Assembly
Cycled to work. Watched Assembly. A teacher
stood at the front and talked to the children. They recited something together
(a pledge?), they sang a couple of songs (The National Anthem?) and one in
English - “The wheels on the bus go round and round” (complete with actions)
and then all filed out to their classes. I went to the first year class which
covers ages about 5 to 8 years. This is because the children are assessed when
they start at the school and are allocated to a class depending on their
ability at that time. They rarely change classes even if they are clever and
should be moved up. In the upper classes there are children with quite a broad
range of ages but they all seem to get on fine - they have been
together for years.
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| Assembly |
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| Boys! Pay attention! |
Class
I went and sat at the back of the classroom - a bit of a
struggle to squeeze into the little desk. There were 57 children in the class -
3 or 4 to a desk designed for 2. The young, lady teacher, Dalin (25?), ran the
class and the two volunteers, Daniel (IT expert from Romford, Essex) and Amanda
(Psychology graduate from Wollongong, NSW) assisted in keeping the kids busy
whilst the teacher, for example, wrote on the board. So we started with the
date (in English) went through the days of the week, the months of the year, we
counted from 1 to 50, we identified colours of items around the class. All the
chanting by rote was done at a loud volume by all 57 - bedlam!
The teacher then led the class through some
text on the board about Halloween. Most of the children had photocopied pages
from a book about Halloween corresponding to the text on the board. I presume
the children had already had explained to them what ghosts and jack-o’lanterns are
and what ‘trick or treat’ means. Even then, I’m not sure how an ancient Celtic
pagan festival, commercialised by the Americans, would have any relevance to
them in July. I’m guessing that’s what the only English text book they had contained.
We recited text from the book and the volunteers acted it out with excellent
impersonations of ghosts, witches and skeletons. Then the kids did the acting
and led the class through the text. I was surprised that some of the kids had
very little grasp of the words but were still confident enough to want to come
up in front of their peers and try to lead the recital.
Next Amanda and Daniel impersonated various
animals and the class tried to identify them. These were taken from the picture
on the walls. Again groups of 5 children came to the front, an animal name was
called out and the last to impersonate it correctly had to sit down.
There followed a period of mayhem where
Daniel led the class in identifying parts of the body; knees, nose, eyes, ears,
shoulders etc. He started by pointing to parts of his body and saying the name
and the children would repeat the gesture and word. He gradually speeded up the
tempo and introduced "stand up" and "sit down" (I gave up at this point as it was too
tricky in the space available). The dénouement was Daniel trying to fool the
kids by naming, and pointing to, several parts of the body correctly and then
pointing to a part of the body and naming a different part to see if the kids
would name and point to the correct part named. Hilarious fun.
I was not permitted to take photos during
the lesson as cameras are a great distraction - the kids love them. However, at
the end I did get a couple of shots.
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| Class of 57 designed for 40 |
Later, I was standing in the courtyard of the
school waiting to talk to someone. A unknown child, about 5, smiling, came up
to me and put his hand up for a high-five. I put my hand down for him and he
gave it a cracking slap and walked off, still smiling. What a trusting, happy,
confident gesture! Here are some more...
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| Break time with a volunteer |
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| Break time with a volunteer |
When I tell people that I was an air
traffic controller they often say what a stressful job it is. And I always say
that it depends on what one finds stressful. I go on to say I wouldn’t want, for example, to drive a London bus or to drill a hole in somebody’s cranium. Now I am going to
add teaching 57 Khmer kids English!
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| Back in my natural habitat (NB garden table, plastic garden chair, ergonomic desk environment and shoes at front door as is customary here). |
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