“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.

—

On the way to the bus station this morning, the city was unspeakably smoggy– worse than I’ve ever seen it. Gaziantep is a polluted place, unquestionably; when the weather was warmer, I’d find myself getting pollution headaches after anything more than a few hours downtown, and a low pall of dirty smoke hangs over the city at all times. But this was considerably more intense: from the top of the ridge of the Cumhuriyet neighborhood, I could look down sidestreets towards the center and see the whole city obscured, its outlines made uncertain by a grey haze. Downtown, it was difficult to even make out the edges of the castle clearly. Apparently yesterday a factory on the outskirts of the city caught fire, and now the aftermath is drifting through.

—

At the otogar, I got snapped up immediately by one of the where-are-you-going guys– the three or four people from the bus companies who hang out at the entrance to the station and try to gather up anyone incoming for one of the nearer destinations. It’s actually usually the best way for me to get a ticket; still buying directly from the bus companies, and usually for the soonest departure. My where-are-you-going guy today asked if I was German– usually the first question– but, to my surprise, followed it up by telling me (in German) that he’d lived in Köln for two years. Despite my assurances that no, I am not German, and yes, I understand (some) Turkish, the rest of our business was conducted in German. It was kind of sweet, actually; I got the impression he wanted to practice.¹ As he was walking me to the bus, ticket in hand, someone called out a joke to him in Turkish; I asked if he was a friend. “Yes,” he said, in Turkish this time, “all friends. But no German friends. And no German wife.” He grinned, and gestured expansively, jokingly. “Neden? Neden?” For what reason, what reason? Then, a little more quietly, without the gestures, neden again.

—

My initial impression of Urfa was dominated by pigeons.

From the otogar, a dolmuş took me into the center of old town through a city center which reminded me of Antep (but with the substitution of palm trees) and a short string of winding back streets, the kind that make you wonder whether the bus driver actually meant to turn this way, or is just enjoying trying to smooth down some of the nearby masonry. I hopped out when we reached the old bazaar (not really being eager to continue participating in the backstreet driving experiment), and, after a minute’s walk, found myself in the courtyard of the mosque built on the site of Abraham’s birth.

Which, as I said before, was full of pigeons. I realize this is a trite observation to be making about a terribly holy place– but it was the first thing that struck me, in any case. Huge clouds of pigeons, settling on the domes, the balconies of the minarets, the ornate architecture of the courtyard’s corners. In the center, a constantly-moving, constantly-disturbed crowd of pigeons cooing on the yellow stones with alternate contentment and indignation, as children threw handfuls of feed and raced through the knots of birds. At the very middle, where the children and pigeons were attending to their respective business, was a short stream set into a channel in the stone: water from the Balikligöl, the lake of sacred fish that supposedly sprang up to protect Abraham from fiery death– which eventually brought my attention back to the ostensible holiness, and away from the pigeons fluttering all around.

—

More writing incoming when it’s not so late after a long day of travel; pictures incoming when I have the correct camera cable again. Tomorrow: grading grading grading, seeing a movie (Yahşi Batı) with a friend and her class, possible dinner plans, personal academic projects. Busy life.

1: For me, hearing German is both lovely and a little strange. I can no longer consciously produce much German without great difficulty, but I understand a respectable amount when it’s spoken at me. What’s much more odd, though, is that there’s no translating going on in my head; what German I can remember just intrinsically means what it does, the same as English. The advantages of learning a language early, I guess.

After class today, a student came up to me and, in an apparent nonsequitur, asked if he could show me something. He said, “You know our god is Allah. Look.” He interlaced his fingers, and turned so that I could see the inside of his palms. His friend traced letters on his hands:

Allah, written in the lines on the palms of our hands. I couldn’t think of anything to say (save “thank you”) in response to so lovely a sharing of knowledge.

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.

Bayram begins tomorrow, and I’m excited for it. I pride myself on being at least somewhat better-informed than the average yabancı about Turkish customs and Islamic traditions, but I really have no idea what the experience of participating in the holiday (even in a limited way) is going to be like. Knowledge of history and practices and religious significance and whatnot doesn’t get me very far in anticipating the emotions of and reactions to the newness of a foreign custom, one entirely outside of my own context. I’ll be visiting with a friend’s family in Adana for the first two days, then traveling to some coastal Roman and Byzantine sites on the third, then stopping by northern Hatay on the fourth day on my way back to Antep. It’s exciting. And makes me a little nervous.

