessary for the school! Susie did have a fun hour or so though when one of the dinner ladies taught her how to make her a little bird model out of palm leaves!

Susie's beautiful bird

Then this third week, we've actually got stuck into teaching. We're teaching religions. Susie's class spent 2 days learning about the religious buildings and symbols of 3 religions, 1 day learning about the water cycle (it's rained a lot here so she thought that'd be appropriate!) and 1 day making Buddhist wheels, in the same way you make snowflakes out of paper at Christmas! John's class spent two days learning about Buddhism and Hinduism (which confused them entirely since the religion here is really a combination of the two, plus some animism!), and then had it (supposedly) easy for two days while his class had some computer lessons. The school has gradually accumulated about 8-10 laptops which they are starting to use to teach the students basic computer skills. However John was helping on their first lesson, so he had quite a hard time trying to explain what a mouse was and how to use it!

All this week has had the extra added difficulty of the fact that we had some pretty torrential rain on tuesday night, and so a lot of Siem Reap is flooded.

The view from our room of the road outside

We biked to work on tuesday morning, but it was through nearly knee depth water most of the way there and back!

Which is the river, which is the road??

All the kids, and most of the teachers, have flooded houses. Some of them are apparently waist deep, and all the areas around their houses are really flooded too. This has meant that the kids are pretty exhausted, as none of them are really getting any sleep, and also that our numbers are pretty flexible, since some kids are coming morning and afternoon because their state schools are closed, and some aren't coming at all because they're having too much fun swimming in the swimming pools they've suddenly gained by their houses!!

On a walk to see some of the kids homes

On wednesday and thursday we got a lift into school and back by landrover, because the floods are getting deeper - not because we've had more rain but because our journey to school is alongside the river, and the river has burst its banks, and more and more is flowing down! Then on friday school was cancelled because the guy who drives the landrover had to go away and so nobody could get there.

Anyway, that's a vague update on our lives in school. We've been up to a lot else outside of school, but that'll have to wait for another post!