Into the Classroom

There is of course a downside of being a ‘Native’ speaker in a city with very few of them.  People ask you to do ‘small’ favours for them, and naturally it is difficult to say no.  Last weekend, one of my co-workers (and co-owners) asked me to come into his local school on Thursday to give his students the opportunity to practice speaking English.  Now I like Gunger, so naturally I said yes, and bright and early on Thursday morning (far earlier than I am used to being awake on a Thursday) he came by and picked me up and drove me out to the village (about 15 minutes from my house) where he works.  It was a small school, and for that day I was the gangly giraffe being gaped at from all angles, never before seen in such a strange environment.  Or that’s what it felt like at least.  Minus the crude shouting I had flashbacks to life in Jakarta.

We sat in the teacher’s room and drank tea- he had told me not to prepare any lesson plans nor given me any topics on which to teach, so I sat there searching my brain for activities that I could do with 30 odd students for two hours.  Basics of course because I wasn’t expecting them to be very good, although I was pleasantly surprised at their level of English- still quite low for the most part, but better than I had anticipated.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, Gunger is an excellent teacher (he actually teaches them in English instead of in Turkish whenever possible) and his students were much better at English than I had been expecting after visiting Mustafa’s school a few weeks prior, and I ranged my topics from thing such as holidays (explaining Thanksgiving was a bit challenging- none in the least for his referral to Natives as ‘red Indians’, which I quickly shot down as highly offensive- my eyes fully widened in surprise) and appearance (although when asked to describe one student, they all said she was ‘fat’; I bit my tongue thinking how much trouble that student would have been in back in Canada) and other such spur of the moment topics.  I was not, however, expecting to teach all day, and by the time I had taught six hours of teenagers (with a nice lunch break in the middle where all the students brought in food from home) I was exhausted, and still had to go out to see Buglem that night.

Some of the school children.

I was all prepared with books that Dad had found and sent out from Canada for her but it turned out that she had just got a new trampoline (a little one for her room), so that was taking up most of her attention, and the books got a little sidelined- although Kubra was quite pleased with their arrival so that was good.  She is slowly beginning to understand me, although unless prompted, she won’t say much.  She has learned the song, “Rain, rain go away” and we are working on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” but “Head and Shoulders” reduced her to a blubbering mess as she thought the actions were too difficult to copy.  Of course she had a bit of a fever so that might have been part of it, and we will try again next time because it would be a good song for her to learn.  Kubra is picking up English quite well, and I can also see why they say that learning a new language from children is a good idea- my understanding of Turkish is improving by visiting their twice a week.

Lunch food the kids brought from home.  Quite a feast.

Weekend classes are slowly coming to the end of term- some have just wrapped up and the others will be shortly, meaning that new ones should be beginning soon, but I am secretly hoping that they don’t start them until after the Christmas holiday- which we have mostly booked (four days in Izmir, three days in Marmaris, and four days in Antalya) and are starting to get excited about- although the prospect of more eighteen hour bus journeys is a titch tedious.  The things you must do to save a dime.   I had an interesting conversation with one of my Intermediate classes, we were talking about history and why English is the de facto language around the world, and one of my students asked why the early Presidents in the US are so highly regarded when they were involved in slavery and the mistreatment of the Natives and such.  I thought about saying that unfortunately terrible things often occur with the start of a new nation, and that of course Turkish history is far from unblemished if you ask the Cypriots or the Armenians, but thought better of it.  Their English isn’t quite good enough for that kind of a debate.  Joe did ask his speaking class what they thought about the Turkish Presidents remarks on women’s roles (if you haven’t read the article, I highly recommend it) and they had mixed opinions, but generally thought he had the right idea.  One of the best parts of living in a country is learning people’s opinions.  It gives excellent food for thought.