A week in the life of THIS English teacher in Turkey

My schedule leaves me little time to sit in front of my computer and update you all on my happenings here, but as it happens today is Republic Day in Turkey. As a result (and because H1N1 has hit Turkey) we have both today and tomorrow off from school. I'm sitting here on my third cup of strong Turkish tea, having eaten a hard-boiled egg that wasn't as hard-boiled as I thought. I find that simple tasks take on a new level of difficulty for me when I am confronted with a whole new set of stimuli. My mind seems to shut down and before I know it, I'm slicing open an egg with a nicely cooked yolk and a soft albumen inside.

Enough about eggs.

Okay, so let me take you through a day-by-day rundown of my work week.

Monday:
Up at 6:30 unless the call to prayer wakes me an hour earlier. Or unless the cat jumps on my head. Or unless I awaken in a panic because I failed to grade journals or lesson plan third period. I start making coffee and look through my closet for a pair of pants and a shirt that don't need ironing. After a shower and a quick breakfast, I head over to the English office. At 8:15, I head to the amphitheater for the Monday morning flag ceremony. My students sit in huddled groups, deceptively mellow and unawake at this hour, giving little indication of what they will be like in the classroom. We stand as the flag bearers come in and march down the stairs. The national anthem is played and the students all sing it in either a low register or monotone. I have discovered that this must be because of the key the anthem accompaniment is played in. You have to either sing it really low or really high and exposed. We listen to announcements, the flags are carried out and I run up to class.

Periods one and two with my advanced prep students (15 year olds) generally goes well. They're still waking up and haven't had their morning break yet so they aren't all hopped up on sugar. Our periods last a mere 40 minutes, which is either mercifully quick or ploddingly slow depending on my preparation and my students' behavior. We either read the novel we're working on or work in our grammar book. Third period comes and I get a break to regroup for 4th period. By this time, the students are their normal, energetic selves. They come upon me at the beginning of class, a wave of questions crashes against me and I entreat them to sit. I like my students. They have an energy that keeps me on my toes. They ask interesting questions. Their curiosity is fantastic and I find myself thinking back to try and remember if I was ever like this.

Period five is set up for parent teacher conferences - I've only done this a couple of times so mostly it's a prep hour for me. I take lunch at 6th period and check in with my fellow teachers. The lunches here are fantastic - we are spoiled: kofta, kebab, chicken, rice, salad, fresh fruit, puddings and cakes, yogurt, ayran, rich lentil soups.

After lunch, I head back to the English office to get ready to face my tenth graders. I teach two classes of tenth graders - each class is pretty unique. This group is my lively bunch. They move quickly through the material and would rather chat and draw and dance and do just about anything rather than settle down to a bit of reading. Yet once they do, they are engaged and ask some pretty insightful questions.

I get a period break then I have my other 10th grade class. This group is quieter but nevertheless just as engaged. They move through things more slowly but not because they lack the understanding or initiative. Rather, it's usually because they take more time to discuss ideas.

The best thing about walking into class each day? The students come to attention and stand by their desks until I tell them to sit (well, it takes them a bit of time to do this sometimes, but it's still pretty cool).

After class I help with the Beyond ISTA theater club.

Tuesday:
I dislike Tuesday mornings because I have two periods with each of my 10th grade classes right off the bat. I'm generally tired after teaching the same thing twice over the course of 4 periods. I get a bit of a mid-day break and then see my prep kids in the afternoon.

Wednesday:
10th graders again in the morning but only for one period with each group. Then I get a break, see my preps for two periods and then backup one of the 12th grade teachers after lunch. My afternoon is spent in a coordination meeting with two other teachers to plan the next week's lessons for 10th grade. After school, another teacher and I co-lead a radio club.

Thursday:
Prep kids in the morning, backup for 12th grade, then 10th graders late afternoon.

Friday:
I have the first two periods free (very nice, except for the fact that I've subbed for teachers 2nd period almost every week since school started). I see my 10th graders in the morning (I should mention we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird right now. My students know I'm a Mac user and in one class I came in to find, written on the board, "To Kill a Mocintosh" with an apple symbol with x'd out eyes. Very clever).

After 3rd and 4th periods, I rush over to the new building to see my preps for an hour. They are generally completely insane by this point in the week, but this is okay because I am too. I grab a super quick lunch then head back to the English building to help with the radio club's Friday lunchtime broadcast. Lately I've been bringing my iPod over to the co-op and playing jazz or lounge music for the hour. Then it's back to the new building for a lesson with the preps. 8th period on Friday is the last one of the week so I make that my SSR period with the students (I long for this period as it is generally the only block of time I have in the week for some solid reading).

We all head back to the amphitheater for the closing flag ceremony, get announcements, sing the anthem, enjoy the warmth of the sun and head out. Generally I will grab a drink and a snack with some of the Turkish and foreign faculty down by the bay.

The weeks fly by here. I'm generally overwhelmed but I've learned to ride the wave of uncertainty and enjoy the experience.

