So the training is over and I'm in the class! Well actually I unofficially started on Monday as the girl I was taking over from - and should have been 'shadowing' was ill so I was asked to take the class!!! No preparation time whatsoever - here are my notes - just go for it!! Quite an exhausting day! Anyway, on Tuesday we had another day training and then I've been officially their teacher since Wednesday 26/2/14!
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| Sweeping the class before 9 o'clock - you can see how small it is! |
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| my class is the second one with the big wheel outside |
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| There is a younger class under the porch and another under the parasols! |
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| The well to clean hands and water the floor to limit the dust. |
In the morning I have 16 students and in the afternoon 8 students. They are in classes according to ability but you could have fooled me! They are from 9 to 14 years old and very different abilities which makes correcting their work complicated, and the hardest thing to cope with is the NOISE! There are about 100 kids morning and afternoon in about 20m x 20m and none of the classrooms have walls only bamboos! Alot of the volunteers who come for a day or two, sing a lot of songs with them and play noisy games so it is really hard for our classes to concentrate on learning their words and hear what I'm actually saying! Having said that, most of them are really keen to learn, can pick vocabulary up quickly and we do a lot of variations around one theme so they normally learn it in the end! The fun I have trying to explain games when I don't speak any Khmer is quite funny - a lot of gestures and leaping about! I'm having terrible trouble remembering their names as they are completely unpronouncable for us - example: a girl called Sotharoth is pronounced something like Tarurois with a French accent!!
Sophie and I ride our bikes to the school and have started wearing the 'sanitary towel' look-alikes on our faces as we both have sore throats - a lot of dust, traffic fumes, burning waste and general bad odeurs, so hopefully we'll feel better soon. I have (of course) had a very funny tummy for the past 3 days but everyone says it's normal - even though I've only drunk bottled water and never eaten food from the street sellers.... hopefully that'll get better soon too!
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| Sophie and I in our "sanitary towel" masks! |
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| Riding home with the students. |
Un peu de français pour mes amis - ceux qui ne parlent pas anglais - je vous aime comme meme!
J'ai du donner mes premières cours lundi car la fille que je remplacais était malade donc sans preparation j'ai survécu la journée! J'ai 16 élèves le matin et 8 l'après-midi agés de 10 à 14 ans. Normalement, ils sont par niveau mais leur capacités sont très diffèrents. La plus difficile c'est le bruit! Il y a d'environ 100 élèves le matin et l'après-midi dans un endroit 20m x 20m, et il n'y a pas de murs entre les classes, seulement du bamboo! Les volontaires qui viennent pour quelques jours seulement chantent beaucoup de chansons et jouent avec les enfants et c'est vraiment difficile pour mes élèves d'apprendre le vocabulaire et même de m'entendre! Malgré ces problèmes, les enfants sont motivés d'apprendre et ils arrivent à capter pas mal! Je dois faire beaucoup de gestes et d'imitation pour les expliquer les régles des jeux - assez rigolo! Par contre j'ai vraiment du mal à apprendre leurs noms car ils sont impossible à prononcer. exemple: Sotharoth est prononcé comme "Tarurois" avec l'accent français.
Sophie et moi - nous avons commencé à porter le sexy "serviette hygiénique" sur le nez et la bouche car tous les deux, nous avons mal à la gorge. Beaucoup de poussière, gaz d'echappement, de fumée et d'odeurs desagréable. Bien sur, j'ai aussi la tourista, malgré le fait que je ne bois que l'eau en bouteille et je ne mange pas chez les "street sellers" mais apparament c'est normale!! J'espère me sentir mieux bientôt!
