Inception Revisited

Today was the last day of school, and the least emotional last day of anything-child-related I've ever seen. Everyone's worn out, everyone's ready for summer, and no one is missing anyone else to the point of tears - the only tears I saw came when report cards were handed out. I did get a bouquet of yellow flowers from a 4th grader, but most of my things are in boxes now and I had nowhere to put them, so I gave them to a friend after school. Later today a good handful of us English teachers are getting together for an expensive dinner with canlı müzik to say goodbye to the 8-strong of us who aren't returning.

At the beginning of my stay in Turkey, before school had even started, I wrote a post comparing teaching with the hit film "Inception." I essentially argued that the characters' nearly impossible goal of planting an idea in someone else's head in a way that feels authentic and original to that person was a teacher's daily job. Our task is to help students understand new meanings on their own terms, meaning we can't spell things out for them or feed them a steady stream of facts, but instead we must allow new information to enter our students in the way they learn best; in other words, they take knowledge and make it their own. The teacher is just a guide.

When I made it into the classroom and thrust myself into a full year of teaching at this school, all the theories evaporated into the idealistic past. In the reality of the classroom in this school (as Turkish teachers complain as well) was constant noise, disrespect, and essentially anarchy. A successful lesson wasn't one where students truly learned something new but one where they all just shut up and stopped throwing things for a few minutes, providing for just a brief moment the environment that makes it possible to learn. Anyway, I could go on and on about how difficult "teaching" was (the Turkish teachers agree with me when I say we aren't teachers because they actually stop us from teaching - they say it's like day care, but I've worked day care before where students allowed themselves to learn). I think I must have in other posts even though I've held off criticizing my school publicly while I was working there.

So did I perform inception this year? Surely I didn't do it every day as I'd hoped would happen. I certainly gained a new appreciation from one of "Inception's" character's belief that the mind can always trace the genesis of an idea to its source and therefore expel a planted idea. Because I taught 12 and 13 year old students I quickly got used to my words and ideas being rejected simply because they were mine. Many of my students really wouldn't have let themselves retain anything if they thought I was the source. Here's an example: at the end of the year we watched a film adaptation of a book we read, and one girl complained every class as if she'd rather have done worksheets than watch this film. But once the picture started she couldn't look away, even though I gave her permission to do a quiet activity instead. Even if she subconsciously enjoyed it, her conscious mind would never let her admit this to her friends or herself.

Sometimes an idea gains its power because the mind knows where it came from. Sometimes a thought who comes from a person you deeply admire or a friend or maybe even someone you don't even know but had a particularly provocative thought can be incorporated into a life. And it is argued of course no idea is completely original to begin with, so even if we're not quite sure where a thought came from that doesn't mean it's unique. And there were a handful of students who were, thank goodness, inspired to excel in their English lessons - not the ones who needed it the most, sadly - either by family tradition, personal diligence, interest in English language entertainment media, or, as was the case for a couple, because of me.

So I guess I did perform inception... to an extent. I never actively put forth the idea that English is fun and interesting in such a direct manner to anyone but their parents; such a proclamation would instantly trigger a classroom full of pre-teen rebellious instincts. But my energy and youth (not tooting my own horn - those are my two strongest attributes as a teacher that almost make up for my inexperience) brought a couple of students - just a couple - to that conclusion all on their own. A couple of specific grammar points came through by way of inception as well, but that was rare. It's true: inception is hard! Maybe not as hard as was dramatized in the film, but still hard. And it does impart knowledge that stays with a student in an emotional process - that's why it has to be the teacher's goal, even if at times it feels out of reach.