Days 7 & 8: Teachin’ Ain’t Easy (Gümüshane)

Yesterday we went with Dr. Bayrak to see the school and look around Gümüshane a bit. The town is relatively small, although not as small as I thought it would be. I’ll try to go around in the afternoon tomorrow to take some pictures. Going around the town with Dr. Bayrak reminds you of how small the place actually is since it seems like everyone knows him.

The summer school is housed in a building that functions as a normal school during the school year. There are chalkboards, projectors and the most uncomfortable desks in the world inside each classroom. This morning we had a meeting in the auditorium where Dr. Bayrak explained the rules and the agenda to everyone, first in English and then in Turkish since not everyone was catching on.

There are three classes: A (beginners), B (intermediate) and C (advanced). We begin teaching at 8:30 AM and go until 12:00 Noon when we break for lunch. Then we have an afternoon activity of some sort and at 6:00 PM we have dinner. Afterwards, there’s an hour worth of time called “study hour” where we hang around to help the students with their homework.

I start my day with the A class, which is composed of some serious beginners in English. I mean…wow. My definition of “beginner” must be way off because I’d have called the class “no English.” To compound the problem, I still don’t have a Turkish co-teacher. Thankfully one of the other Turkish teachers that I met yesterday came to my rescue. Even basic things like introductions need translation. I knew immediately that I was not cut out to teach English, but I’ll try. Teaching international relations is going to be just absolutely ridiculous with this group. To make it worse, they told me they all hate geography and that they have no interest in ever leaving Turkey. It boggles the mind to be in a room full of a dozen people and not a single one of them wants to leave their own country. I don’t even know how you make international relations interesting to a group like that!

A class also has some troublemakers in it, who immediately clustered up together in the corner. There’s also a know-it-all that speaks out of turn, but I’d have him over the corner kids. I guess some of them have decided that they just won’t ever understand me, so they shut down and drift off into their own little world. For the most part I let them be today – I don’t want to make my first impression one of a disciplinarian – but tomorrow may be different if they persist.

After an hour of instruction with A class and a fifteen-minute break, I move on to B class. There are seemingly light years between A and B class in terms of language comprehension. Whereas I could barely get A class to tell me what city they were from, B class could discuss why “Lost” started to suck after Season 3. I spent so much less time worrying over simplifying my English with them that we ran out of things to talk about! We discussed what they liked to do, their music tastes, movie tastes, relationships, academic interests and a bunch of other stuff. The only problem with this class is that some students are much better at English than others; in fact, they’re kind of all over the board and it makes it somewhat difficult to teach to people who aren’t on the same level.

Supposedly C class consists of only one student, but more may come tomorrow. I didn’t get a chance to speak with them today because we started late (big surprise).

After class is dismissed, the students seem to split up into boys and girls. This is really irritating to me but as one of the girls explained, “We have nothing in common. Boys don’t like to gossip. Well. They do gossip. But they don’t make a special time for gossip.” I don’t know if we’re supposed to spend time with them or not since that wasn’t made clear to me. The other two teachers went with the boys to play basketball; however, I can’t think of anything in this world less interesting to me so I took a mini-tour of the town with some of the girls and then I came back to my room for the afternoon.

We reconvene at the school for dinner at 6:00 PM. So far the food has been excellent, but my stomach doesn’t necessarily care too much for it. I don’t think the problem is the food; in fact, I’m pretty sure the problem is my stomach. Africa has made my stomach FUBAR probably for the rest of my life. Oh well.

Tomorrow I’ll teach an actual lesson on the structure of the international community. For my beginners I guess that will just be vocabulary.