My students make better paper airplanes that yours

First things first: Geaux Saints!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shout out to all of Louisiana, this is the most exciting that has pretty much ever happened. And if you’re a Colts fan you shouldn’t be.

Second: Exams are not fun. Period. Thankfully I was a bit under the weather so I didn’t have to proctor the semester exams this time. Yay! The students were quite glad, as I’m the only teacher that doesn’t let them cheat. And by that I mean I don’t let them get up from their desks to go look at their friends’ papers. It is ridiculous the cheating here. I know I’ve talked about it before, but I’ll talk about it again. No one cares. Students yell answers to each other from across the room. They have conversations. They make paper airplanes with their exam papers and fly them over to classmates. I wish I were joking. They have all sorts of cheat sheets, many of them ripped pages out of their textbooks. And NO ONE CARES. I take away their cheat sheets and make them sit still. But it is impossible to stop them from talking. I can’t fail them, I really have no power over them. But they don’t like to make me angry, so that helps. But cracking down on cheating seems like a straightforward solution, so why isn’t there more of an effort to do this? It’s complicated. Number one, that would require more work of the already grossly underpaid teachers (if they’re paid at all). It’s much easier just to ignore the cheating. Another issue is that cracking down on cheating would need to be implemented nationwide. It would be unfair to judge the exam scores of students who freely cheated against those who weren’t allowed to. Well, they should just study harder. True, like many American students, some Cambodian students are lazy or unmotivated. But there is another side to the coin, and that goes back to the problem of teacher salaries. Often teachers’ already low salaries ($40-$80 a month) are a month or two late. And the teachers get paid this ridiculously low amount whether they actually show up or not. So often teachers choose the latter option. The problem is that they make tests based on the material they should have covered if we had school everyday and they showed up to class everyday. So sometimes students will have only had a couple of class sessions in a particular subject the entire semester, and are then tested over the entire book. So it’s kind of hard to tell them they can’t cheat, when the whole system is screwing them over. At my school, there is only one math teacher for grade 12, and the grade 12 national exam (basically their ACT/SAT) is on March 23rd. This math teacher is quitting teaching and going to work as a surveyor for the forestry service because it pays more. So with a little over a month left til the exam, the grade 12 students have no math teacher. And math is the most important subject on the exam. And then there are the questions themselves. I wrote a lot of the test, so it was a lot better than last year’s, but some sections were not run by me first. For example:
Have you seen a cup anywhere? We seem to be ___________ a) see b) missed c) lose d) found
What’s the correct answer? If you said e) none of the above – you are right! Unfortunately the students were not given option E. Having said all this, there are often comical aspects to an exam. This is what my students have to say about life:
When we fart in a crowded room, we feel excited. (It should be When we fart in a crowded room, we feel embarrassed)
The usually students play football on weekends
If she had become a politician that is why the police fined him
The boy was broken by the window (It should be The window was broken by the boy)
My daughter was cooked (It should be The food was cooked by my daughter)
I bought a bike. It was intelligent.

On Cambodian history:
Angkor Wat was attacked and decorated by Thailand.
Angkor Wat is one of the largest religious collapse in the world.
The king decorated the region

On the things money can buy:
Big clothes
A husband
A young womn
Honor
A good score on the exam
Modern (Modern what? Dunno)
Family happiness
A trip to the moon

And some of the questions on the exam weren’t exactly wrong, but certainly unusual. If the students filled in the blanks correctly, they would make these sentences:
If people did not die and leave the earth, the earth would be too crowded.
If the animals came when they were called, the people would have caught them easily without running.

So yeah. That’s examination Khmer style.

On a victorious note, I cleaned my room today. For those of you who are unaware of my tidiness-related habits, suffice to say they are non-existent. My dear mother spent 18 years of her life trying to get me to keep my room clean, alas with little success. That is not to say I am complete slob, I hate having food or anything that harbors mold and nasty bugs. But the simple act of folding my clothes and putting them away eludes me sometimes. This is not helped by the fact that I moved recently, and while I have a 5’x5’bed, I only have an 8’x8’ room. Meaning if I have a 1 foot wide walkway that leaves about 4 square feet of storage space. So today I went to the market and spent over $15 on storage items. That is almost a week’s salary.

But the problem is solved and now my room is clean, if not spacious. Walking back from the market, arms loaded with plastic storage apparati, every marveled at the sheer amount of things I bought. So now everyone knows that I have lived at the new house for four months and am just now getting around to cleaning my room. I know that I have integrated into my community because people now gossip about me in the same manner as they do each other. Sometimes people come through who don’t know me, and the only way I can think to describe is like the scene in Toy Story when Buzz and Woody land in the alien toy grabber machine and all the little alien toys are like “Strangers! From the outside! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” It’s kinda like that. And that can get annoying. But thankfully people are pretty used to seeing me. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve been asked how much bread I eat (I’m white, which clearly means I’m French, and clearly the French eat bread all the time, so it’s a logical question). The locals even correct out-of-towners when they ask “Who’s the French chick?” and the locals are like “She’s not French, she’s American, they’re different.” The revelation that French/English/American are all completely different astounds many people here. All white people are called French and it is assumed that they speak English.

Getting back to gossip, the market is like high school for old ladies. Every goes around telling everyone each others business. One day two market ladies will be best friends, the next not speaking to each other. It’s like a soap opera, but better. I get to just sit there and sip coffee while it all happens around me. The other day, my former host mom, to whom ascribing the term vain would be a gross understatement asked a police officer who was prettier, she, or her friend the rice seller. The police officer, who was obviously not born yesterday, says they’re equally pretty. This enrages my former host mom. She goes on about how she buys expensive (and slightly slutty, though she didn’t say that) clothes, wears make-up, gets her hair done, gets manicures, pedicures, the works (side note, she always talks about how she has no money, but every day she wears a new shirt to the market). Given all this, she should be significantly prettier than the rice seller. The rice seller just looks at her own chest, pulls her shirt down a bit, and simply says “mine are bigger.” That made my morning.

I have to laugh when people talk about how rich Americans are. Yesterday the market ladies were all comparing their $3 shirts. I, on the other hand, was wearing clothes I’d found in the give-away bin at the Peace Corps office. The majority of my wardrobe consists of things found in the give-away bin or purchased for fifty cents from a thrift store. I wouldn’t be caught dead paying $3 for an item of clothing. It’s an upside down world over here. But I have learned to read, at least a little! The language has 33 consonants and 27 vowels. Most of those vowels have two different sounds depending on what consonant they’re with. And the vowels are written above, below, to the left, and to the right of the consonant. And each consonant has another form (like how we have capital letters and small letters) that can be written underneath another consonant to shorten the sound. So there are 122 possible phonemes. Which is why after living here a year and a half I have attained an approximately 2nd grade reading level. But I can read most signs, and I can write small words (an excellent party trick) so I consider myself successful. One last comment, the warning label on my eyedrops has informed me that possible side effects include bone marrow depression and/or newborn infants. What will happen? Will my bone marrow fall into a state of depression? Will newborn infants randomly appear? Stay tuned for more details. Love and miss you all!