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Published: February 23rd 2010
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I will say that you don't even begin to fully understand how ridiculous English can be until you try to teach and explain why we have so many rules and why so many exceptions to those rules.
I learned that rule -
change the Y to I and add ED - early on in my education, but I don't ever recall asking why we do it that way. The secondary school students we teach in the evening want to know WHY. And what can we say? "English is strange. You just have to remember."
When they grasp the formula, then you have to explain why it's not
always true. Study becomes
studied, worry becomes
worried. Then they expect play become
plaied and you have to explain the difference. And fly becomes
flew??? Come on...get outta here!
The secondary students are an amazing testament to the desire to learn. They attend high school during the day, as well as helping out at home or working or attending to whatever other duties they have, and then they ride their bicycles up to 10 kilometers to Knar School to study English from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. And
when they ride home again, it's pitch freakin' dark, and until the PLF provided bike lights, they had none.
The 28 students range in age from 14 - 23, and they are in 7th through 11th grade. (One of them, the oldest "boy", is actually a Khmer teacher at the school during the day.) They may be that old because they started school very late. It may have taken them many tries to pass the exam to move ahead a grade. When there are 50-60 students in a class with one teacher, and the teaching methods are to write on the board, have students copy the material, and then listen to the teacher recite information and repeat it back to him or her, you can imagine how difficult it is for some students to learn. Add to that the fact that children may come to school hungry or sick, and it's almost a wonder that anyone learns anything at all.
But they embrace the opportunity for sure. So while Erin and I take a bumpy 50-minute tuktuk ride to school, they pedal their hearts out and arrive tired and hungry, greeting us with "Hello, teacher! How
are you today?" Some of the boys gather up the car batteries and connect them to the three fluorescent bulbs that barely light the room. The moths gather in huge clouds around the lights, and occasionally a very large bug of some kind lands noisily on someone's desk or in my hair. Last night a gecko fell off the ceiling and hit the floor. Sometimes the principal, who lives next to the school, wanders in and out of the classroom with his toddler son. Outside, we can hear dogs barking in the schoolyard, but at least the chickens have already roosted somewhere for the night.
They have a textbook. but we find it rather useless. It's printed by Oxford University Press and includes short readings about "flying first class" and Albert Einstein, and asks questions like "How often do you play tennis?" and "How many televisions are there in your house?" The material is irrelevant to their lives, so we identify the topics they should be working on and make up our own material. We've worked on variety of things, including present and past of "to be" and "can/could." We do examples on the board over and over,
using as much vocabulary as we can think of, and asking them to fill in the correct verb form. And then when we ask
them to write a sentence in past tense - about anything they want - they are often confused about what we're asking. Asking for them to be creative seems to be a bit novel and and makes some of them uncomfortable. Some of them get it right away, and we ask them to explain to the others in Khmer to make it clear. We keep a couple of Khmer-English dictionaries handy to look up the meaning of words we can't explain easily. Sometimes, Sovann or Chamnan, the tuktuk drivers, will sit in on the class or sit in the window looking on. Chamnan's English isn't so good, and he sometimes sits at a desk and writes his own notes along with the class. Sovann's English is better, and last night he helped us translate a few words, once I convinced him to join us.
Have I mentioned yet that Sovann is Jaz's boyfriend? That's probably worth its own blog entry, and perhaps I will get to that sometime soon...
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Tom Whitney
non-member comment
Young people who want to learn . . . hmmmm . . .
Jess, I am amazed at how much the young people seem to really want to learn, there. It seems so different than in the United States, doesn't it? - Or have I been away from having young kids so long that I am not aware of an aggressive desire to learn among our youth of today? This was interesting to learn a bit about how you teach them. Regards, Tom