Curiouser and Curiouser

This post is a companion post to my friend Aiichiro's post on the same subject. I would link to it, but my Mac browser doesn't let me do it easily, so you will just have to trust me when I say that he wrote about this first. Anyway, as someone who enjoyed art and wanted to be an artist at a very early age, I was naturally attracted to kids books with superior illustrations. I liked Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, etc. But my favorite illustrations were the ones Sir John Tenniel had done for Lewis Carroll's Alice books. After I admired the pictures and tried copying them in my own notebooks, I actually read "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" and was so happy to find out the stories were (unlike the Disney film) brilliantly complex, humorous, and completely sarcastic. Carroll, through these books, is able to show how ridiculous the adult world must seem to children, and poke fun at imperialism at its worst to boot.

I've seen several versions of Alice in Wonderland and have never been satisfied because they have all seemed too cutesy, and Alice isn't cute - she's strong, and whiny, sometimes a brat, and very often full of common sense. I like Alice, because she is not passive - she explores the worlds she's dropped into and discovers new things. Most versions of Alice focused on the putting famous actors in caterpillar or turtle costumes and having them dance around like theme-park mascots.

Enter Jan Svenkmajer, Eastern European stop-action animator. I'd heard he'd made a version of "Alice" in the 80s but after my sister and her friend had seen another of his films, "Little Otek" (about a child made out of a stump of wood - a child that grows and devours neighbors), I kept putting it off. I didn't want to be disturbed. When I saw YouTube had some clips of "Alice", I watched them and then ordered myself a copy of the film. It IS a bit disturbing, but not in a bad way, and it completely captures the feeling of the original books without resorting to sentimentality. In fact, it's completely unsentimental. At times, Svenkmajer's wonderland is nightmarish and his Alice, who is correctly played much younger than in most adaptations, is run through the wringer (is it wringer? or ringer? I think it must be wringer because you are wringing out water as from recently warshed (I actually spelled that incorrectly on accident, so I'll leave it) clothes).

After watching the film, I had to bring it to Aiichiro because he quotes Alice at least once a week and has a special love, bordering on obsession, for this book (which to me is very cool).

So for your viewing pleasure (Liz, you will love the teeth!), I am including Svenkmajer's version of Alice and the caterpillar (it's four minutes long, but you can spare four minutes for bizarre, can't you? I thought so.):

Unknowability

I feel like I should post something, but I don't really have a subject or topic of interest to discuss here. So I'll just ramble a bit and see what of value - if anything - comes out of it. Maybe I'll talk about the title of this entry: Unknowability. It's a term I threw around liberally when I was writing my thesis. I used it to describe the poem's multiplicity of possible meanings, but resistance to definition. My third reader had a problem with the term; she believed it was a slippery slope sort of word that allowed one to stay on the surface and not dig deeper for meaning. I didn't care because I was quite happy with the word, and felt that it allowed me to go deeper without being stuck in a rigid template. But I like the term in general as well; it it is, I think, something that drives me. The possibility of figuring something out - whether it is a crossword puzzle, a mystery, the location of a lost letter, the identity of Jack the Ripper, or a reason for someone's behavior - fascinates me. The solution is never as satisfying to me as the possibility of a solution and the attempt to figure it out. Not having answers stimulates my imagination. Definitive answers are comforting to some degree, but are cold, set-in-stone truths - I can't do anything with them. In literature and film unknowability plays out quite nicely because, I assume, the author or director wants to stimulate that creative part of the brain, wants to tease the reader or viewer with the promise of an answer and then never offer it.

I remember suggesting once to a theater group that I belonged to that we should re-adapt an Agatha Christie play, "And Then There Were None" (a.k.a. "Ten Little Indians," a.k.a. "Ten Little Niggers"), to more closely resemble the novel on which the play was based. Only my idea was to remove the solution from the play altogether: After eight of ten guests at a weekend party on a secluded island are killed over the course of a few days (in various gruesome ways), the two survivors (each supposing the other to be the killer) confront one another on the beach. The young woman has a gun; the young man doesn't. She shoots him, returns to the house, finds a noose hanging from a hook in an upstairs room. Knowing that the only survivor on an island with nine corpses will most likely be hanged anyway, she kills herself. After this, Christie offers a pretty complex solution. I suggested to my friends that we should end it after the woman kills herself and never offer an explanation. My thinking was that the audience reaction would be much more interesting. One of the group immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous, stating that it would make the audience feel unsatisfied and possibly angry. This was the reaction I would want. That way people would leave the play discussing possibilities.

Here are some books and films that I like to read because of their unknowability on different levels:

1. A Passage to India (book and film)
2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (book and film)
3. The Turn of the Screw (and the film, The Innocents, which is based on the novella)
4. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
5. Julia (Memoir and film)
6. When We Were Orphans
7. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
8. Bach's Art of the Fugue is great because It's incomplete - the final piece in the collection peters out wonderfully

If anyone else has good suggestions of books or films that deal with this kind of ambiguity, I'd love to hear from you.

How's everyone's summer going?