How I Came to Teach in Cambodia and Why I’m Staying
I have been teaching English here in Phnom Penh for three years and I really enjoy it. I know many other teachers here who enjoy their job and do it well, some much more experienced than me and some less.
However, I have also met many people who teach just for the money. I hear them complain about their job or their students but they never admit that they are actually just not cut out for teaching. Teaching anywhere in the world is a job that involves skill, passion and most of all patience. So I am shocked to see so many people who would never consider being teachers in their own countries doing it out here and wondering why they are having such a nightmare.
I personally think that they owe it to all the Cambodians who are sacrificing so much to receive quality teaching from native speakers to leave the teaching to those who actually respect the job, and enjoy it.
Before I came here I had been working for a few years as a Learning support Assistant, at comprehensive schools in Essex and Rotherham. My job as a LSA’s was to support all the students on the Special Educational Needs register, students with learning and/or behavioral difficulties, as well as those who didn’t always get on too well in a classroom environment.
Often I was rewarded by seeing someone cross a little milestone or discover they could do something that they didn’t think they could before. Other times I would end up in the middle of a year eight chair fight. It definitely was not a boring job. I would also cover lessons during short term absences (a good practice in the art of classroom management is to work as a cover teacher in a school on special measures). Unfortunately in the last month my LSA colleagues have been made redundant due to part of the huge government cutbacks in UK. I am sure they will be sorely missed like so many other youth workers whose jobs have been axed by the government recently.
Some teachers at the school I worked at in Rotherham were encouraging me to take the plunge and do a PGCE. I was not ready to settle so I decided to get TEFL trained and work for a volunteer school in Cambodia. Three years later, I’m still here.
It’s interesting to compare some experiences in schools here and there. Here, the desperation for children to speak English at such a young age, and to work so hard is mind boggling- half days in public school, half in private, tuition in the evening and/or Chinese school .
For many it starts at the age of three and doesn’t stop. These students are aware that they are very lucky to have their education and sometimes I wish these students could have been with me when I was trying to persuade some year tens to hand in just one, just one piece of coursework for their GCSEs. It would have been really interesting (although telling them that they were lucky for their education would have been similar to telling them to finish their peas because there were starving people in Africa-it wouldn’t have gone down too well!) .
At the volunteer school I came here to teach at I enjoyed classes with a mix of people from the Tuol Tumpoung community…. the mother and son that studied together, the man from a jewelers stand in Tuol Tumpoung market, two blind men who worked for World Vision…..young or old what they had in common was their stamina…squeezing in 6am or 7pm classes on top of their never-ending work/study/family life. The answers they all gave when I asked about their daily routine made me tired just listening.
In the UK it is accepted that some people are language people and some aren’t the same way that some people are math people and some aren’t. As native English speakers this is the luxury we are born into. At the school I work at here, most subjects (including math) are taught in English, so not being a language person is pretty much not an option.
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