Today was one of those great days when I could have kept teaching for hours. I don’t know why, but my favorite classes somehow end up happening on the days when I least expect them, when I’m teaching a lesson that I didn’t think would be particularly exciting or when I’m just not feeling in the mood for class before it starts.
Today, I was introducing a new chapter in the writing book and giving a new essay prompt to my 304 class, but before getting to that, I had some common mistakes to review with the whole class from their previous set of essays.
Reading my students’ essays doesn’t always allow me to see how my students feel about the issues in discussion. Unfortunately, many of them usually spout the same arguments, leading me to doubt whether the views they express are the ones that they really hold. Their writing does, however, often give me a good window into the Cambodian education system and into the structure and style of Khmer speech and writing. From reading my class’s essays, I’ve probably been able to get a better grasp on what the Khmer style of argument and writing is like than I would otherwise be able to, based on my very low level of Khmer.
For example, many Cambodians learn to write the introductions of essays using something similar to the funnel method that I also learned when starting to write essays in middle school. It’s a technique in which you go from a general statement that, assumingly, most people can relate to and then narrow down to the specific thesis, hopefully making a logical connection between the two ideas in the process.
Many of my students, however, take it to the extreme, starting each essay with “People all over the world…” Whatever first statement they start with is so general that, to my US-trained mind, it seems utterly irrelevant to include. When I brought it up with a few of my students individually, they all understood what I meant but explained to me that this is a common and completely appropriate way to start an essay in Khmer. Expectedly, there are stylistic differences that exist between English and Khmer writing, but I want my students to be able to write English-language essays that sound like they’ve been written by sophisticated writers, even if my students maintain the Cambodian style for their Khmer-language essays.
I knew class was off to a good start today when they instantly understood my joke (which I don’t claim to be clever) that I wanted someone to write his next essay about “People from all over the other planets.” There are lucky days when my students and I are all overly enthusiastic about class for no reason. This was one of them. They laughed at my comment, showed that they understood what I was saying, and carefully started taking notes.
After reviewing some minor but important semantic and usage problems, I turned to the definitive words of all, always, and everyone, emphasizing that you can’t include these words in an argument unless everyone really does always agree about everything. Again, I learned that, in Khmer, it’s appropriate to use these words to make a point, even if the reality is not quite as clear-cut and extreme as the author makes it out to be. But again, my students also understood what I meant about not overusing them in an English essay, and I’ve come to be able to detect when they’re simply nodding to appear to understand and when they legitimately understand.
Though these small points were successes in that my students understood my feedback and seem like they’ll take it to heart, my main objective was to try to get my students to write with a more critical eye towards what they’re saying.
The last essay topic was to write about the effects of any one of a list of subjects. Some of my students wrote about corruption. Corruption breeds poverty. At first, I was surprised that corruption was so openly discussed in the second most corrupt country in the world (according to a Transparency International report earlier this year and following Cameroon). When I found out last semester that they learned about the negative effects of corruption as part of their public school curriculum, I was even more surprised. But after reading dozens and dozens of papers about the topic over the course of the year (usually the most popular topic to write about if it’s one of the choices), I’ve come to realize that the government’s actually so effectively beat the ideas of corruption into everybody’s head over and over again that I don’t think it actually registers as a tangible problem anymore. It’s been talked about so much that it’s become this abstract idea that, if fixed, will make Cambodia a rich, developed country, but it’s become so abstract and large in most people’s minds that no one actually feels it can be dealt with.
While I’m on the subject of common essay topics, a very meta essay to read is always the popular subject of writing about common English mistakes, usually organizing the mistakes into problems with grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, or some variation of those subtopics. It’s always kind of a trip to be correcting an essay about mistakes that people make in English. And although this is one of the most boring topics to read about, I think it might be so popular because the students can relate to it first hand, which is also why I’m not opposed to our band members deciding to give this fairly dry prompt.
But anyway, about half of my students chose to write about the results of divorce for their effects essay this past month. As I was reading them, however, I started to get frustrated that each one was wholly negative, with no concessions given to the fact that divorce might, in certain cases, have positive effects on the people involved. Additionally, all my students (not exaggerated in this case) gave the same frustratingly authoritative reasons why divorce was bad. One was that it always made the wife and husband unhappy and lonely, ignoring the fact that they might have been unhappy or lonely within their marriage if they felt they wanted divorce. Additionally, “Divorce always leads children to lawlessness, drug addiction, and immorality.”
Other reasons that didn’t bother me were a decrease in income and wealth once separate residences were needed and incomes could no longer be pooled, parents-in-law worrying about their children and grandchildren, and the argument that parents-in-law would no longer feel comfortable spending time with each other. I thought the last argument about in-laws no longer being able to be friends was an interesting cultural note that I couldn’t imagine even considering when thinking about the consequences of divorce. I’m accustomed to a nuclear family and wouldn’t think of parents-in-laws as spending loads of time together anyway.
Anyway, though, I came into class with the perfect ammunition for urging them to write their essays with more critical thinking. I explained that writing about the effects of divorce had been an extremely popular choice for the essay and then proceeded to tell them that every single essay on the topic had only explained the negative effects of marriages splitting. If divorce didn’t have a single positive effect, then why were Cambodians still getting divorced? I brought up the newspaper reports that have appeared since I’ve been here about angry wives throwing acid on their husbands to “encourage” them to become more faithful. Was that better than divorce? Already, they started snickering, and I could already tell that they understood.
I then ventured a bet (not really too adventurous after getting to know how my students usually formulate the thoughts for their essays) that they had learned about divorce in school at some point and that I could tell them what was on the curriculum. They confirmed that they had learned about divorce in a class in high school and listened amusingly as I listed off what they had learned: the bad effects of divorce on the children, who turn to dugs, etc, etc.
We then had one of the best conversations about critical thinking and about not simply repeating what they had been taught if they didn’t agree with it, encouraging them to disagree with me if they didn’t feel what I was saying was rational. It turns out that virtually none of them actually think that divorce results in only negative consequences.
Over the course of the semester, I’ve also tried to introduce current events into class. Usually, I try to find an angle to get them into a discussion about whatever stories the students present on, but it’s sometimes a little difficult to keep a conversation going when the “current event” that they choose is something like a car accident. After this discussion, however, we had current events for the week, and we even got into a conversation about politics and the inevitability of the upcoming elections in July.
Although it’s the kind of class that I’ve tried to plan numerous times, something just went right and allowed me to have the type of classes that I aim to have everyday.