Laurie's World

Often throughout my day, as things happen, I say ‘oh I need to remember this so that I can blog about it’. So here I sit Friday evening after work, and I’m trying to remember all the things that I wanted to talk about. I think what I’ll do is just start talking to you all and see where it goes…

I will happily report that I have survived week three of my experience here. I believe I have 7 1/2 weeks of teaching left. 😂 That does not include the week off at the end of September. That’s a holiday week and is four weeks from now, but who’s counting? I have started to feel better about getting into the groove here. I didn’t have the terrible crashing impending sense of doom on Tuesday and Wednesday like I did in the previous two weeks. So I guess that’s progress! I started working intensively with my struggling readers, so I have a better understanding of what they need. Fleur, the learning support teacher (from Holland) is going to start working with them on phonics for 15 minutes at the start of every school day starting on Monday. I’m very excited about this and hopeful that it is going to be a great support for my students. One of my students that was really struggling in English and Khmer, has been moved to a first grade classroom per parent request. (They are a lot more fluid between grades here than what I’m used to in the states). This particular student has just never had a chance to learn the foundational skills that she needs to even begin to access second grade content. Her parents were open to having her be in a grade one classroom, having a tutor, EAL support, or anything that would be the best for her. So we decided to move her to a first grade classroom. She has had two days there now and she’s happy and learning and on her way to success. I think she misses me, which warms my heart ❤️ When she sees me in the morning at arrivals she runs up and gives me the biggest hug. But her first grade teacher is so sweet and loving I know she will be well taken care of. So now I have 14 students in my class, nine boys and five girls. Something that’s very fascinating to me here is the difference in how families treat to the Khmer teachers versus how they treat the foreign teachers. If you were to have asked me what I thought it would be like, I would have thought that families would have a special connection with the Khmer teachers that just wouldn’t exist with the foreign teachers because of the cultural differences and the language barrier. What I’ve discovered however, is that unfortunately families don’t treat Khmer teachers with nearly the respect and deference that the foreign teachers get. This is heartbreaking to me because my teaching partner is extremely intelligent, dedicated and educated and deserves all the respect in the world. Culturally they just don’t treat their own people the same as they treat the foreign teachers. I don’t know why this is, and I know I’m not going to change it. It does cause me to want to show Makara how much I respect her myself though. She’s amazing And I couldn’t do this without her! So what me caused me to share this is that when my student runs up to me in the morning and gives me a hug, she only does this with me. 😔

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2022 at 2:54 am and is filed under It’s a new era 2022. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.