Days 10-13: “Braaaaaaain.” (Gümüshane/Karaca)

My students are zombies. Not only because they come stumbling into class bleary-eyed, speak English at a zombie-equivalent level and have questionable fashion taste but really it’s because they call me “Brain.” No matter how many times I correct them, they still call me Brain. They don’t even get close. And they do this with things all the time – they select the nearest English word that they know and assign it to whatever we’re talking about. They don’t know how to say my surname either, so they selected “Terrible” as a replacement for it. That makes me Brain Geoffrey Terrible.

On Saturday, we were supposed to go to Karaca Cave (pronounced “Karaja”) at 9:30 AM so naturally we left at 10:15. I move slowly in the mornings so I always reach a point where I start to panic and rush to get ready, only to remember that I’m in Turkey. In some ways, Turkish time is worse than African time. Also I don’t know where Dr. B came up with the figure of 50 miles since it was almost literally right down the road. The cave is located HIGH in the mountains, so we were offered some spectacular views once we arrived. On the way up we stopped at a little fountain that delivered fresh spring water – nice!

Only 500,000 people have visited the cave since it opened in 1996 so it’s a little off the beaten path. Nevertheless, I was shocked at the state of the tourist facilities. I don’t know why Africa has become my measuring stick for such things but the facilities they had at the cave were pretty amazing. There was a café/restaurant with an overlook over the valley and mountains; several souvenir shops and stalls; and a smaller café up the mountainside where the actual cave entrance was. There was a wooden walkway inside the cave, which I guess was impressive in its own right but it kind of paled in comparison to some of the caves I’ve visited in the United States. When I told the students there are many caves in the US they were astounded, as if Turkey has sole claim on caves or something.

I had Sunday to myself; Dr. Bayrak describes them as “off days.” The other two volunteers and my co-teacher went to the nearby city of Trabzon but I was more interested in having a lazy Sunday to myself. It’s a good thing I didn’t go because it turns out they went to the mall and the movie theater to see “Eclipse,” which if I may say so is a bit of a lame way to spend a day in a foreign city that you’ve never visited before. I slept in, had some Turkish fast food and walked around the city to take pictures before coming back to finish up some homework (maybe an equally lame day, right?).

Monday was another trying day at school. Dr. B revealed that he’d like us to spend the afternoons with the students, which essentially means a 10-12 hour work day. “To hell with that,” I said in the back of my head. I’ve decided to teach, have lunch with the students and spend about 2 hours or so with them in the afternoon before heading back to my room or wherever. I come back to the school for dinner and then hang around for an hour or so for their study hour before going back to the hotel. I guess it doesn’t bother me so much that we’re being asked to spend so much time with the kids, it’s just this is so radically different from the way the program was presented to me.

Today we finally managed to convince Dr. B to restructure the classes. Having one kid in the advanced class was ridiculous, especially since he wasn’t all that advanced. He also had a bit of an attitude problem. He asked me to write neater even though my writing isn’t that sloppy. I wanted to respond with “lrn2read, n00b” but instead I just went about my business. It’s incredible the way the students think they can speak to you sometimes!

Our classes are now structured thusly: “A” class is basic beginner, “B” class is basic advanced and “C” class is intermediate. The intermediate class remains my favorite in that I don’t have to stop to explain the meaning of “dig” and “cost” and “hello, how are you?”. The basic beginner class is like hell on earth. You just can’t break down “Please write 5 sentences using these words” any more than that, and yet they still don’t understand the instructions. If I didn’t have Gülçe to help me with translating everything, we’d just be sitting there staring at each other the entire class period. They also cheat. I don’t want to keep them from working together but it’s remarkable when I ask them to use five specific words in sentences that they all seem to come up with sentences that are a slight variation on one another.

Basic advanced is a bit better. Today we reviewed irregular verbs and they did remarkably well. Dr. B took my intermediate class today to teach them computer science (I wish I was a fly on the wall during that) so I bummed around the school until lunch time.

School is improving, I’ll admit. If I could manage to get more prepared for classes then I think my teaching experience would go better. It’s hard to be organized when you aren’t an English teacher, though. I don’t even remember what half this grammar stuff means – like present progressive, etc. I know how to speak English and I know how to write well but I just don’t remember all the rules – I think you reach a point where your command of the language is good enough that the individual rules become irrelevant.

The more time I spend with the students, the more I enjoy their company. A new group of students arrived this week, and I’m feeling much better about them. I wouldn’t necessarily call them nerds but they’re definitely not the jock-type students that dominated the first week. They want to talk about books and video games and things of the like, stuff I can actually carry on a conversation about. I’ve played chess with one of them (and barely won) and today a group of them escorted me through the weekly bazaar. They’re all quite young so they like to make silly jokes (such as giggling when we passed the women’s underwear section in the bazaar – although to be fair I laughed also, those were some huge bras) but they’re all good kids. They’re not afraid to laugh and enjoy themselves, which is a nice departure from the stone-faced townsfolk.

After our stroll through the bazaar, we went to an ice cream shop and they insisted on buying water and ice cream for me. Turkish people are hospitable to the point of almost being irrational about it but I didn’t want to make a scene. They were showing me some of their favorite Turkish singers on TV and talking about the best football teams in Turkey. Later we stopped into a candy shop. They asked me about George Washington and George Bush on the way to the shop, and they seemed very amused about my reason for liking Barack Obama: “Because he’s not George Bush.” In the shop, they explained to the shopkeeper that I’m an American teaching English in the town, and he asked me if I liked Obama. I thought, “Oh hell…this could go anywhere…” I went with my gut and said “yes,” so he gave me a thumbs up, a big smile and offered me some free pestil – a local candy made out of mulberry and walnuts. The students also managed to get a discount on our bill at the ice cream shop with the same American spiel. It’s nice to see that we still have some credibility around the world, even in Turkey!