“Make sure your class shows up.”

—-

Today was supposed to be the first real lecture section of the first real college course¹ I’m teaching: Introduction to Greek Mythology, for the first-year literature students. (Yesterday we met to go over the syllabus. I talked too fast.) I’ve been worrying about it, of course. Although I’m confident that I’ll do a good job [with a lot of worry and the help of my mentors], I still wound up tweaking powerpoint slides and scribbling quotes in the margin of my lecture notes 15 minutes before class time. The topic (”What is myth? What are the origins of myth? What can we learn from myth? What are the ethics of myth? What about myth and art? What are our sources for myth?”) was broad, complicated, and difficult to reformulate into something manageable for my students’ level of English– but I was looking forward to discussing it with them.

So a fourth-year student (A) was dispatched with me to help me find all the projector cables in the classroom. We showed up two minutes late– to a room empty of people and papers except for three students’ books. Oh, no. Truancy is rife here, and it’s quite common for students to skip the first week of class altogether– but I had about a third of the class yesterday, and they knew our first lecture was today. What could have happened? A and I set to work on the projector, with me hoping (albeit pessimistically) that my students were just mysteriously late.

The projector turned out to be pretty mysterious, too. A keyboard, mouse, and remote control were locked inside a metal cage, on top of another cage housing the main body of the computer. I’d forgotten the adaptor necessary to hook my computer up to the projector directly, so we wrangled a bunch of wires and cleared a space to plug in my flash drive, only to discover that the computer wouldn’t turn on. Pressed the button. No luck. Replugged the plug. No luck. Defeated, I went to reattach the projector cable before locking everything up again– and accidentally discovered the exposed wiring with my thumb.

Ow. The casing had come off the core of the projector cable, and something somewhere was carrying enough electricity to give me a pretty sharp shock. So I spent a few seconds dancing around the classroom and biting back my surprised swearing for the student’s benefit, then locked the locks, gathered my things, and headed out of the classroom with A in ignominious defeat.

At the bottom of the staircase, though, I spotted two of my students. “Where were you?” They started to explain– only be interrupted when an unreasonably bright flashbulb went off about ten feet from our collective faces. A photographer, brandishing a big DSLR and external flash, started directing us to cluster together, move up the stairs, move down the stairs. I was not particularly cooperative. “…hoca istemiyor?” Indeed. I escaped to the bottom of the stairs, and waited while my students were asked to troop down the flight together twice, flashbulb going off over and over. Apparently, the English department is the only non-hazırlık department currently in session, and the university needs promotional photos for the Erasmus Programme. Finally, my students escape.

The explanation? Some of their other classes today were canceled due to a meeting, so they thought mine was, too. Whoops.

I guess we’ll make it up next week. What an absurd comedy of errors.

1: I love my hazırlık students, but my English classes are functionally the same as teaching high school; I don’t think even my students– who routinely neglect to bring paper, pencil, or book– consider them university courses.

Headed to bed.

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.

Found while grading writing quizzes. About the Taj Mahal, one student writes,

“It’s made of white barber. It has two towels.“

…

It’s a sound-based mistake, of course, though as a friend pointed out, “How can you mistake marble for barber when the cognate in your own language is marmer?” Alas. And the “towels” (towers) just makes it better.

Unfortunately, the assignment wasn’t to write about the Taj Mahal, but rather a building in one’s hometown. And the Taj Mahal was a pre-written example from a similar exercise in the textbook. Sorun var. We’ll talk on Monday.

Easy-Bake Envy:

When I was a kid, I really wanted an Easy-Bake Oven. Cooking’s pretty much the only gendered hobby I ever picked up– my doll and horse phases were brief, I don’t really like to shop, and I almost never wear makeup. (The fact that cooking’s my only gendered hobby actually seems a little ironic, given that my dad does all the cooking in my parents’ house.) In any case, though, I love to cook– it’s a stress-reliever, a way to share with friends, an easy access to sociable company.

Alas, my Turkish apartment lacks a built-in oven, as is standard here. Instead, there’s what my friends called “a cooker”– a stand-alone two-burner thing, one hooked to electric, one to a purchasable gas tank. This is all well and good, and since I haven’t bothered to buy a gas tank, I’m even managing fine with just one burner– but I missed baking (cookies, bread, pie, everything) terribly.

