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Merhaba!

Good news, bad news, and more good news.

The good news is I’ve moved into my new apartment! As I’m writing this I’m getting ready for my second night here. I unpacked all my things (not to say they’re organized in any particular way) and even made myself my first homemade Turkish dinner!


My romantic first homemade Turkish dinner in my new home

The place is wonderful. It’s got a nice big kitchen with a gas-burning stove, a dishwasher I don’t know how to use, a nice stove, and tiled floors. It’s connected to my spacious living room, which is about as big by itself as any dorm I lived in at NYU. Plus it’s got this huge window that covers almost all the wall and looks out over Bahçeşehir and lets in all sorts of wonderful natural light for reading and seeing things you’re looking for without turning on lights. There’s a cozy bathroom with a washing machine, which I also don’t know how to use (not that it stops me) and a tiny square shower with a broken door that will be fixed tomorrow. There’s also a bedroom with carpet – carpet! – and plenty of storage space for all the junk I’ve got. Plus I’m fully furnished now with a small couch, a table, 8 chairs (I don’t know why, but they were all provided so I took ‘em), dishes, a bed, a dresser, a bookshelf, a fridge, a couple cheap coffee tables, and other random supplies. Now what I need most of all is a desk and a decent stereo and I’ll be set. Oh, and some decorations. And some visitors, because this place is huge and I’m the only one living in it. That’s right, it’s just me. I need help sitting in all these chairs!


My kitchen is in shambles right now

The other day I spent a good ten minutes opening and closing those giant windows, trying to decide how I liked it better!

The bad news is directly related to the good news: When I moved to the new place I gave up my rights to Internet until at least September 1 (probably meaning much, much later). I’m probably going to post this from a café somewhere – I’m writing it as a Microsoft Word document right now. I’d get it fixed right away if it weren’t for some life’s necessities that need fixing: the shower door, the empty light fixtures that make nighttime pitch black. I’m going to be in sparse contact for a while. I’m hoping it could be fun to try and live without something I’ve taken for granted so much recently. I’ve gone all day without going online, and I’m proud I could make it even if I suffered from withdrawal a couple times throughout the day.

The other good news is that I finished my CELTA training earlier today with a high mark! I think everyone taking the class was ready to be over, but it was still sad to say goodbye to my new friends who will be on their busses to their campuses within the hour. I met a lot of wonderful people working in campuses throughout Turkey. I guess this makes it easier to think about traveling within the country – I have friends wherever I want to go! And I’ve become friends with some of the teachers here at Bahçeşehir, too, so it’s not a total loss. And now that we’re done with training we can get down to business and start thinking about how to make these kids’ lives better! How to enrich them with knowledge about the English language while fostering a love for it at the same time. Hopefully the class helped me with some ways to make that happen, and double-hopefully I had that capacity in myself to begin with.


Bosporus under the clouds

I’m starting to get used to living here. It’s been three weeks now since I’ve moved, and the other day I noticed that the area of town that was once strange to me has now become a part of a routine. I’ve grown so accustomed to people speaking Turkish all around me that I barely even hear it anymore. I don’t feel like I don’t belong anymore – yes, I’m foreign, but this is my home. I’m also learning Turkish as I go, which helps, but I can still barely speak. I’d hoped to be fluent after a month, but that’s obviously not going to be the case (maybe three months?). Still, I belong here. This is my place. This is where I’m going to make a difference in the world. I can feel my ownership of it within my subconsciousness’s assimilation of its differences. And, like my new apartment, I feel for the first time a deep caring for the place I’m in because I want to make a life here. I don’t know how long I’m going to stay in Turkey – my contract is for one year, so it’s going to be some time between that and the rest of my life – but I want to make it home. It’s not like New York, where I knew I was passing through. Here I want to put roots down, even if I leave in the summer of 2011. Istanbul is more to me than just a middle point between me and California, or wherever home is. It’s not home, and it’s not a transitional location. It’s somewhere in the middle.

Inception

Merhaba!

If you haven't seen Inception yet, you might not want to read this short post. It doesn't give much away, but still. You might be one of those people, like me.



The premise of Inception, besides taking place within dreams, is finding if it's possible to plant an idea in someone's mind that feels so natural to him that he thinks it's his own idea. Basically, to give birth to an idea in someone else's mind. There are a few scenes where chacters are quite adamant that it's impossible, that it can't be done, but Leonardo Di Caprio's character is sure he can do it. The rest of the movie is a dramatic, nail-biting saga into the mind where this concept of Inception is played out.

After thinking about my job as a teacher for the last few weeks, it seems that plot is pretty much based on the lives of teachers. Its our role to lead our students to discover truths on their own, truths they can believe in with their hearts and souls even if their not truths they came to without guidance. We can't just teach them that 2 + 2 = 4; we have to convince them until they can claim that knowledge as their own. We can't just say that the English word "sad" is the opposite of "happy"; we have to help them feel it, using their own personal experience, as a personal truth. The best teaching, we've learned, is when the teacher doesn't teach at all, when instead the students learn. In another word, inception.

