In a bit of the bigger picture, training goes on. I’ve now been in the country just about a month. I’ve been living with my host family a little more than three weeks, and I’ll be with them another 4-5 weeks, until the end of training. After that, I’ll be moving in with another host family…somewhere in the country of Cambodia. Granted, Cambodia is about the size of Oklahoma, so there is not a whole lot of difference from one side of the country to the other, but there are big and small towns, big and small families, etc. A week from now, I’ll find out where in Cambodia I’ll be living for the next two years. It might seem surprising that I don’t that yet, but to me it actually seems very soon to be finding that out. I’ve had at least one dream this week about getting a placement hours and hours away from everyone else, although in reality, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many bad sites to be had. In western Cambodia there is Battambang (big-ish city) and the Thai border, towards the north Siem Reap and the Angkor temples, west is the border with Vietnam, and south could be one of the coastal provinces. We’ll see!
This week, the teaching trainees among us (about 2/3 of our group of 55) got to actually get into the classroom and do 6 days’ worth of practice classes. Teaching is pretty fun, but doing it every day is EXHAUSTING. Em and Andy, if you’re reading this, I have a not-really-newfound respect for what you guys do. Maybe it is especially tiring when your class consists of 60 Khmer teens crammed 3 to a desk learning from books that are far too advanced for their knowledge of English. Still, I only had to teach an hour a day - well, that and watch two other hours of teaching, speak slowly to the brave students during breaks, and pose for pictures one by one with a good portion of the girls in my class. Now next week sounds like a breeze. I just have to sit back and learn again.
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Teaching has taught me that being the student is more fun than being the teacher. :) But teaching is like anything - you build up your stamina though repetition. I teach 5 classes a day and at this point it's no problem coming up with 250 minutes' worth of material, though if I ask my students to give a 10-minute presentation, which seems like cake to me, they panic. But between 10 minutes and 250 is a learning process that's similar to building a workout routine. My advice in both instances is the same: Do a little more each day, and involve your iPod as much as possible.
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