After I came back from scotland, my school had another half term to go before Christmas. I felt so much better than when i first started because I had a good holiday and I was now familiar with all the people in Rambert . All the people in my class are getting along much better now, we are more relaxed and settled. I felt stronger and I noticed improvement from last half term.
Everyday my school schedule is similar. I get up at 6 to get myelf ready, then it takes me 45 minutes to travel to school. We have dance classes for 4-5 hours. We always have ballet class first thing in the morning because we believe that doing ballet first is the best way to warm up and prevent injuries. We do contemporary dance in different styles. Once or twice a week we have a choreography class, where we improvise, play around with movement and create either a solo or a group dance.
Every monday and friday we have Pilates and conditioning classes because we need to get strong and build stamina. To be honest, this is the class that we don't really like because it's hard, but we know that it is really good for us.
During the week we also do some academic study because we are preparing to work towrads a university degree from the University Of Kent. This class is called critical studies and we are learning how to analyse performances, take time to reflect on ourselves and research dance in our wider culture and world.
At the end of term I had to finish a piece of writing that had to include my reflections on what I am learning in class, a performance review, notes from critical studies and a piece of research. I have never done academic writing in english before so I was struggling. They have people in school to help me but I really needed someone who knows me and understands dance and my culture. So even after I got help from school I panicked and had no clue what to do.
Thankfully they gave international students one week extention. So when I came to Rachel's house for the Christmas holidays, I had one week left to work on it with her. I'm so thankful that I have Rachel. She knew what I wanted to say, she knows dance and understands how different our education system is in Cambodia . I finally understood what my task was and was able to finish it in time.
There are other international students in my class. We have a special english class after the end of training every monday evening. Whenever we have lunch or a break time, we sit together in the student common room or somewhere in school to talk about how we've been doing. Since we're from different countries, we sometimes share about our cultures, and teach each other some words in our language.
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