An English teacher’s day in Cambodia

My aunt and uncle have a rule about complaining: you only get one whinge per day.

So, if you stub your toe before you even get out of bed in the morning, you can have yourself a little cry, but that’s it. You’re done for the day. Even if you then leave your house, fall down the stairs, cross the street and get hit by a child riding a bicycle,  miss the bus to work because you were too busy yelling at the child, get fired because you’ve been late too many times, drink heavily for the rest of the day and fall up the stairs going home, and stub your toe getting back into bed.

You have to pick just one.

My whinge today is teaching.

I know, I know, all teachers complain about teaching. The kids are brats, there are so many papers to grade, the administration is always all up in yo’ grill, blah blah blah. You know what I have to say to that? They speak English!

To make matters worse, it is a cultural habit here to always respond with a nod when asked a question. Do you know where this address is? Nods yes. Do you have change for a five? Nods yes. Can I steal your tuk tuk? Nods yes.

I never get a response with the I-don’t-understand expression when I ask them to point to mom in the picture. It’s just a nod—I hear the words coming out of your mouth—which makes me count to ten and do breathing exercises frequently so I don’t shake the children violently and cry myself to sleep at night.

Now you can add in the teacher complaints of dealing with crying six-year-olds, that one kid who won’t ever shut up, and their unbelievable ability to cheat on everything.

If it weren’t for my schedule, I think I’d lose my mind.

6:30 am: Wake up. Or at least move my body from the sleeping position to standing. Actually waking up happens around 8 am.

7:00 am: After yawning, showering, yawning, and getting dressed I make an egg sandwich and have a little rest. (Yes mom, I take my vitamin every day).

7:20 am: Go to the street where my moto driver is waving and saying good morning. He’s great. Every morning he takes me to Modern International School and every afternoon he takes me home. I pay him $8 a week. You can bet he’ll be getting a good Christmas present.

8:00 am: Finally awake in time for my first class. 24 kindergarteners. We’re studying from a book called Number Magic. They all already know how to count to 1,000 and magic is frowned upon here, so I’d say it’s an effective learning device.

9:00 am: Same grade, different class. Except I’m pretty sure every one of these kids could be diagnosed with ADHD. At no point is everyone sitting in a seat—they are like whack-a-mole, one sits down and another one gets up to wander—and by Thursday I lose my voice from telling them to sit down and do their work.

10:00 am: 31 preschoolers. One teacher’s assistant. And a kid who I can only politely describe as an ass hole. He’s smarter than the other kids and about four years older, so he flies through his work and begins his next task of terrorizing the teacher.

He started this new routine of putting on his backpack midway through class and pretending to leave, saying, “Bye Teachaa.” He throws me his shittiest smile and waltzes toward the door. The TA yells something in Khmer about breaking his knee caps and then he runs back to his desk to sulk.

11:00 am: Hop on the moto and close my eyes for the fifteen minute ride home. I close them partly because of exhaustion and partly because this is peak traffic time and I’d have an anxiety attack if I watched all of the accidents we narrowly avoided.

11:15 am – 5:00 pm is my saving grace period. I usually eat lunch, go for a run around the Royal Palace or do yoga at home, write a little, catch up on reading, eat dinner, and walk to ELT—the university where I teach night classes.

5:25 pm: I have my oldest class of 6B students, which is the equivalent to seniors in high school. I love teaching this class because they’re almost fluent and really funny.

This past Friday our topic was gossiping and rumors so we played telephone to show how rumors spread and change. It got them practicing listening and speaking, and they cracked up when the rumors I started were about someone in the class liking someone else.

6:30 pm: Last class of the night and it’s high school freshman. They think they’re all that and a bag of chips. But they’re smart. And they love pop culture, so I get to hear about how amazing Justin Bieber is every day. I’ll admit it, though, they’re pretty good kids.

7:30 pm: Walk home and make dinner.

8:30 pm: Do a little lesson planning for the next day.

9:30 pm: Check emails and Facebook stalk.

10:00 pm: Get ready for bed and read (I’m as nerdy as they come).

10:30 pm: Lights out.

Alright, so I guess this vent session made me realize how easy I have it. I only work five hours a day—that’s 25 hours a week for all you mathmagicians out there—and I still make enough to pay rent, save a little, eat well, have a couple adult beverages with friends, and get a weekly $4 pedicure/massage.

As we say here daily, “Only in Cambodia.”

What you can buy with $50. Are you for riel?

A commonly asked question I get from my peeps back home is, “What kind of money do they use over there?” Over there implying Cambodia, the other side of the world, and/or space.

It’s an interesting system of bartering, similar to fur traders of the colonial times, and you can pretty much use whatever you like to pay for a good or service. I tend to sing for all of my meals, but sometimes I’ll give them a palm reading depending on how well I’m in touch with the spirits that day.

Actually, they use the US dollar.

And these bills for change. Whoa! I’m loaded.

Instead of carrying around 11 lbs of coins, I can rid my wallet of pennies for riel. I’m thinking of using this as the title to my next rap album, penniez fo riel.

It’s about 4,125 riel to a dollar, but everyone goes by the 4:1 ratio. I like to think I’m clever handing someone 4,000 riel when they ask for a dollar. Surprisingly, less than a nickel loss doesn’t bother anyone too much.

But what does a dollar actually mean in Cambodia?

