On the one hand (μεν), it was a rough day. I realized in the morning that I had another stack of midterms I’d forgotten to grade, and then found out I was supposed to vacate my office by the end of the day (that didn’t happen, unfortunately), and had to go to a meeting that turned out to be entirely in Turkish, and hglagharghlblaghargh. Nothing bad actually occurred at any point, but most of the day was composed of frustrations and stress and lack of sleep, without feeling like I accomplished much.
On the other hand (δε), my evening class was remarkably successful. This was our first week spending five consecutive hours together, and I was afraid it was going to be a disaster– there are some chronically badly behaved students in the group, and even my best students get worn out and apathetic by the end of the fourth hour, understandably. Five hours feels like begging for trouble. For some reason, though, they seemed invested in the lesson– more so than usual, even. The group that usually leaves after the second hour to go eat actually came back for the end of class.1 We got through all of the material we needed to get through tonight. The idea may even have made sense by the end. So for the last twenty minutes or so, we played Apples to Apples (not the best game in the world, but excellent for teaching, and even directly relevant to the work we were doing on descriptive paragraphs), and everybody left the room happy and chattering. It felt like a minor, merciful miracle.
I am not yet a good teacher, though I aspire to it. Sometimes my activities fall miserably flat, sometimes I forget what I’m doing in class despite the clearly-marked lesson plans in front of me, sometimes I fail terribly at classroom management, sometimes I worry that I’m not giving them anything more to learn from than me talking. I had a tiny bit of experience with this juggling act before coming here, but in very different contexts, and I’d originally expected to actually be doing the work of my title here (English Teaching Assistant). Instead of an assistant, though, I am an honest-to-god classroom teacher all on my own, struggling and winning and failing with maybe less preparation than normal. Day to day, I often have no idea what will work and what won’t, despite seeking out help and poring over resources. I know that’s to be expected, but I feel like I should have more to offer. Two months in, this is not so terrifying. Two months in, this is still so terrifying.
When this post was bouncing around in my (tired, tired) head, the old cliche of the “little things” came to mind at first. Yet even though class only took up a small part of the day, everything else revolved around it. Teaching is the Big Thing, the mass at the center of my life here, shaping the orbits of my social life, my travel, language learning, bureaucratic frustrations, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, and on and on. Whether it’s recognized or unseen at any given time, it’s exerting its pull on the nature and structure of whatever else I do. It has to– I owe it to the work. And besides, I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to climb out of the gravity well.
1: It is very common and totally acceptable in Turkey to just leave class during the ten-minute break between hours, so that you can go eat or hang out with friends or what-have-you. In the US– by my perception, at least– that would be considered incredibly rude. Here, there’s a certain number of state-mandated hours that you’re allowed to miss class, and most students use them to leave early on Fridays or go get dinner during evening classes. It’s been, surprisingly, one of the hardest things to adjust to in the classroom.
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