My New Favorites

By some stroke of fate, the English for Cambodia chapter on women’s rights happened to correspond with this week’s International Women’s Day celebration. I opened up the lesson with my 12^th graders by drawing a T-chart on the whiteboard with “Men” and “Women” as the headers. My first question to them was whether or not men and women are equal in Cambodia. To my surprise, many students (male and female) shouted, “Yes!”

While I’m no cultural expert, I’ve certainly noticed quite a few ways in which men and women are treated differently here. While I agree with my students that there have been many advancements in equality for women in Cambodia such as equal access to primary and secondary education, I think my students were answering a different question than I was asking. I believe they meant men and women should be equal, not that they actually are.

With some coaxing, I got them to fill in the T-chart which I’ve reproduced here as well as my memory serves. While there were a few disagreements between the boys and girls in the class, they mostly agreed about traditional gender roles.

 

 

	Men	Women
Housework	eat and sleep	cook, clean, wash clothes, and take care of children
Jobs	high power: government, military, doctors, police	usually stay home
Bad Habits	drink and smoke	not allowed to drink or smoke
Freedom	can go out at night	must stay home
Money	earn money	spend money

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, my co-teacher was overly eager to teach about passive statements with “must” for necessity, and I didn’t have much time to discuss gender inequality with my students, but I did leave them with one image which I think took them by surprise.

I asked them to think about the flag ceremony which they perform every morning at 7:00 before heading to their classrooms. All students line up by class and sing the national anthem while two students, one male and one female, raise the flag. Before the singing starts, the two students bow to each other, and then the boy unties the knotted rope and hands one side to the girl. As the anthem is sung, the boy exerts force downward to lift the flag while the girl passively holds the rope away from the pole to avoid tangling. Once the anthem is over, the male ties the rope, and they bow to each other again.

As I reviewed the flag routine with my students, many of them had an “aha! moment.” That such a small mundane activity could have such large gender inequity implications was truly eye-opening for these high school students.

During the past year and a half I’ve developed two new favorites, a favorite letter and a favorite word. If my students begin pronouncing “s” when speaking in the third person singular or start asking “why”just a little more often, then my work here is complete.