Spoken Like A True Idiot

Ayşa likes to teach me basic phrases in Turkish. She's so sweet. Today she quizzed me on the days of the week, which I can never remember unless I start at the beginning, but today my answers were still abysmally wrong (roughly translated into their English equivalents):

Friday
Wursday
Pink

And then I basically gave up because we dissolved into laughter and I didn't have the heart to go on. Thank god she can actually speak English.

I don't miss you when you're gone. Or, annoying students

Remember my lawyer student? The woman who was chronically late and then brought a German textbook to English class? Well, she ended up switching classes to a time that was more convenient for her (mind you, she's still late...).

Charles, the teacher who has been lucky enough to be gifted this woman's presence three days a week, regularly whinges (Br. Eng: to complain) about her: "How does she survive in the real world?"

"What do you mean? What's she done now?"

"I just can't imagine how she opens doors, or ties shoe laces. She's one of those people who is so stupid that she actually thinks she's intelligent."

Or the time that he walked into my classroom during a ten minute break and sputtered: "I'll do anything, I'll sell my firstborn... or my soul... Just please, please, please take her back from me."

Sorry Charles, no can do. She's yours now. Besides, I have my hands full with Cemal, the Replacement Idiot in my Elementary class.

I've had them for a month and we've been working on things like: "My name is..." "She's a doctor..." etc. It's pretty basic but it's challenging nonetheless. However, if you never try, then I just blame you for wasting your parents' money. Cemal, a 20-something, is clearly a spoiled rich kid. He's the kind of cocky bastard you want to smack--and I don't say that about many people.

He took Charles' Intensive Elementary a while back (which is effectively six months of class content compressed into three and a half months), failed the exams, and ended up ALL THE WAY BACK at the beginning of Elementary. With me. The second time he took the Level 1 exam at the end of the first month (which is purposefully easy to boost students' confidence), he almost failed. Again. Please, cut off my arms to distract me from the pain your existence inflicts.

Now, I can forgive you if you struggle but are sweet and look like you're trying. But if you saunter in late, dance to the obnoxious ring tone when your cell goes off, parrot me in an annoying voice every time I say "correct," refuse to complete assignments so that you can do partner work, laugh at other students' mistakes, chatter endlessly in Turkish, and make me feel more like your babysitter than your English teacher, I will loathe you.

Well, Cemal has pushed every button and more. There's an interesting challenge when you teach Elementary, of figuring out how to tell people off without using words. Even if I could be so unprofessional as to call him an ass, he wouldn't understand it.

Yesterday while one of my older students was answering an exercise question, Cemal sat behind him, making mocking faces and waving his arms around in the air, trying to be funny. Laughing at other students in my class is punishable by death.

"Cemal," I said sharply. It was the kind of voice and look you use with a puppy that just peed on your favorite area rug. He looked scared. I made him answer four questions from the exercise in a row; I never broke eye contact with him and I didn't crack a smile or encourage him to keep trying when his voice wavered with uncertainty.

Maybe 45 minutes later, his phone rang. Students sign a contract acknowledging that they will shut off their phones in class. His has rung before but I hadn’t ever been successful at commandeering it. Yesterday it went off during my explanation of an activity; I interrupted myself to take the call but he sent it to voicemail just as he handed it to me. About a minute later, it went off again, this time in the middle of a drill.

"Give. It. To. Me." He did. The class watched me, all 11 of them looking at me. I slid open his ultra-slick toy of a cell.

"Hello?" I chirped.

[Turkish blah blah blah, unintelligible except for "Cemal?"]

"No, this is J, Cemal's English teacher."

[Turkish blah blah blah]

"Do you speak English?"

[Turkish blah blah blah]

"Sorry, he's not here now. Call back later."

About then, the phone beeped as the Turkish blah blah blah ended. Whoever was calling him gave up. They didn't call back.

Cemal's face was something like shock, and about half my class was nearly dying with the laughter they'd been bottling up during my phone call. I sat his phone on my desk and smiled primly: If you want to treat me like your mother, then I’ll be your mother.

When he asked for it at the end of class, I made him recite "Can I please have my mobile back?" I asked his peers if I should give it to him. "No!" a few of them shouted, laughing. As people filed out, I told him sternly him not to do it again (the following is the kind of thing you enunciate with agonizing slowness to communicate with an Elementary student):

"Cemal, mobiles ok for policemen and doctors. Are you a policeman or a doctor?”

