As I was emailing with an old professor of mine, I realized that I have not posted an update recently. So to update everyone: I started teaching! I teach grades 4, 5, and 6, teach the teachers, and teach a small group of high school students at night. Lots of English to teach! Below I am going to share some small anecdotes and stories about how teaching has gone so far.
the kids LOVE stickers, I bought some stickers and cut up to hand out during the breaks... this may have been a mistake because now all of the students reach through my window at school saying "som sticker muej (one sticker please)"
how many times can someone teach ABCs? although English is my first language, I think that because I have taught the ABCs so much, I have it memorized even better than before
most of my classes are incredible with such great students who love to participate! When we play competitive games, they get so into it to learn and I think it is helping them memorize
needing to remember that the Latin alphabet for a non-Latin alphabet user is hard: I think the biggest learning lesson from teaching younger kids is that it should not be expected they understand the ABCs immediately, nor how letters sound; the Khmer alphabet/words look something like this សួស្តីខ្ញុំឈ្មោះ Alex (this says "hi my name is Alex"). I have started to learn the Khmer alphabet with the first grade teachers and everytime I look at the Khmer alphabet, I think "oh my gosh this is how the kids probably think when they read English" which is that letters unfamiliar to them are very overwhelming); and so it is always something to keep in mind of helping kids sound out words and learning how to read with the Latin alphabet
Short story: there is a girl in my 6C class who speaks English very well and sometimes during class she asks "can I rizz you?" (for those who are older, rizz means "style, charm, or attractiveness"/ short for charisma (Webster)). She then tells me a pick-up line in English which is always funny! (one was when she said "If I could rearrange the alphabet I would put U and I together")
Short story: some days I always have to be prepared to teach or not to teach because the school schedule changes! For example, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week, the school had exams. I did not know about this until Monday and so when I went to school there was a lot of running around by the teachers to get the exams. I ended up helping monitor the 1st grade exams which was learning the first 4 letters of the Khmer alphabet and also numbers. Thank goodness I knew those 4 letters and the Khmer numbers because I had a lot of kids asking questions on help. So imagine me trying to explain how to count in Khmer to a lot of kids (also don't worry there was another teacher in the classroom, he was just helping the other kids!). I came back to the school in the afternoon (accidentally 1 hour early, so I just did some work) and all of the teachers were grading the exams. Because I cannot read Khmer, I ended up helping some of the teachers' kids color and also play hide and seek. So while all the teachers were seriously grading papers, I was running my own little fun camp time (I also taught some of them the ABCs). The second day of exams, I started to help monitor one class, but then one of the teacher's kids came (the kid is 3) and she wanted to go color again, and so we colored at my desk. And then in the afternoon all the kids did arts and crafts at my desk!
The teachers are so friendly: many of them bring snacks to school for me to try and they also bring fruit!
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