I’ve come up with a list of some very important goods and services under $50 in Phnom Penh, so if you’ve got a fifty and some time in this city you can:

1. Have the ladies at Luna Boutique make a dress for you.

I needed to play the role of English teacher in the upcoming film “Real Life” so I found a dress shop around 51^st and Sihanouk to make my costumes. Every dress in the store is $45 and that includes alterations. Ta da!

 

2. Stock the kitchen and buy groceries for a week.

A pan, pot (not that kind), spatula, spoon, knife, cutting board, silverware, plates, and pitcher

+

my groceries—use your eyes

=

$45

 

3. Get really really really drunk. Riel-ly. I’m done, I swear.

Let me break this one down for you with a general list of prices for happy hour and also happy hours that you just have to pay more for.

Draft beer: $.50-1.50

Cocktails: $1.75-3.50

Shots: $1.00-2.00

Limes: free with salt

If you spend more than $50, you were pick pocketed.

 

4. Relax at Riverfront

Although this is an extremely touristy area, I won’t act like it’s not fun.

There are approximately a gazillion restaurants. They’re all about the same price with, unfortunately, about the same menu, which includes pizza, hamburgers, and typical Khmer soups, fried things, and steamed things. All very good. Lunch and dinner shouldn’t cost you more than $15, though—unless you’re including #3.

After lunch, walk across the street and watch the boats go by or the kids playing.*

*This activity is free.

Once watching the kids playing has worn you out—children make me tired just looking at them—you can go back across the street to get a massage.

There are more massage parlors here than there are Starbuck’s in the US, so don’t worry about trying to find one. Same goes for mani/pedi salons.

And of course . . . shopping!

Any good you want, they’ve got. T-shirts, movies (bootlegged of course), jewelry, books, and buddhas.

If anyone would like to provide me with $50 to do more of these activities I am always taking donations.

 

A classroom in Cambodia

Any idiot knows what happens when you assume. So why do I keep feeling like the only ass here?

My latest blunder came from teaching at an orphanage. I assumed I’d be teaching little darlings. But I was what, class? Very good, kids, I was wrong.

Part of our training for the LanguageCorps certificate included two weeks of student teaching. For three of us who stayed in Phnom Penh—some moved to either Thailand or Vietnam—we were assigned to teach at an orphanage called SSD.

This was my classroom.

The extra students in the back . . .

and the ones who came and went as they pleased.

Forget about the eight-year-olds trying to concentrate, I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to teach or feed the chickens.

After pulling myself together, I wrote my name on the board, gave them my warmest Fraulein Maria smile and tried to start at the very beginning. Clearly, I hadn’t yet shaken my delusion of eight studious children hanging on my every English word.

And then in walked James Bond.

Cambodian kids have a habit of nicknaming themselves after celebrities and, lucky me, I had a self-proclaimed 007 in my class.

He was just that. I would turn around for two seconds and he’d have disappeared leaving a wake of disruption, beat up one of the little girls, or managed to take apart an entire computer keyboard—where he procured it is still a mystery to me—and pass out the parts like tokens.

This all happened the first day. In one hour.

After the class from hell, my supervisor told me that Bond, James Bond wasn’t even supposed to be in my beginner class, but the intermediate. So the next morning I put on my big girl panties and kicked out that mothe— I mean, that dear, sweet boy.

These were my other students.

With a bit of seat rearranging (boy girl boy girl), they sat with their hands clasped and eyes bright to learn fruits, vegetables, and meals. Over the next week and a half we smiled, laughed—ha ha ha—played joyful games, sang “Kum ba yah,” and sobbed and sobbed when it came to an end.*

*Now would be the part of the cartoon when you pull out an oversize needle that twinkles at the end emphasizing the sharp point and tap my dream bubble, bursting it into a million pieces. POP!

When James Bond went to kill a different class, I assumed (again) that my class would be perfect. Really, kids are all insane and the only way to control any of them is with straight jackets and muzzles. I’m aware of how that sounds.

The alternative is playing lots and lots of games. They also loved rewards like Hello Kitty stickers and stars by their name on the board. And, little by little, I started to notice they were actually a pretty good group of kids.

This is Sannara Pa. She was one of the youngest, but by far the smartest. Very clever. Too clever. She also erased the board for me every day after class, so obviously she was my favorite.

This is CL. If you’re familiar with the K-Pop group 2ne1 then you already knew that was the name of one of the singers (I know you already knew that). She was a smarty too, and a definite diva.

This wise guy is Kammara Streymon (another celebrity name). For the entire two weeks I thought he said Freymon and no one corrected me because that’s rude. Makes sense.

Aw, Raksmeg. She started coming to class halfway through the first week, but she caught on quickly. She was a giggly thing—I’m beginning to understand why I was a difficult student.

And Pa. This kid is the embodiment of the phrase “ants in your pants.” During the entire two weeks he never stopped moving and he learned one word: green pepper. He liked saying it over and over. At first I tried to get him to learn the other words, but then I realized green pepper is actually a pretty fun word to say, so if you can’t beat ‘em . . . green pepper, green pepper, green pepper, green pepper.

I’m going to break my vow of anti-assuming, but I’m going to assume that kids act like kids anywhere in the world. They get bored easily, want to joke with their friends, love playing games and hate taking tests.

After accepting these facts, I figured out a successful class is made up of two words:

Controlled chaos.

It took a few days, but fun and rewards equaled moderate attention spans and happy maniacs kids. What more can you ask for?