Day 4: Exams

We're taking exams this week in all General English classes.

You'd think exams would be easy--you don't have to prepare anything, you don't need to think of a lesson plan, you don't have to talk and demonstrate. You just sit there for an hour and a half and chill.

Truth be told, I find exams more annoying than not--you have to show up early in order to control the positions of the desks and which ones different students sit in; you have to make everyone respect the fact that silence means silence; and you're stuck with nothing to do for 1.5 hours but carefully watching them and stopping them from cheating.

I like to slip off my shoes and sit on the teacher's desk, resting my excruciating hawkish gaze on each and every one of them. No one cheats in my classes--and gets away with it. I've failed students for it before.

On the other hand, some students aren't incorrigible cheaters. Many do their own work because they are incredibly perfectionistic and terrified of making a mistake. It's almost funny to watch them work. They finish incredibly quickly because they have over-studied all their lives; they then spend the next hour frantically re-reading and re-re-reading their answers, rooting out any mistakes, actual or perceived, and becoming increasingly stressed as time goes on.

I find it almost funny in light of the fact that for all their perfectionism, they still make mistakes such as forgetting to capitalize the pronoun "I", forgetting how to use English punctuation, forgetting the -s on 3rd person singular verbs, or just writing trite expressions like "he will be go" or "In Cambodia have many problems." They spend an hour whiting-out and re-writing a paragraph that I'm going to spend 10 seconds reading. There is no forest, only trees.

I shouldn't laugh at them...but my attitude towards academia and test-taking has always been flippant at best. I can assure you I'm not going to grade them on how perfect their letter "d" looks.

And then you get the students who ask bizarre questions. This evening, one of my students asked me, "Teacher, do I have to capitalize a word at the beginning of a sentence?"

Me: "Yes, the first letter is always capitalized."

Student: "But teacher, I don't want to capitalize."

Me: "Then you'll be wrong."

Student: "But do I have to capitalize??"

Me: "If it needs capitalization, do it." (By this time other students are taking advantage of the situation and beginning to exchange whispers).

Student: "But teacher..."

Me: "If it needs capitalization, then capitalize." (Sits stoically and refuses to respond to any further inquiries).

I'm still shaking my head over that one. And I get to go through this every two to four weeks.

Day 2: Teeching is Fun!

I have now gone to the internet cafe no less than three times today, for all the same reasons as yesterday.

When I wasn't running away from the sounds of construction, I was teaching. Teaching has taught me first-hand what comedians mean when they say, "tough crowd." Some groups of people are just hard to handle, for whatever reason. But I'll save the cross section of my five classes for a future date--believe me, you're gonna hear all about my Gang of Monks, as well as my frustrations with the 20-year-old junior high schoolers in my morning class. But another day.

Today, I had a classroom observation. Usually this means you are under scrutiny for doing something wrong; in my case, I was showing a new teacher how to teach. I wish I'd been afforded that luxury when I began teaching--instead, I was rather brutally placed in front of Chinese kindergarteners and their vicious mothers, along with an assistant looking on at all times and judging my every move. And I had no idea what I was doing. AWKWARD.

So I'm always glad to help out a newbie. I enjoy mentorship. I'm probably more flattered that they chose me than I should be. (I have a paranoid friend who tried to insist the new teacher in question was a mole designed to judge me; the thought that that might be true hasn't been able to break through the wall of flattery yet.)

I teach for six hours a day, every day; I earn more than a lot of Khmer teachers who work harder than I do under far more deplorable conditions. Yet despite my relative luxury, my salary is low enough, and my skin white enough, that I will never be able to afford to go back to America. That's the thing about EFL--once you begin, you're essentially stuck in it for life. There's really no escape.

Damn, I just depressed myself.

Girls with Funny Accents

Well-known factoid about me: I'm not a native speaker of English.

That is, I'm not a native speaker of English if you ask the general public. Despite the fact that I was born and raised in Ohio, USA, among a family that migrated to this hemisphere over 400 years ago (from England!), I apparently speak English with a funny accent.

In my work as a cashier, I was daily asked "where I was born" because I "have an accent". It got to the point where I would just start making up stories. "I was born in Palestine." Lol. "My mother is a Romanian refugee and my father is the Saudi Ambassador to New Guinea. I moved around a lot as a kid." Lol.

Okay, English is actually my first and only language, but just no one seems to realize that. Since I have come to Cambodia, this has already happened to me twice (which is a lot considering I've spent the last 9 out of 12 months in virtual isolation).

The first guy was utterly convinced that I am English or Australian (you have no idea how many people think I'm Australian) because I "talk like it." This guy wasn't even a native speaker of English himself! Come on!! Is my voice that obvious?

Some other guy told me I have a distinct French accent when I try to speak Khmer. Me: WTF? I can't even speak French! How is that even possible??

So there you have it. I talk funny, no matter which language I speak.

Close Encounters of the Cambodian Kind

I have two favorite restaurants in Phnom Penh. By strange coincidence, both of them are blue: The Blue Pumpkin and The Blue Dolphin.

The Blue Dolphin is a family/bar-girl run restaurant with cheap delicious food. It's not air-conditioned, but they have comfy wicker chairs, chocolate shakes, free water, and the girls who work there are really nice. It's really close to my house, too.

The Blue Pumpkin is farther away, but is really chic. You can go in with your laptop and work for hours and hours in the air-conditioned, free-WiFi, comfy-white-couched environment. The problem is that you get charged Western prices for all the food (some of which, like the Pumelo-pork salad, is worth it).

The people at Blue Pumpkin, by the way, hate me. Every time I go in, I always wind up doing something douchey: I break a glass, I leave dirty footprints on the couch, I buy a glass of water and then sit there for seven hours without buying anything else, I start fights over the cost of their food, my friend falls asleep and snores loudly, etc. Sometimes, I annoy them simply because they think they've got me figured out.

Them: "I know! You want cinnamon ice-cream, right? Like how you've ordered for the last 27 days in a row!"

Me: "LOL!!! Today I want PASSION FRUIT ice cream!" And that's annoying of me. I am truly the Blue Pumpkin's problem child.

So, I decided to give them a break from my demanding, contrarian ways and hit up the Blue Dolphin instead. In doing so, I got a lesson on the Cambodian concept of personal space. Or lack thereof.

I came in with a mass of final exams. For some time, I contentedly sat and graded them in the cool, fan-generated breeze.

Suddenly, I became aware of a green-shirted presence.

Looking up, I saw that one of the girls had, like an angel of death, materialized over my left shoulder. She was intently watching me work.

There was nothing left to do but acknowledge her presence.

This made it impossible to work, but. . .okaaay. . .

Then, for reasons still unfathomable to me, she bent down, hugged me, and proceeded to rest her hands more or less permanently on my shoulders. Her eyes were fixed on my exams, and I was trapped like a rat.

Eventually, after I crammed the exams back in their envelope and began pointedly drinking my glass of water, she wandered away. But I didn't dare take the exams back out. Not a chance.

Because grading English exams is the most fascinating thing anyone could possibly do--except when you're the teacher that has to grade them!*

*In front of an adoring audience to boot...