Category: Essentials 2017-2018

My third term Literacy focused on Gender. As part of the term’s assignment, the other students and I were given a task to write a gender-related-article. I chose hair. Have a look at my article writing: 

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HAIR

“What have you been doing during your three-week-break? You couldn’t find a time to cut your hair?” I was asked before I returned to my boarding school.

Stereotypes and perceptions about hair are deeply-rooted in Khmer’s mindsets as well as many other people around the world. This idea dates back all the way to at least the Romans and the Ancient Greeks. Archaeologist Elizabeth Bartman states that besides the “bearded, long-haired philosopher,” females, in general, had longer hair than males.

In Cambodian government schools, males are required to have really short hair while females have the freedom between short and long, but preferably long hair. I remember being in grade four and seeing one of my friends get punished by our teacher because he didn’t cut his hair over the weekend. He went up to the front of the class, after being called by the teacher. I could see her fingers reaching out for his sideburn and pulling it upward. She announced to the class that this is our punishment for keeping long hair; she really meant it toward male students. His hair wasn’t even long enough to cover his ear. I was terrified and always cut my hair once it seemed a bit long for a schoolboy.

Despite this rule, there are still male students that keep their hair long. I’ve seen some with hair so long it completely covered their ears. These people have gone through many punishments because they violated school rules, and must not have listened to their parents when they instructed them to cut their hair because it’s “long.”  Cambodian society has viewed long-haired men as “gangster”. This makes it really difficult to be seen as an educated man with long hair.

I later got accepted to the Liger Leadership Academy, a non-government school where there’s no rule regarding the length of a person’s hair. My school’s director has really long hair, almost reaching his shoulders, while one of my female friends has really short hair—shorter than many males.

Since I came to Liger, I have always wanted to keep my hair long and experience what it’s like, but my aunt always asked me to cut my hair. Because she has been more like a mother than an aunt to me, I can’t deny her request. Nevertheless, I found a way around it. Considering my literacy class is gender-focused, I have just the perfect excuse to keep my hair long. By now, I have longer hair than any other male students in the school.

Although my aunt doesn’t mind my hair being long because of my literacy unit, I still got told and asked so many times about my hair in school and outside of school.

“Why don’t you cut your hair?”

“What have you been doing on your holiday?”

“When will you cut your hair?”

“You should cut your hair.”

“Go and get your hair cut this weekend.”

I knew these comments would come to me, and I am ready for it too. But what is really strange, but kind of makes sense considering Cambodian people’s mindset, is with the comments that my short-hair-girl-friend received from people on their first impression, “Wow! Really nice hair!”.

I asked her the other day with why she cut her hair short?

She said, “That’s the hardest question for me. I guess it just feels right.” She hesitated and continued, “It’s just being more like myself.”

I strongly agree with her answer. I think it is a person’s decision on whether or not they cut their hair and should not be told by the society and especially their family.

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In Literacy class, we focus on four areas: writing, speaking, listening, and reading. For the first block, we focused specifically on writing. Every day, when we came to class, we have a Word Of the Day, where we learned a new vocabulary to improve our word choice in writing. Once in awhile, our facilitator would give us about 10 minutes to write about a specific topic in our Literacy Journal; I usually wrote about a paragraph or two. A big part of the first block of literacy is writing our narrative essay, Coming of Age. We went through so many processes of brainstorming, drafting,  writing, editing, peer editing, and conferencing with the facilitator. Along the way of writing the narrative essay, we learned about rules in writing such as parallelism and comma usage to improve our Coming of Age paper.

For this school year, we have Khmer Essential four days a week likes other Essentials, instead of two. In the first round of Khmer class, we learned how to make a formal speech and practiced it in front of our teacher. From my experience doing that, I have to say that in Khmer speech we have to acknowledge all of the audiences that participate in the event including monks, prime minister (if available), village chiefs, foreigners, ambassadors, government officers, children, and regular people. We also listened to several interviews by TV channels and took notes throughout the video. After that, we worked as a team to come up with a presentation to the whole class. This way, we can practice our Khmer skills in listening, writing and speaking. For reading, we have a lot of Khmer books for us to take home and read it. Once we’re done we turn it back into the classroom so the others have a chance of reading it.

This year, just like Khmer class, physic will also be happening four times a week. Physic has allowed me to understand how the world around me work; it illuminates my wonders. In the first round of physic, we focused on motions, both in one and two dimension/s. We had to work closely with trigonometry (SOH CAH TOA) and deal with gravity and the four kinematic equations. I have to say that I have a head start in physic class because of my last year AP Physic 1. Nevertheless, I learned new things and improved my ability to solve complex problems.

I love and enjoy learning math. This year, I get exposed to a completely new area of math, statistics. I find statistics to be very different from other math subjects such as algebra and geometry. Most of the time, in stats, there’s no such a thing as one correct answer, it really depends on your explanation and evidence using the graph and/or data. Students that learn statistic will take the 2018 AP Statistic Exam. In the first block of statistics, I learned about different ways to display and describe data using graphs, charts, and numbers. I also learned about density curve. The area under the density curve is always equal to one, and it represents the probability of a given condition.