Alas, we have made it halfway through the first semester of classes and through our first exams. About two weeks ago we both proctored our first exams for our older students and just this week we proctored our exams for our high school students. Next week is off for Water Festival and most students will be heading back to their home provinces, teachers have the week off as well.
The exams for the older students went very well and fortunately for my classes, no one failed the exam. Also, I was not forced to deduct any points for cheating or absences. Chantelle’s experiences were slightly different. Her students had more absences and she had one student who was obviously cheating. There is a big difference in culture at schools here in comparison to the United States. Here, the “Zero Tolerance” policy is not widely enforced; therefore, students typically start school with Khmer teachers who tend not to strictly examine students while they test. Some schools have absolutely no policy against cheating and students are allowed to pretty much take tests as a group. Fortunately, most of the students in our higher level classes have been under the policies of PUC for a few years now and know that they will lose large portions of points for even attempting to cheat. It is quite a different story with the high school classes.
Unfortunately yesterday my stomach was feeling upset, so I wasn’t able to proctor the exam for the first high school class. A substitute was able to cover for me. Today when I went in to proctor my second class’s exam, I found out the office had printed and gave me a totally different exam than what I had written for the class. So, both the students and I had a surprise when we looked at the exam for the first time. The information was on everything we covered in the chapters, but the questions were set up completely different and with different sentences for each section. A listening and writing section were also added. During the exam, I was forced to mark down at least 6 papers for cheating, each of them was even given a warning, yet they continued to cheat. We will see how this affects them in the long run.
As it goes for the social life, we attended the birthday of our friend Soma Norodom last weekend on Diamond Island. It was a pretty spectacular event that included appearances from many famous Khmers. Many of the attendees were from the Royal Family. There were also several bands, actors, and break dancers for entertainment and everyone got to walk in on a giant red carpet and immediately start getting pictures taken. We later found out that the pictures were being used in the Phnom Penh Post newspaper’s Socialite section. The majority of the party guests were friends and associates of Soma’s, who were of all walks of life. It was a pretty unbalanced ratio of Westerners (like ourselves) to Khmers. We were starting to believe that the entirety of the Caucasian population of Cambodia was in attendance. The food was served Khmer style on large platters for everyone to share from. They started us with fresh fruit, cheese, and breads, followed by fried noodles, followed by penne pasta in tomato sauce, followed by duck with rice, followed finally by birthday cake. I believe I ate about half the duck and most of the rice because no one seemed to be that interested in it. There were about 250 guests at the party and upwards of 50+ wait staff. The whole event ended up looking like a wedding based on how it was set up.
Thus ends the adventures of the last couple of weeks. We will be taking our vacation in a town called Sihanoukville at the ocean in the southern part of Cambodia. We will make sure to take plenty of pictures and post them within the next couple of weeks!
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