Converse Considerations

Turkish Retribution
Tonight I've finally gone and done it. I've created the long-warned-of Turkish Punishment Masks of Shame. My students are not supposed to speak Turkish in the classroom but making them comply with this is challenging. English teachers at PEÉ are constantly creating new and creative punishments for Turkish chatter (including hopping around the room on one foot, meowing like a cat, "losing points", etc.). As Sondra and I walked home tonight we hypothesized that if females could be made to feel unattractive, and males feminine, we might create an effective incentive to shut up.

So I dug through my trash and found an empty milk carton (now washed), and an old oatmeal box. They have been split open and given eye holes. I also found some hideous red tinsel in our original Turkish bathroom-turned storage closet, and sewed it onto a barrette. Tomorrow morning I'll fix some rubber bands on the sides of the milk and oatmeal boxes, so that they can be worn on the face for the duration of an activity. A lot of the guys here have pretty short hair, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the barrette will have enough to grab onto...

Behold the trinity's beauty!

Though I'll never tell them, my students would be glad to know that I sliced my finger while cutting the eye holes... Karma, yeah?

Cultural Imperialism
And God said, "Let there be English." And there was, and God saw that it was good. And English spread across the land, and grew through time until it was a complicated tangle.

Finally, hundreds of years later--when English had become the vehicle of economics and of the globalized, competitive business; when what people knew about their jobs and their cultures was no longer enough--students in countries worldwide toiled many a long hour in language schools to learn this disastrous monster that God called English. These students strove to decipher the inconsistent mess (Too, two or to? Their, they're or there? Should we use "a," "the," or "one?" before this particular noun?!). And these students spent many hundreds, nay sometimes even thousands of dollars to compensate for their unfortunate upbringing in a language foreign to English.

God created a chosen people who were blessed to speak English from childhood. Among them was J. She went to Turkey, where the original language bespoke a logic and beautiful simplicity, and she tried to teach English.

Some of her students had already been brought into the tangle of English, and she led them ever deeper. Other students were utter tyros and began outside the tangle, on the fringes. She led them slowly into the wild forest of English grammar--a place where there are more exceptions than there are rules--a place where you're lucky to grow up so that you don't have to meet the horrible beasts later in life.

J watched some students succeed. She watched others falter, and the occasional one fail. For 23 classes out of 24, she did the song and dance (grammar, grammar, grammar, and lots and lots of vocabulary). But for the last class of the 24, she sat and watched her students during their exams: they gnawed their erasers; they snuck glances at their neighbor's answer sheet; they mumbled memorized phrases and tried to remember which preposition followed which verb. They agonized and sweat as they tried to answer the multitude of questions that assessed and quantified their knowledge. In the end, no one ever got 100%.

And though God saw that it was good, J wondered...