ONE WEEK IN CAMBODIA, 2020

 The new location for the Best Center has two large rooms for teaching and for meetings.  We teach English four hours each day.  Orsoth and Bun Thou are 3rd year students at the BC and study together. Tom and I are team teaching this year, which we really enjoy.  Paul, the full time American teacher here is on leave in the States so we are trying to keep his same schedule so that when he returns it will be easier for him to resume his routine.  
 Som Orng, Srorn, Makara and Kakda are 3rd and 4th year students.  There is an effort to groups the students according to their English levels.  Their university schedules also play a role.  The online English course that we use takes at least 120 weeks to complete.  They also are tested on about 2000 vocabulary words during that time.  Paul has also developed some supplementary materials to review each online lesson.



We begin our teaching day with these 5 students.  Seyha, Socheat, Seang Hai, Bondeth and Houng (who is not pictured), who are year 2 students.  Each student brings their notebooks and takes notes so that they can study for a test at the end of 4 online lessons.  You can see the computer which we use to put the lessons on a large TV screen for the study.  
Tom and I are not teaching the 1st year students their English lessons.  Dara, a staff member here teaches them so that their native language can be used to begin their English studies.  They would not understand enough English in the beginning.

Our 7:00 PM class uses a different format.  The 3 young men (Titya, Da and Chhoy) have all lived at the BC and graduated from universities.  They all have jobs in Phnom Penh and seem to like their jobs.  One works in HR at a hospital, one works for an NGO and the other works in the loan department of a bank.  But they all realize that their opportunities increased with better English skills.  So they come to the BC 4 evenings/week to work with Paul (or us when Paul is out of country).  We are using an online vocabulary list to help them increase their vocabulary and especially the pronunciation of words.  Chhoy is not in this photo as he was unable to come the day it was taken.  These men are also active in the university congregation of the church in Phnom Penh.

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