Let there be light! (and other stories)

Yesterday I started teaching.


There's a weird though, huh? The last time I considered the idea of being paid to teach, I was in grade school. Not that they're paying me a significant amount, but still. I had three 50 minute sessions, with 20-25 kids in each. And by "kids" I mean 18-25 year olds, although they act much younger than I expected. Alex and I have theorized that it probably has a lot to do with the fact that they still live at home with their parents, which is the Turkish norm before marriage. And this university babies them a lot, which doesn't help the situation. Monday morning we arrived at 8:30, as usual, and we were supposed to have recieved emails with our class schedules- which we didn't- and then couldn't remember the website where the higher ups posted our curriculum for the week. We panic (okay, I panic, Alex just took it in stride), and try to hunt down said higher ups to get a schedule and the curriculum, but none of them show up before nine or so. There's a whole different attitude towards time here- they don't really "do" deadlines and timelines and things like that, there's a much more lax attitude, especially in the administration. Which is really frustrating, when I'm so used to everything being scheduled to the minute- trying to figure out when, for example, the light in my bedroom was going to be fixed was an absolute nightmare. "Semih Bay (Mr. Semih, my boss), when do you think you can get someone to fix the broken light in the apartment?" "Oh, I'll send someone. Don't worry." "...Um, well, do you know... uh... well do you think this week, or should I expect it next-" "I'll take care of it. Let me make a note." Smile smile smile.
Almost three weeks later, a guy shows up at my door with two new, boxed lightbulbs. Because apparently "The wires in my ceiling lamp snapped and it fell out of the ceiling and almost killed me" translates into "I am incapable of buying new lightbulbs." So I let this poor guy into the apartment, and pick up the lamp from where it had been chilling under my desk, and hand it to him (it's big and heavy. Not subtle). And he looks at it, and at me, and then at the lightbulbs, and then starts speaking in rapid Turkish, clearly apologizing.
"Tamam." ("alright") I nod sympathetically. Like I know exactly what he said.
"Tamam?" He grins, very surprised.
I smile, he says something else, and leaves. I threw a minor temper tantrum, because it's been nearly three weeks with a dark bedroom (I have to change with the door open at night, and I can't read or study or do almost anything in there- unbelievably frustrating), made some tea, and sulked. Happy ending to the story- yesterday I came home and didn't even realize the light had been fixed until I tripped over the vacuum sitting in my darkened room- which is definitely not where I left it. The little elves who fixed my light even cleaned up after themselves!

Wow, so I was going to talk about my classes. Right. So Alex and I are sans schedule, running around the building trying to find anyone who knows what we're supposed to be doing with our lives. And we run into Fatih, who looks like the hounds of hell are on his tail. Which, depending on who you ask, might be an apt description of some of the persons in charge of TOBB. He all but begged us to come in and do some recordings with him immediately, because there's a lot of pressure on him to get them done quickly- an unusual situation. We agreed to help him, at least until we recieve emails telling us where and when we need to be in class. So for over two hours, we sat in his non-sound-proof recording office, reading exams. For anyone who's ever taken a language course, you know the kinds of stuff we were doing- Alex read the directions and individual questions, while I handled the long, absurd speeches on random topics. There's a couple of fun parts to all this: one, Alex is dyslexic, so it takes the poor girl like six tries to read anything correctly; two, the room isn't actually soundproof, so any noise anywhere nearby is recorded with our voices, and we have to do it all over again, and three, the building we're in is very new- so they're still designing and building the surrounding areas (landscaping, paving, etc). Which is extremely noisy. So an exam that would take me twenty minutes to read silently and twice as long to read aloud (s-l-o-o-w-l-y), takes over two hours. And some of the speeches were AWFUL- one was on the differences between Paranoid Personality Disorder and Paranoid Schizophrenia and the technical aspects of treating both. And said hellhounds in the testing department think it's clever to make pre-intermediate English language students answer questions about this stuff. Although I have to say, my favorite (there were a half dozen speeches and a few shorter bits), was one about culture shock. I started reading out loud without reading ahead of time, and when I got to the part about the "honeymoon" versus the "horror" stage of culture shock Alex and I burst out into giggles- she eventually had to leave the room while I read about exactly what we had been going through. I'm still in the honeymoon phase, while Alex is well into horror- "criticism of local culture, life, and values," "longing for the familiar," "occasional rage"... that's her. Fatih was terribly stressed out and I felt awful, but after two hours of monotone reading, we got a little loopy.

Anyhow the email finally came, and I had my first class at 11:50. The curriculum included an icebreaker, where I put a long word on the board and told the kids to make smaller words out of the letters of that word. "Precipitation," in case you're wondering, has at least two hundred possibly shorter words. Alex and I found about 120 before I went to class, where the kids promptly came up with stuff like "pirate" and "reaction" and "petition" - while our words were things like "cat," "one," and "rain." But the kids kinda got into the game, shouting things out as I wrote them on the board. With my classes today I made it a competition, splitting the class in half and letting team leaders write words on the board. Very successful in most classes. Then we moved on to an extraordinarily lame activity, in which the curriculum instructed me to write quotes on the board and then explain them. I picked one of the suggested ones and one of my own ("A candle loses none of its light by lighting another candle" and "A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," respectively) and wrote them out and talked. The problem with this is the whole point of my class is to get the kids to speak in english- which they weren't doing while I babbled about the differences between "price" and "value" and the implied meaning of "light." Obviously. The only time this activity didn't suck was in one of my classes today. It was an extremely competitive group, already split pretty evenly and with two opposing ringleaders- I wrote the quotes on opposite sides of the board and told them that each team had ten minutes to come up with an explanation for their quote, or "idiom" as they kept referring to it. Both teams got the meanings very well, despite Turkish outbursts every so often. At one point, while Anil, team B's speaker, was presenting their explanation, team A's speaker, Memmit, kept razzing him- and so Anil tucked his arms behind him and turned his back- at which point Memmit stood up and started yelling at the top of his lungs, finally sputtering out that it was "very re-rage-re-redspectful!!" (disrespecful). Judging from the reaction it must be a pretty extreme insult. So with that class, we barely finished the second activity in the fifty allotted minutes. In all my other classes, we moved on to the third activity, where I picked on whoever was the most obnoxious and talkative (usually a boy from the back left corner of the room- Alex and I have both noticed it's a problem spot), and made him write on the board while I asked people what their favorite football (soccer) team was. Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe were the alternating favorites. Then I made individuals explain why their team was the best, who their favorite players were, etc. If there was time left over I asked about movies, and made them name movie genres, and then asked each student about their taste in music, favorite groups, etc. In each class at least one kid was a fan of "Turkish folk music," with one of them playing some for me- a Turkish military band, all instrumental and very patriotic. And there were also usually a couple jokers who shouted out "Arabesk!" (arabesque), which is viewed sort of the same way people in the Northern USA view country.

Altogether, things have been good. I've been picking out a couple kids from each class, ones who are most willing to take risks and speak and who are also well liked by their classmates, and use them to motivate everyone else. I'm also learning names, although it's slow going. Memmit, Anil, Beyza, Zeren, Amr, Halil, then coworkers like Mehtap, Aslı, Özge, Nesrin, Nurcihan, Farouk, etc... not easy.

Currently planning on going out with Alex and Anna tonight to watch the inauguration somewhere, and Anna is also possibly coming to visit our classes tomorrow. Should be interesting.