So the teacher helps create contexts based on a combination of the students' worlds and the teacher's (Ellen Paige's character can go home now). We have to play different roles and different characters to bring language to life in students' minds (see you later, Tom Hardy's character). And the teacher has to perform inception every day, usually alone, on 6 whole classrooms of students. And, by the way, hell yeah the teacher has a time limit (mine will be 40 minutes, slightly shorter than Leonardo DiCaprio's team's 10 hours).

Not to knock Inception, though. It really was a fun movie.

Welcome (back) to Turkey

Merhaba!

Two weeks ago I arrived back in Istanbul, ready and eager to start a year of having my own classroom, getting kids excited about the nature of foreign language, and immersing myself in another culture for an obscene and refreshing amount of time. Let me do some explaining:

I am a native English communications skills (= speaking and listening) teacher at Bahçeşehir Koleji in Istanbul and will be for at least this year. Bahçeşehir is located in a suburb of Istanbul, so far from the city center that many Istanbulus don't consider it to actually be a part of the city. Istanbul has grown something like %1,200 in the last 60 years to about 13 million people, so I have the feeling a lot of Istanbul isn't "really" in Istanbul. It takes me an hour to get to Taksim, which is more or less in the city center, and if I can't catch the express train... then don't ask. I will be teaching grades 5, 6, and 7, roughly the age group I worked with in Florence two and a half years ago.



Over the summer I had to deal with a bout of depression: I had earned my TESOL (Teaching English as a Second or Other Language) certificate and thought that after I sent my resume out to a few places I'd get a nice cushy job and a beautiful apartment in Kadiköy. Well, by the time July rolled around and I didn't have anything yet I was starting to panic. I felt that I would have to move back to New York, find some dumb pass-the-time job while I take the GRE's and apply for grad school. I'd even found a roommate when Bahçeşehir asked for an interview, then asked me to come out in less than a month. What a shift in gears! But it's hard to explain how desperate college graduates like myself can feel when confronted with this - ahem - wonderful job market as we still try to find out who we are. When I went to New York for the month of July, I found most of my friends were just as stressed out trying to find a way to gain financial independence as well as discovering what to do with the rest of their lives.


Playing with my camera in a Taksim park. Check it out: This city has more people than New York by about 5 million, but there's still green!

Truthfully, I still don't know how to answer that question. I know I don't want to be a musician anymore, but I'm not sure if teaching will be in my forever future. I love teaching and I love working with kids, but I don't know how to choose something to stick with all my life. Is it like choosing a girl, like in the fairy tales where you just know? Is it like choosing your friends, the people who happen to impact your life where you happen to be at some happenstance in your life? Is it like how you choose where to be, based on past experiences, work opportunities, or out of love? I hope that, through the course of this year, I'll be able to find some direction in my life. Living in Florence added new perspective and pointed me forward. Learning a new language and a new culture will hopefully help me see something I wouldn't be able to otherwise.


Bahçeşehir. Not exactly representative of the scenery, but I like this picture a lot.

Bahçeşehir itself is just what it sounds like: a suburb. There's one main street which takes two minutes to walk through, a couple of malls that sell little more than women's clothing and shoes, an express bus stop, and brick-laid hilly streets where the drivers routinely ignore one-way signs. I haven't had the chance to familiarize myself with Bahçeşehir and the surrounding regions (I've been too busy even to write! Such a contrast to last time I was here when I wrote hundreds of pages in a week), but that will come soon as I slowly but surely teach myself how to survive and communicate. I have to say, though, this quieter area is such a breath of fresh air after four years of Manhattan. Being far away from Taksim and my friends from Bahçeşehir University near the Bosporus is going to be a drag sometimes, but I know I'm going to like living outside the main city. I've been craving it for my entire University career! Plus Bahçeşehir is on a hill and gets some nice views of the countryside.


There's a big vote coming. That means this van drives around blasting all sorts of crappy and loud music.

Since I've been here I've done a few major things, though less than you'd expect from two weeks here:

1. Namely, I've been taking the Bahçeşehir Koleji-required teacher training course (CELTA, which stands for something I'm sure) for the past week. It's a 10-day course with a break on Sunday (yes, we work Saturdays) which is like a more specific version of the TESOL course I took in California, more specific to teaching English at this school. There are about 70 other first-year English teachers taking the course with me from Bahçeşehir Koleji campuses around the country. Some people came 15 or 16 hours for this course. About eight of the other teacher trainees are native English speakers, all American except one Turkish woman who lived a long time in England (that counts as native speaking). The rest are Turkish teachers who teach English, most likely teaching English language skills (= reading, writing, and grammar). Needless to say, I've been making lots of friends during this week of training, though sadly many of them work at campuses far away from Istanbul. Still, the Turkish hospitality, as they call it, is striking and deathly warm. In contrast, the Americans might have the misfortune of being too cold. I've heard that the biggest complaint about native teachers is that they're too cold: you're supposed to hug your students, put your hand on their backs, show you care about them through physical contact in ways that would have gotten me fired at El Cerrito or in Florence. The people I've met are so generous, even if they can't understand what I'm saying.