In an odd sort of way, Thanksgiving and Kurban Bayramı fit well in my mind. Both seem like celebrations, on some level, of having enough: enough to get through the winter, enough to give to friends and family, enough to indulge for a day or two in an extravagant feast and celebration of togetherness, enough that you don’t have to endure pain and hardship for a little while. Charity is central. Food and family are central. There’s more to it than that, of course, in both cases– but enough, and being grateful for it, is important.

So instead of one day to remind me to be thankful this year, I’m lucky enough to get five devoted to the idea. I’m thankful for my friends and my family, for the ability to live in this wonderful place, for my health and my happiness and my luck. I’m thankful for the warmth and generosity of my new friends here, for the challenge of my work, for the time that I have to see places and explore experiences so unusual for my peers. I’m thankful for everything I have, for my life, and for the reminder to think on it and appreciate it.

Happy Thanksgiving, and bayramınız kutlu olsun.

1: Roast chicken (turkeys are– ironically, I guess– difficult to find here) over a bed of potatoes and quartered onions, plus tiny onions cooked whole until sweet with slivered spinach and crushed garlic steamed over them as a side. Bread and butter. Apple pie (a lovely success, when I expected a pretty awful failure– I bake a mean apple pie, but the circumstances were not in my favor).

Does this count as a costume? Taken in Istanbul, May 2008.

“No, that was his circumcision suit. You wouldn’t call a wedding dress a costume, would you?”

Duh! I’d completely forgotten about the big dress-up party that goes along with the Turkish circumcision tradition. And my friend’s point was absolutely right– although the outfit looked and still looks like a costume to me, there’s an important difference between the archaisms of certain kinds of formal clothes (like wedding dresses and circumcision suits) and the mimicking of history involved in a costume. American wedding dresses, even modern ones, still cling to traditions that seem completely out of step with modern perspectives on clothing: white for the bride (but only the first-time bride), a long concealing skirt with a train, garters, maybe even still a veil. If we weren’t so accustomed to seeing wedding dresses in their own peculiar role, of course they’d look bizarre, archaic– like costumes.

Living here, I find my misinterpretations and mistakes getting mirrored back to me as insights fairly often, but it’s not always comfortable. There’s certainly satisfaction in figuring out (or having explained to me) some cultural note I was perplexed by, and amusement and fascination in the differences. But I do find myself struck by my minor and major misunderstandings alike, and wondering just what, exactly, is getting assumed about me.

Well. At least now I won’t call it a costume in class tomorrow. Small victories.

Surprisingly not uncommon: horsecarts.

The Tuesday bazaar in the university neighborhood is a repeated source of entertainment for me. Markets are human life in distilled and concentrated form: talking, shouting, haggling, eating, buying, joking with friends, jostling, scooping up children, persuading, gossiping, teasing, finding necessities, selling necessities, what-have-you. The building blocks of communities– families, food, daily chores, connections with your neighbors– all happen at the market. And they’re full of bright colors and interesting smells to boot. What’s not to like? So last week I finally stocked my kitchen with a little more equipment (enough that it’s not a daily frustration anymore– that is, I bought a saucepan and some miscellany) and loaded myself up with as much incredibly fresh produce, cheese, and honey as I could carry with aching arms on two different trips. Maybe most satisfyingly of all, I managed to get through my transactions in comprehensible Turkish with pretty minimal sign language. Incredibly rudimentary Turkish, yes, but being able to buy something without making a complete idiot of myself is an important language milestone all the same. This week, since I won’t be trying to stock up so much, I’m hoping to get pictures. I’ll probably wind up making two trips all over again.

Between settling into my apartment (as per Twitter, I’m now settled in enough that I tend to get up from my chair to grab a book from the shelf– and then realize there is no shelf and the book’s in a box in Portland), getting to know Antep a little more, and teaching-teaching-teaching, I haven’t gotten out of the city in the last two weeks. This weekend, though, I’m planning to go to Hatay with a friend who’s from the area. I guarantee writing of some sort will follow.

Speaking of which, I have about three partially-written-out notes I’m going to try to get onto the internet this week. To try to hold myself to it, here they are:

• a navel-gazey post on why I’m not applying to grad school this fall
• a post on the Turkish engagement ceremony I went to now-a-few-weeks-ago, plus some other cultural notes
• and a very-delayed post on Fulbright orientation in Ankara, what it meant to me, and some of the ideas I see as central to my role here.

And that’s the general gist of what I’ve been doing lately. More soon, as promised.

1: As I’m writing this, I can hear raucous shouting and car-horn-honking in the street outside. I’m guessing Fenerbahçe beat Galatasaray.