Day 9: Jesus Mercy, What The Hell Have I Done? (Gümüshane)

When I first arrived in Tanzania and the plane was landing, I could see across the city from the window because our approach was very low. For as far as I could see, there wasn’t a single paved road. I panicked. The first thought to race through my head was, “Jesus mercy, what the hell have I done?”. That’s the way I’ve felt almost since I arrived here. The feeling is waning but I always have a hard time adjusting to the places I travel to because I’m not like an ordinary person. My academic focus and preference for a nice dinner and conversation seems like it leaves me a pariah!

Teaching today… It was a little better. My co-teacher, Gülçe, has arrived from San Diego. I was under the impression she was a college student. But no. She’s a junior in high school. Thankfully she seems to be pretty on top of things, and she’s taught at the summer school in the past so she has a pretty good idea of the things that are going on. Unfortunately, she’s only here for 15 days. I don’t know who is going to be my co-teacher after that. It’s just one of a million unanswered questions around here.

“A” class this morning… Geez. When Gülçe arrived she was shocked to find that I was supposed to teach them international relations. As she put it, “How can you teach them international relations when they don’t even know what a T-shirt is?” Yeah, good question. So we scrapped my lesson plans and relied on some of the teaching English workbooks that she brought along with her. Today we worked on the past tense of verbs dealing with money and shopping, and I gave them homework on writing sentences.

The problem with the class is that most of the kids are young, and they just don’t care. One kid just outright told me “No” when I told him to do the assignment. I didn’t even know what to do. What kind of kid just sits there and tells the teacher “no”? There’s also a know-it-all in the class; God bless him, he is really trying and he’s usually even right. He really shouldn’t even be in the beginner class but he’s really young, like 15. The rest of them seem altogether uninterested. Frankly, I’m not even sure what they’re doing here.

After “A” class, “B” class comes as a breath of fresh air. I decided to actually try to teach the lesson I had prepared on the structure of the international community. It went relatively well. I don’t know if they fully understood everything I was talking to them about but they were able to grasp concepts and things. The lesson went by a lot faster than I thought it would, so I tried to give them a writing assignment on what they thought the best form of government would be. And that was a total flop. I felt like they didn’t know enough about government in English terms to be able to work with the assignment, so for the rest of the session we discussed government: the three branches, checks and balances, etc. About half of the class was engaged and they were all boys – the girls just sat on the other side of the room with this empty smile on their faces. I don’t know how to get them to participate.

Even though I think “B” class could handle actual curriculum, I don’t think it would be to their advantage. If they’re at the school to learn English then I should teach them English. I’m going to try to give it an international slant whenever I can but that’s a challenge when everyone tells you they’d never leave Turkey even if they could. However, there was one promising “international” note during class. I asked them all to pick a country so that for homework they could read a piece of news about the country and come back to share it with the class the next session. They all readily volunteered the country they would like to be, and they picked good countries like the United Kingdom, Japan, Egypt and Germany.

I met with “C” class today, the advanced students, which turns out to be advanced student. There’s one guy in there. The other two teachers have complained about him, and he does seem to have a little bit of an attitude problem. None of us really feel his English is good enough to be at the advanced level but we’ll just have to work around it (unless we can convince Dr. Bayrak otherwise). Thankfully I was able to do the introduction thing with him because I didn’t meet with him yesterday. The latter portion of the class we read a story together out of one of Gülçe’s books, and during the process I determined that his pronunciation was pretty good but his reading comprehension was pretty bad. He says he wants to be able to speak better, so we’ll be focusing a lot of conversational English, I guess.

After classes, Gülçe and I went with one of the other teachers to a local restaurant where we had “Turkish ravioli” in a kind of garlic yogurt sauce. It was heavenly compared to the school food, which isn’t bad but this was pretty amazing. We received a call from Dr. B asking us to report to this café/entertainment center facility near the river clear on the other side of the town, which admittedly isn’t a huge distance but still a bit of a walk. We had quite a lot of çay and I watched games of backgammon and foosball (maybe I’m a frump but I’m always more comfortable and enjoy myself more as the spectator). We then headed back to the school where a bit of a scheduling mixup mildly infuriated me.

Tomorrow we’re heading to a cave about 50 miles away from the town. Even though I’m claustrophobic and scared of bats, I’m still looking forward to it. It will be a nice chance to interact with the kids that doesn’t involve them hassling me to play volleyball, football, basketball or some other kind of damned ball.