“What?”

“You are a student. You are not a policeman or a doctor. No mobile. Today, mobile is a big problem. Mobile tomorrow, very, very big problem. You understand?"

Apparently he did. He didn't even come to class today. Class was so much better without him. It's fascinating the difference one person can make.

Musings from a yobanca

I sat in a dim bar, my eyes tingling from the endless cigarette smoke curling towards the ceiling. I blinked, relishing the slick relief. It was Saturday night, and for the first time in five months, I was hanging out. Ayşa, the beautiful girl who works in the front office of PEÉ and took me to the hospital last week, had invited me to go out with her to meet a few old friends from university. I accepted immediately--I didn't care where we went, or what we did, or who we saw.

Walking into such a situation, you can't have high expectations. If any of them speak English, I thought, well then good for me. But if not, well, so goes yobanca life. They did, in fact, speak English to varying degrees. They were initially shy about talking and so for awhile, Ayşa translated for us. There were lots of smiles and laughter as I stumbled through some basic Turkish phrases--putting them at ease because certainly their English had to be better.

Occassionally one of them would take mercy on me and ask me a question or two. However, they hadn't seen each other for awhile, and they were happy to chat and tell stories. It was during my witness of one of the men telling a story that had everyone in stitches with laughter that I discovered a new type of embarassment. Previously unfelt, this gentle yet inescapable embarassment dawned on me: clearly I was The Fool, understanding nothing whatsoever of the conversation taking place around me. Should I laugh? I didn't know what I was laughing at. Certainly, the situation had a degree of comedy from my side, but if I laughed, it would be an idiot laughing at a private joke that no one else could understand. No, I decided, it was best just to smile.

But god, how I longed to laugh, to understand, to be surrounded by old friends. Ayşa, the beautiful, sweet girl, sensed my predicament and translated for me, allowing me to share some of their experience.

I sat in that pub, knowing that I was in the midst of vast oceans of conversation. It was like treading water and praying that I would come across a stray piece of driftwood upon which I could rest, if for only a second. It was so hard to stay alert when all I heard was the odd number or "yes" or "no," "because," "what," or verb stem (iyor) without knowing the actual verb. It's easy to become overwhelmed by the incessant waves of words. I wanted, at times, to just drown in the words--tune out and permit myself to exist in a private world in the midst of an incomprehensible reality--but I forced myself to focus and try, even though I knew it was futile, try to understand.

"Don't fall asleep!" Ayşa joked with me once. I told her I wouldn't.

The truth was, once I had accepted this new embarassment, I enjoyed myself. When we parted company, they all kissed my cheeks goodbye (first on the left, then on the right) and we promised to meet again.

American Pie, or, Why we should care about what we export

Crafted by one of PEÉ's own students. What follows is an excerpt from an essay on why movies are popular worldwide. I'm not saying anything--judge for yourself. (You can click on it to make it full screen if you can't read it otherwise. I don't want you to miss any of it.)

Yobanca Blood

Ayşa and I finally found the right door. We pushed it open into a room--empty save for a single man in a long dark rain jacket. Ayşa said something to him and he got up to find the nurse. With Ayşa translating for me, I experienced everything with a five second delay. It turned out that the man was the father of the baby that needed blood.

I couldn't speak Turkish so I just looked at the father. His face was taut with anxiety. I hadn't expected to see him but now I was glad. Ayşa and I were in the children's hospital across the street from PEÉ. A few minutes before, someone had been wandering through local businesses, pleading for anyone with AB+ blood to come and donate to a premature newborn whose mother was experiencing a bout of hypertension--or something like that. The family didn't have enough money to buy blood.

"I have AB blood," I'd said in the teacher's room at PEÉ when a secretary from the front office came through. "Could they test it to find out if I'm positive or negative?"

And so off I had gone with Ayşa, skittering down the five flights of stairs, and weaving between a massive line of traffic to the other side of the block. The hospital is a sprawling mess of rooms, corridors and waiting rooms. Electronic number boards were high on the walls, keeping track of the endless queue of people waiting to get medical attention. We were batted around like a ping-pong ball between different stations in the hospital. Finally we found the right door, and discovered the father of the baby, who summoned a male nurse.