So last week I finally got around to buying a counter-top oven, the available alternative. It looks almost exactly like an American toaster oven, but on some kind of magical appliance steroids: it has bake and broil settings, and goes up to 250C. And, amazingly, it works. I made roast Thanksgiving chicken in it (my first roast chicken ever, no less) and apple pie (I bake a mean apple pie), and I couldn’t be happier. It’s quirky and has weird interface issues and is pretty small, but my silly Easy-Bake envy has finally been satisfied by this ridiculous yet effective little gadget.

This morning I finished the snickerdoodles (the power and water were out for three hours last night, so that didn’t work out so well), and handed them out to students and colleagues at work. Everybody seemed shocked that I would bake at home. I can’t wait to share more food.

Turkish Christmas Trees:

After proctoring exams this afternoon, I wound up going to the local mall with friends out of sheer desperation (my shoes were literally falling apart). It is The Place To Go for many people here– the two times I’ve been, I’ve run into big groups of my students– and whenever I ask classes what they did over the weekend, a good two thirds will say, “We went to Sanko.” It’s huge and– to me, at least– terrifying, though I don’t like malls to begin with.

Anyway. We walked in through the gates, and there, in the giant four-story-high atrium, was an enormous metal Christmas tree.

I think I laughed hysterically for a good several minutes. In retrospect, I’m not all that shocked– the idea of Christmas is understood pretty much anywhere American culture penetrates, and we certainly tend to promote a fun, gift-centered, food-centered holiday over the religious midnight-mass version. Without the religious tie-ins, there’s not really much reason not to celebrate Christmas for the fun of it. It was unexpected and shocking, though, and I was baffled and amused to see this wholesale adoption of what is– let’s face it– a bizarre holiday tradition to begin with.

It’s probably going to be a pretty surreal month.

The subject– which I’m pretty confident doesn’t get reused, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it here– was, I kid you not, non-ironic motivational posters. Each student got one more-or-less randomly, and was responsible for telling us what they saw in the picture, as well as the “main idea,” what they thought it represented. Most of the answers were more or less the same, and mostly on-target, though a few interpretations surprised me. A picture of protesters fighting the police, with the caption “Know Your Power,” invariably got the explanation that it was wrong for protesters to try to solve problems that way. As an American reading a probably-American-produced poster, I’m pretty certain the originally-intended idea was the opposite, that protesters should know they have the ability to fight back against ostensibly stronger forces. Coming from a culture where protests are– speaking very, very generally– not the scenes of violent death, I can still understand why the image might evoke different incidents here.

We generally prompted them to relate the main idea to their own life, though, and it was there that the most interesting conversations occurred. It surprises me what my students trust me, and other teachers, with– stories and strongly held beliefs that might rarely be shared in an American classroom. It’s often touching, or sobering;¹ it feels like a rare gift that my students speak about these things with me, when speaking at all is such a challenge for them. When describing a poster labeled “Embrace Life’s Storms,” a student– un-prompted– shared the story of how he’d struggled with medical problems in a foot as a child, and been unable to walk (”or play football,” said with a wry smile) for years. To an outsider, Turkish culture seems a little less open to (and certainly less accommodating of) physical disabilities. Would an American student in that situation have told his story? I don’t know, but I’m doubtful.

The students I teach, even those I most struggle with in class over their behavior and their skills, still surprise me with their earnestness. There is a different culture of teaching here, a perception of the teacher as hocam, my wise teacher, rather than a restrictive force to be battled or escaped. That’s not to say that my classes are angelic, of course; if anything, they’re much more inclined to leave in the middle of a class or talk over me than any American students I’ve worked with. Yet there’s an undercurrent of respect– in both directions– that changes the dynamic of the room. When I get frustrated with students in class, even if I say nothing, they often come to apologize afterward. I know they’re trying, and that their distraction is often the result of not understanding what’s going on, so I build in as much leeway as I can. I want to push them, and they know it; we’re working on it together, bit by bit. Sharing stories gives us all reasons to keep pushing through the hard parts of this partnership.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m proctoring exams again, though it’s paper grammar exams this time, unfreighted by emotional content. In lieu of conversations and stories, I’ll share with them the snickerdoodles I’m baking. Not much, but at least they’ll know that I know what they’re doing is tough, and that they deserve a reward, even if it’s unspoken for now.

1: On the other hand, two students told me last week– in a discussion of leaders, and the qualities of a good leader– how much they admired Hitler. That was more on the disturbing side. I pushed them on it, but there’s a limit to how much I can pause class to deal with it, and I am not currently close enough to either student to drag them into more than a brief conversation after class. We’ll see what happens over the rest of the term.