Teaching a new course at RUPP

Reflections on my first week of teaching

Last semester, I spent my time at the university earning trust amongst the staff, helping individual teachers with their laboratories and presentations, writing new experiments, teaching Infrared spectroscopy and incorporating it into the curriculum and starting my research. When I returned from my Christmas break, I was suddenly asked to teach a new laboratory course in Green Chemistry for the second semester. Three young teachers have left or are about to leave, to pursue master’s degrees in other countries. This left the chair in a bind, with a curriculum to teach, and not enough staff. So, all of the foreigners here (three in the department this semester) were asked to teach. I was asked to teach three sections of a new Green Chemistry laboratory course.

Now this is exactly in line with one thing I had hoped to do this year, as I have also wanted to teach such a course at Messiah College. But planning a new laboratory course with limited resources has been challenging. I was assigned a lab space that is ill-equipped, so I will be moving things around, and buying what I can at the local markets.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I teach a set of third year students that are called the “private class.” For many years, the university only accepted the best high school students, and they were allowed to attend the university without charge. More recently, the university has realized that there are more students who want to attend, and they are accepted as fee paying students, or the “private class.” A portion of these fees is all the money that a department receives from the university to run its programs.

I have yet to pin down my class list. This is given by the study office to the class monitor – as he or she is called. On the first week of the term, students do not know exactly which classes they have been assigned to so it has been more chaotic than I would prefer. But I’m going with the flow. Students do not choose any of their courses. Once they enter the university with a particular major, their courses are set by the department. No one changes majors either. I’ve asked them to sign in an English spelling of their name, alongside the Khmer one – but I may just go with numbers! At least for attendance and grading. It is hard enough for this old brain to learn 80 familiar English names.

Class began Monday with my students spending nearly 10 minutes cleaning the benches and sweeping the floor. This is automatic for them. There is no budget for any cleaning or garbage pick up. I do have an assistant in the class, who will learn the material with the students, and hopefully teach the course next year. Monday was a little rough. My assistant brought in copies of the notes for the day, but had not copied my schedule. Slowly, or so I thought, I talked through the schedule and my expectations. Since this is a lab course, I have planned weekly assignments, or reports. This is not something they are accustomed to I can tell. We also talked about academic honesty and plagiarism, things discussed at Messiah College, but even more important here.

My introduction to green chemistry involved a demo of traditional packing peanuts and the new starch ones, in a beaker of water. I don’t think the students had ever seen packing material before. They don’t buy things in boxes here, and they don’t get care packages in the mail! I encouraged them to talk about what they saw, in Khmer, and I think they got the idea of Green Chemistry. (Ironically, the old packing peanuts were green, and the starch ones were white!)

At the end, my assistant kindly told me that I had gone too fast. It was then that I realized I had used far too many big words. Before the end of the day I had typed a glossary of all these big words, and I will pass that out this next week.

Wednesday class went much better. By then the class monitor had passed out my schedule and the first notes to all the students. (They in turn pay him for the copying costs.) I could tell that many students had read my notes – things were underlined and highlighted. At least on the pages of the students sitting in the front row... (One never knows about the students sitting at the back.) I tried to bring laughs to the classroom, and tie the ideas of green chemistry to issues relevant to Cambodia. It went well.

On Fridays, I teach the scholarship class. These should be the brightest kids. Class today was broken into two periods, as there was a presentation from a Korean University in the middle of the morning that I was asked to accommodate. But the students were here, and waiting when I got here. They didn’t seem too excited when I told them we would have class from 8:00 – 8:45, the presentation was from 9:00 – 11:00 AND then we would meet again until 12:00. But as my American students know, there is no time to be wasted when learning chemistry!

To my surprise, they then proceeded to ask me if we could switch class to another day. This is common place here. Another one of their Friday classes had been cancelled (odd subject, no teacher) and they wanted the whole day off. No Registrar’s office setting a schedule here. But, not a bad idea. If my children have a long weekend, maybe we can head out early to the beach!

Every week will be a learning experience. I’ll keep you posted.

Roseann