As the male nurse was motioning me to sit in one of the chairs, I was stripping off my jacket to roll my sleeve up, and Ayşa was explaining that I wasn't sure if I were positive or negative. But then the nurse stopped dead in his tracks.

"Yobanca?" He asked, finally noticing that this pale little girl hadn't spoken a word for herself yet. Yep. She's a foreigner all right.

He asked Ayşa if I had a drivers' license. Negative. I tried to offer him my residency documents in lieu but he wouldn't take them. I stood amongst the three of them--Ayşa, the nurse, and the shaking father--trying to follow the ensuing conversation, but in vain. Of course.

From the way Ayşa inched back towards the door we'd come through, and from the way the father kept saying to us, "Çok teşekkürler, canım, çok teşekkürler (Thank you so much, dear, thank you so much)," it became apparent that we were leaving.

What about the baby?! I was trapped in helpless silence so I just took one last look at the father before we pulled the door shut behind us. I wanted to cry.

Back in the corridor, Ayşa began explaining, trying to soften the blow. I learned I was the second person to try to give blood. The mother didn't know that the baby was in danger because she was having hypertension.

"But why don't they accept yobanca blood?" I asked as we crossed the tree-lined parking lot.

"Maybe it's something about genetics, that they won't take your blood. Maybe they want a Turkish person. I don't know."

But my students that night were furious. "That nurse should be sacked. If you told the manager of the hospital, he would be sacked. The baby needs blood. That is so stupid. There is no law. If you'd had a drivers' license you could have proved that you'd done a blood test and been tested negative for AIDS... but the nurse made a story."

"Maybe he didn't think I would be disease-free? Or maybe they didn't have the money to test the blood before the transfusion," I offered. What point was there getting mad about something in which I had so, so little influence? Better to accept and move on.

"They should test the blood anyway before a baby gets it."

I could hardly argue with them about it. It was now about three hours since I had gone to the hospital with Ayşa. My students and I sat around the table in PEÉ's in-house cafe for a silent moment, wondering if the baby was still alive.

I took a deep breath and stood up. "Ok, our ten minute break is over. Let's get back to class." I led the way back to the classroom, the only place for thousands of miles where I am ever in control.

Burritos. Yeah, that's right. Burritos.

After a long Sunday, at least a few of the teachers from PEÉ get together for a beer after work. Tonight, however, I had better things to do, better people to see. Her name is Rosarita.

So I said goodbye to everyone and hurried to the bus, catching the 6 right as it pulled up to the stop.

Once home, I pulled Rosarita out of the cupboard and introduced her to Tillamook Sharp Cheddar Cheese. They were soon joined by a can of California-made salsa and real corn tortillas. Aren't they gorgeous together?!

These amazing goodies were shipped to me earlier this week--I'd been forced to curb my appetite when I realized that I couldn't get Rosarita open because I lacked a can opener.

But tonight I was prepared and I began assembling a mighty dinner. Turks don't eat sour cream but they have a cream-type condiment that I had in the fridge--it's not very tangy, but it's close enough when you have better things to salivate over. Like toasted corn tortillas with grated cheddar melted, then topped with brown rice, refried beans, some more cheddar, chili chicken, and salsa, blessed salsa.

I didn't even make it to the table with them. They were consumed in their entirety on my kitchen counter in huge, inelegant bites. I know it's gringo Mexican food, but it tastes like Home, and I was grinning with bliss for a good 10 minutes. Delicious.

Pancakes

I attempted pancakes for the second time today. Without accurate measuring devices and reliable ingredients, they're not like the ones from home... I don't think that their "baking powder" is the same as what we use. I made my pancakes much more carefully this time than the first attempt, and they turned out a lot better, but they're still a little gluey on the inside.

Oh America, I miss your fluffy goodness.

FYI, I'm going to be eating like there's no tomorrow when I get back to the States in nine months. Like there's no tomorrow.

They are my children and I love them...
But I don't love them all the same. Some classes are better than others. I particularly love the Elementary and Upper-Intermediate students--the ones at the beginning and the end of English, so to speak. Something about the middle levels is a buzz-kill.

