Week 27: Khmer New Year on the horizon

05/04/09

I reckon that, although we still have 3 more weeks left, this was probably the last week of productive teaching. The week after next is Khmer New Year but we can already sense the party vibes seeping into the classroom and threatening to reduce any allusion of concentration to mad excitement. Break times are already get longer and, instead of the usual skipping, tagging and wacking games, bottles of talcom powder and water balloons have appeared on the scene. Some of the kids have also put orange dye in their hair which makes for an interesting look when also mixed with the white talcom powder which everyone covers each other with. After break time it seems like half the class has gone grey!

However, despite the potential disruptions we've been making good progress with the Cutting Edge in Sarim's 10-14 year old classes. We're now on module 2 which is all about countries. I think it's quite difficult to find a good quality English text book for Asian students as they are usually very Eurocentric and the content is largely irrelevant to Asian learners. However, we chose Cutting Edge because, although some parts are verging on irrelevant, it's the best we've come across that is readily available in Cambodia. For example, I think that teaching the students at CLC the names of lots of countries isn't the most useful set of vocabulary and Tom and I decided that not all the activities in this module are possible in this class (as they don't even know most of the countries in their own language). However, the grammar is clearly presented and practiced and there are some good 'real life' sections such as having a conversation about where you're from.

The beginners class of 6-10 year olds is still going to use the old books although this week we read them a book which had lots of description of people's faces and then told them to draw their friend's portrait. They really enjoyed the activity and now we have some new student's work to put on the walls instead of the big, ripped "Selfintro Duction" posters.

At the end of last week Savorn (an ex-Youth Team student who is going to take over my CVTC class) and I went around to talk to all the CVTC students to talk to them about attendance because it has been steadily dropping and, more often than not, the class has been cancelled because there are only 2 or 3 students whereas we would like at least 8 (even though it's supposed to be compulsory for all 30 odd of the producers). We decided to merge the 12:30 class and the 16:00 class and they now start at 15:30 instead. On Monday and Tuesday we had 8 students but then on Wednesday no one came because they were busy sorting out their salaries and on Thursday there were only 3 students. Progress with the book has been extremely slow because of the poor attendance so we're still only on the 3rd or 4th page of the book which is pretty frustrating. Savorn and I are quite surprised because we both regularly get people asking us to teach them sometime in the midst of their busy schedules.

On Thursday we had a meeting with Theary and Savoeurn who gave us lots to think about before we leave. Savoeurn has asked us to help him plan a 1-day workshop to train teachers how to use the Cutting Edge books effectively. BAB Cambodia has education projects in a number of other provinces around Cambodia and they're hoping to standardise the English education by implementing Cutting Edge in all of these projects. Tom and I were already thinking of spending a day training Sarim as we're slightly worried about how she'll manage the book so we were glad to help Savoeurn with this. Another of his and Sara's ideas is to use some of the land behind the school building as a student agriculture project where each class gets a plot of land and can grow whatever they like there to give them a sense of responsibility. If they grow vegetables or fruit they can either keep it for themselves or sell it at the market. The basketball court is now complete - although it's hoped that eventually some more funds can be raised from visitors' donations in order to be able to purchase enough concrete to lay a better surface as bare earth isn't ideal for basketball - so Savoeurn has asked Tom to give him some ideas about how to set up some teams for basketball as well as for volleyball and football.

One other thing that came up during the meeting was Savoeurn's idea to have a leaving party for me and Tom with all the villagers who we got to know during our stay. Of course we thought that would be awesome so we came up with some ideas such as basketball contests and funny games. And Savoeurn plans to have the party on 10th April which is also my birthday!!

This week we also got invited to a wedding on the 12th and to three Khmer New Year events - dinner at Paa's house, a celebration at the pagoda and a celebration at CLC. Please forgive us if we spend the first few days back in Singapore sleeping!

On Friday, after going to CLC in the morning to talk to the CLC Education Team in a workshop about why we've introduced Cutting Edge, we came up to Phnom Penh again to buy 3 CD players for CLC and the CVTC so that they can play the listening activities from Cutting Edge. We got them from a huge shopping centre called Sorya (the only one in Phnom Penh to have esculators!) which was like stepping into Singapore. There were adverts for head massagers and we even had ice cream at Swensons!

I only have 5 minutes to pack my bag before we go back to Chamcar Bei so I'm off! Although wait I nearly forgot to mention that the King has decided to visit the village on the 29th of April!