WORK..the curse of the drinking classes..Part 1

I have been in Mondulkiri for a month and have been trying to figure out what and how to do whatever it is I am meant to be doing here. This is a perennial problem for volunteers in Cambodia and often people end up doing entirely different things to what they arrived for. For example, although I am meant to work with secondary science teachers and help them with doing/getting started on practical science I have already been roped into helping with the teaching/training for teaching of english in primary schools.

When I arrived I was immediately drafted into a prize giving ceremony...It was on the day that the queen (Lizzie) was brought to hospital, otherwise she might have been asked herself.

One of the first things i noticed, outside all the dust on the roads and everywhere was that the kids seemed to  spend a lot of time in the playground (a playground is a space around a school building , like Ireland in the time of your grandparents). I have since noticed this is the norm here as teachers may have other activities to engage in ( and often not connected with their education jobs).

Well that day I was new and obviously a major celebrity. I still hadn't seen where I was to work.

The project is to introduce practical work into science teaching in the provence. There are only a small number of secondary school and even less (3) upper secondary schools. Teachers teach (when they teach) by rote and entirely from the textbook. There is no flexibility in their teaching and notions of inquiry based learning is a foreign idea.

No secondary school in the provence has a lab but a  but a recently built resource centre attached to the main high school has two labs. One for physics/chemistry and one for biology/earth science. They have been stocked , somewhat and in a hit and miss way. Much of the equipment was still in boxes when I arrived.

Below is a pic of a bunsen and  boxes of tubing but the tubing is far too big for the burners. This is the way it is. But every (being optimistic) problem is solvable or is it soluble (hopefully)

While the resource centre looks pretty impressive (relatively speaking) it is perched in the middle of the high school. 

The school is called the HUN SEN High School after the ruler of Cambodia. It turns out that most public high schools in Cambodia have the same name. Just as well Bertie Ahern didn't have the same idea.   

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