A Tatlı shop in Taksim. I get too hungry when I look at this picture.

Our main CELTA instructor, Gulfem, the woman who interviewed me, is a gifted woman. Proud of her shortness, plumpness ("Do I look like I like salad?!" she said once), and experience (let's not call it age), she has more love, energy, and passion than most of the young first-year teachers she's instructing. I can't say enough about this woman to show you how wonderful she is, and I'm not just saying this because she's my boss. She not only gets us on our feet for activities, she makes us want to get on our feet. When she tells stories she makes us taste in our minds the food she's describing, feel the weight of what she's pretending to carry, smell the atmosphere she's imagining for us. She's funny: when she was reading a favorite passage of hers called "God made the teacher," she said, "And God gave the teacher infinite patience and a caring, huge..." and as the class said in unison, "heart," she moved her hand to her rear end. But it's not just personality: there's something about the Bahçeşehir message she promotes that I can really get behind. Moving away from old, traditional teaching styles and engaging the students on all sorts of sensory levels. Finding out how the students in my particular classroom learn best and teaching to that. Complete immersion in language and student-led language discovery, the teacher acting as a guide and not a transmitter of information. Education is about the needs of each student; it's so simple!

Again, I know it might sound like I'm saying this just because I work here, and there are some faults I'm sure - I'm not working in utopia. But this teaching style is something I can really believe in.

And we will never be able to make a teaching utopia anyway. One of the greatest tragedies of education is that our students deserve better than a teacher can humanly give them, and as teachers we are always disappointed at how far from perfect we can be for them. All we can do is our best.

2. I visited my friends Pınar and Hande, staying with them at their flat in Ortaköy, home of the world's best Kumpir! The day before I had met with the two of them and my Turkish brother Can in Taksim to buy a guitar and have the best lemonade in the world. For all you tourists out there: I have one rule about good places to get a food or have a drink. If you have to go downstairs it can't be bad. To get to the Limonbahçe (Lemon Garden) you have to go into what looks like a normal apartment building, go down some dirty-looking stairs that look like they lead to the basement of your mind, and follow a few chic signs to the outside. There you find a huge area, as big as a large restaurant, covered by friendly canvass, with couches and nice table and everything. It's almost like Soho, New York. Very peaceful, very hidden away, and it feels like we've found a secret. Plus the lemonade was the best lemonade I've ever had in my life. That's always a plus. Minty and delicious!


Hande, Pınar, and me in Taksim

The next day Hande and Pınar and I headed to Ortaköy for the Kumpir, which is like a baked potato with whatever you want inside, but somehow it tastes way better than a normal potato. We then had a drink at a café nearby with one of Hande's high school friends, Burak, and watched the sun go down as we sat next to the majestic Bosporus. After that we spent a long night learning traditional Turkish dance in 100-degree weather (yes, even at night it was that hot - how in the world do people fast for Ramadan in this weather?) and shared music, and I learned that Turkish iced tea actually has flavor! And, as always when I spend time with my Turkish friends, I learned some useful Turkish, like bebeşim (hint: that's not actually a useful word).


Me and Pınar eating Kumpir

There's not enough time in a day to write how at home I felt and yet how exciting it was to be in this foreign culture.



3. On Sunday I finally got to see Hazal's house and meet her family. Our mutual friend who was also part of the NYU group that came to Istanbul last March, Suzanne, is visiting this week and Hazal's family picked her up at the airport and is letting her stay with them for her week. Hazal lives in Malteppe, which is about as far away from Bahçeşehir as one can be, so when she and her father picked up Suzanne they took the opportunity to pick me up as well and take us to Malteppe. After an hour of driving and catching up and laughing about the peculiarities of life and language ("Hande taught you 'bebeşim?!'"), we arrived as her mother was preparing what turned out to be an amazing dinner. Hazal was the intermediary, the only one who could speak English well enough to communicate between we Americans and the rest of her family. They told us to feel at home, and a few times told me to stop saying "Thank you" so much. We were a part of the family before we even walked through the door. We played basketball into the night, then came back to watch Turkey beat up on Canada in a basketball tournament as we ate sweets and fruit, experimenting with my camera, Turkish words, and the mobility of their recently injured cat Susam. It was like we'd been family friends for ages, and the fact that we didn't speak the same language barely mattered at all.


Basketball at night

♡

Of course this is gross simplification of all that happened in the past 15 days. You can tell by how rosy my description is; in reality, the first few days I was here were almost crushing as I tried to get by in a shared dormitory (ie. not my own place) with a city of non-English speakers, jet lag, no way to contact friends, nothing on my itinerary, feeling bad for staying inside all day and feeling uncomfortable when I went out. But who wants to hear about that anyway? I'm going to be a teacher here. This is going to be my community, and my presence is going to make it a better place. Those little insecurities are just that: little.

P.S. I'm trying to think of a new name for this blog. Any ideas?