Bringing Britany Back

Last week was our first experience in a Cambodian classroom. And I am excited to share I loved it. It could be because we had the youngest grade that is learning English (so they are still excited) and we only had the smartest students at the school. But whatever, it was great. The students had just completed grade 7, and are around 14/15 years old. Our classroom had approximately 30 students. In real life Cambodia, it’s around 60 students to a classroom. The set up for the week of teaching was 3 American teachers to one classroom, and we each taught one hour. And for the last 2 days, we had Cambodian counterparts that taught with us. (Once I am teaching full-time, I will or am supposed to have a counterpart.) The eagerness of the students to learn, and actually teaching was so much fun. It seemed to come at the right time of training, because we were finally allowed to use what we have been taught about almost everyday since we have arrived. So, the best and most embarrassing day so far in Cambodia came during this week… I was ambitious enough to do a lesson on a song. Of course my first and obviously the best choice was Sometimes, by Britany Spears. If you don’t know the song, sparse yourself because the catchy tune will stay in your head for weeks. I wrote out the lyrics to the song on large sheets of paper, and to challenge the kids I left blanks where their vocabulary words for the day were, thus they would have to fill in the words. However this created a stumbling block later on in the lesson, when it came time to sing with Teacher Leslie. Let me paint the picture… Me standing in front of the classroom on this mini-stage (that all classrooms have), in a long skirt with a long-sleeve button up, sweating bullets from the heat. With 30 wide-eyed kids, the Country Director of PC (head honcho), Training director (second head honcho), Education director (third head honcho), a PC volunteer, a language teacher and 4 trainees, all watching me sing and mime the words of the songs to students with a complete lack of response to sing-along. Of course if I was warned that this would be the day that the top-dogs of PC Cambodia witness my teaching skills I might have changed my lesson plan to be more conservative. And of course in an ideal teaching situation all the students would have been jamming out to Britany with me and wowing my supervisors with my great lesson, but in turn it was 3 students barely managing the chorus and my fellow PCT helping me out from the back. Nevertheless, I don’t think I will forget the time I sang Britany Spears to a room full of middle school students and the most important figures of my new job in Cambodia.