But God how I love my Elementary students. They're vulnerable, nearly helpless is the vast sea of English words, grammar, rules, exceptions, and pronunciation. When they start to take their first steps with English, pride literally swells in my heart--they are learning how to speak. And I am their teacher. It's like watching children, only they are adults. They're empowered and I'm proud as hell.

And I love my Upper Ints--why? Because they have the language to carve out an identity in English. Over the years that they have studied, they have been exposed to a tremendous amount of language. And they have so, so, so much stored in their passive knowledge ("Teacher, why do we use 'By the way?'" "What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?" "Am I using teepee correctly?"). For them, it is mostly a matter of activating their passive knowledge--of allowing them to develop themselves in English.

Pre Int and Int students are trapped somewhere in the gray zone. They are growing, but self-consciously--like gangly adolescents who refuse to talk with anyone at the family reunion and sit in the corner, glowering at the buffet table.

My relationship with my students defies easy categorization. They must respect and trust me to teach them, but I also need a certain amount of room to make mistakes with them. The new car has to get that first scratch. And though there are moments when I am utterly serious and/or peeved with them ("Cağlar, I am not your mother--stop talking.") and when they must listen to me, I am also their clown. I have become ActorArtistSynonymProducer3000.

You try drawing a farm on the whiteboard without looking like a fool. You will probably moo and attempt some scythe-swinging action at least once before you finish. And try explaining excited to a room of non-English speakers without jumping up and down with a look of glee on your face. Or dangerous. That's right, slide that seventh-story window open, climb up on the chairs in the back row, and make like you're going to jump. "Teacher!" they cry. Exactly. That is dangerous.

And when they succeed at some monumentally difficult reading, or when they actually take the time to memorize a seemingly-hopeless list of irregular past simple verb tenses, someone has to be their cheerleader. I regularly tell my students that I love them. And I do.

... Except the ones who are truly stupid...

My new Elementary class began last weekend. The class, primarily men in their early twenties, is a rowdy handful. They demand constant attention, but they do obey me and repeat everything I tell them to. They are fast learners, for the most part.

One woman, the friend of PEÉ's owner's ex-wife, who it seems has been done a favor, didn't attend the first two classes. I was consequently requested to teach private makeup lessons throughout the week to prepare her for this weekend. All well and good, since I get a little extra cash, but it turns out that she is far from being a natural language learner. It's ok. Some people are. But for God's sake, be on time about it.

She was late for our second private appointment on Friday afternoon, so I had the secretaries call her. Oops! Sorry, she said, she forgot. Can we reschedule for later Friday afternoon? Fine, I grumble, 3 o'clock works. But dammit I had to rearrange my planning, so I wasn't happy about it. And when the wench still hadn't showed up at 3:08, and I had the secretaries call her again, she swore left and right that she was in the lobby six flights down, just getting in the lift. Good, I said, as the secretary got off the phone with her.

So I stood and waited for her in the foyer as three elevators came and went to our floor. Out she finally tumbled, a mess of apologies in Turkish and English when she saw me standing there with all of my materials in hand.

It's fine, I said with a terse smile. Are you ok? She was, and she's a lawyer so maybe she had some important legal battle to win--like a Turkish Eric Brokovich--and that was why she was late. I tried to forget about it. And off we trooped to class, me leading the way before my "42" year old (Honey, you have to be lying, you've got to be more like 50) student.

And then Saturday's elementary lesson rolled around. I bet with the other teachers that my lawyer-student would be late. She seems to love, love, love attention. And oh, was she ever late. Try 50-something minutes late. She knocked on the door (after interrupting every other class on the floor to find my room, I discovered from teachers later) and scampered into class before I could send her to the canteen to wait until I called 10-minute break. It turns out that the main secretaries also told her not to go to class, but to wait in the canteen. Wench. I lectured the class sternly about interruptions more than 15 minutes after class starts.

So today she was only 10 minutes late. But the icing on the cake was that she didn't have any of her English books--the English books that I saw on two previous occasions had been mysteriously replaced by--and I am NOT making this up--something that looked suspiciously like (when I peered at it from upside-down in a most teacherly fashion as I instructed them to turn to page 16, and nothing on her page 16 looked like my page 16) a German textbook. German. Let me repeat that: German.

Are. You. Kidding. Me?!!?!??!?!?!

