First week of school

After sweating it out…literally…we have started teaching at Pannasastra. It has been a pretty interesting first week and we are looking forward to see what happens the rest of the term.

At 5pm on Monday night we FINALLY received our class schedules, only to learn that we would only have two classes for the first two weeks. It’s a bit frustrating but we are dealing with it. After picking up our schedules and dry erase markers we looked over our teaching manuals and began to plan our lessons.

On Tuesday we went to pick up our textbooks and then made our way to our classes at another campus. Fortunately we can walk to campus in about 15 minutes. We are relying on our legs until we can afford to buy a bicycle. Our first classes were pretty slim, as many of the students were still trying to figure out which campus had classes available to fit their schedules. My class only had 2 students and Keith’s had about 20. After all students are finished enrolling we are supposed to have an average of 30 students in each class.

Since neither of us had a full class and many students still needed to pick up their textbooks we didn’t complete our first lessons until Wednesday. My class is learning about kiwis (the bird) and camels with a focus on understanding how to use singular and plural nouns as well as differentiate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It’s so weird to go back and break down everything that I say, because on a daily basis I don’t think, I just speak. Thank goodness I had good teachers and a persistent mother with an English degree.

Thursday I had two classes, one with students who are college aged and the other with high school students. The college aged students are the one’s I mentioned previously who are learning about kiwis and camels. These students meet M-F for 1.5 hours. The high school students only meet M/Th for 1.5 hours. They are learning about different types of addictions such as caffeine and gambling. The interesting thing is that the high school lessons seem more advanced, but what I think the difference is, is that the high school lessons introduce topics and the college lessons refine the grammar…who knows really. We haven’t been given any instruction on how to run the classes, we are given complete trust and control. Hopefully we don’t totally screw up!

Friday was pretty easy. We both only had one class so we had most of the day to do what we wanted. My class played a game using the vocabulary that they had learned during the week and had them practice determining the words that were nouns and adjectives. It went pretty well and the students seemed to enjoy it.

This weekend we gave our apartment a deep clean and watched some new movies that we bought from a local dvd shop. We have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off for a holiday, but since we aren’t making very much money we are stuck hanging out in our apartment and touring the area by foot. It’s not exactly how we had envisioned our time here, but we are trying to make the best of it. Hopefully this coming week we will be given more English classes. On October 12 I will begin teaching Environmental Science at another campus. I am pretty excited for this since it is more like what I was expecting. I am supposed to be teaching health science next semester, but since things have been off to a bit of a rocky start I’m not so sure that this will happen. We will give you all an update when we hear more news. For now cross your fingers and wish us good luck…if not, we may be seeing you sooner than April J…

Xo,

Chantelle and Keith