I don't even know what we're going to do about her but I doubt it will be pretty.

But everyone else gives me the warm tingles.

Rain rain go away

The rain has been unrelenting. Even now, in my new room--with a window that affords sounds of Izmir that I didn't hear before (like the rain, the Call to Prayer, dog and cat fights)--even now, at 9 o' clock, the rain is pouring. It was pouring when I woke up at 7 this morning to go to work, and it is still drip-dropping down the trees. Thunder rumbles. It is beautiful and cozy, so long as I am inside and free of work.

The rain clouds blanket the city in its own warmth. And on rainy days, the bus is a microclimate of its own--tropical in its steaminess--and densely packed with silent, sullen Saturday- and Sunday-morning stiffs making their way to work or school or wherever.

After a few months, we have worn a path through the city. Habit. After we pile out of the bus with possibly 30 to 40 other people, we break away to walk the six blocks to the tall building where PEÉ is located. We walk past restaurants and shops, down a road used heavily for bus transfers. Uniform sidewalks do not exist on these side streets. A marble-tiled sidewalk may be in front of one posh restaurant, but then abruptly disappear a few steps later. A wood walkway changes to bare dirt becomes ancient cracked concrete switches to a different height of ancient cracked concrete. The incessant shifting demands a certain level of attention which is always absent at 8:18 am. It is much easier to brave the road with cars and buses rumbling just inches away.

Normally on Saturday and Sunday morning we shuffle to work. Tired and less-than-enthused about the 9 hour teaching day yawning before us, we shuffle. But in the rain, the movement changes; the pattern varies.

The heavy rain causes the familiar side streets--planes of uneven asphalt that would drive a perfectionist to suicide--to become a foreign territory that requires a new attention. Puddles appear, deep enough to soak my entire foot. Rivulets stream through the shallow gutters and spread over the road in slick pools. Motor oil glistens in rainbow designs on the dark road. This morning, brains still fuzzy from sleep, Sondra and I scuttled around puddles, trying to make it the six blocks with dry feet.

We had only a couple blocks to go when I heard her cry, "Shit!" from behind me. "Did you step in one?" "Yeah," she groaned.

Getting home was equally treacherous. Our jackets--soaked from 20 minutes in the rain--are on the laundry rack in the living room with the fan blowing on them. They'll dry in time, but hopefully it'll have stopped raining by then.

Shoddy wiring in the flat blows on New Years...

I would just like to remind everyone that Turks are probably the nicest people on earth, and that, no matter how many unpaid hours I work for PEÉ (and there are a lot of them...), I remain eternally grateful that I can call someone any time of the day and get help with real-world problems that would otherwise leave me in frustrated tears.

Example: When our power went out at 7:49pm tonight (Sondra had just conditioned her hair in the shower), and tinkering with the fuse box in our flat didn't work, and tinkering with the fuse box in the lobby didn't work, and asking our sweet upstairs neighbors didn't work, and asking plaintively at the market outside our flat didn't work, there was no one left to call but the savior of a secretary who works for PEÉ.

Me: Müjde! Help! Our electricity is out! Sigorta attı. (The fuse is blown.) We don't know what to do.
Müjde: Tamam, canım, (Ok dear) no problem. I will send my electrician friend. Don't worry.
Me: Thank you!!! You are wonderful!
Müjde: No problem, canım. I'll call him now.

Five minutes later Müjde phones back to say that some guy is on his way. Müjde's name actually means good news. Surprise.

Fifteen minutes later Sondra and I are letting a smiling gent into the lobby of our building so he can fuss with the fuse box. We run back upstairs to get him a chair so he can reach the fuse box (and he puts on little blue plastic booties before standing on it so as not to muss the upholstery-- çok Turkish), and within minutes he has us back on the grid. We are so grateful that we let him smoke a cigarette in our living room while he phones Müjde to translate some details, instead of shooing him outside to puff on the balcony.

So that's it. There's no good way to close, except that I love Turks. And their blue plastic booties that keep them from tracking dirt into the Pristine Turkish Home (except we're filthy yobancalar who work nearly 50 hours a week each, and we don't have time/energy to clean, so I'm always super embarassed when they try to take their shoes off and I have to gesture that it's better to leave them on because the flat will get them dirty...). Bless 'em.