A Pig, A Penis and Pizzas, Oh my! My first week in review...

My first full week of teaching in Turkey is through, and putting my feet up and vegging has never felt so deserved. Though I never pride myself in counting down the days until summer break, or at least the next holiday, I have to admit, the thought crossed my mind a few times.  Let's hope that by the first holiday (November) my students and I have come to some sort of mutual understanding and respect, and that I can make it through the night without nightmares of what could be awaiting me the next day in class.

The week started with a dangerously hot, half-hour, school wide ceremony.  It was all in Turkish, so of course it felt pretty meaningless to me, but I couldn't help thinking this was just too much for all of those kids.  The first days of school in the younger years are always filled with tearful children and parents, so I was not surprised to see many sobbing children clinging to their parents legs.  Although I am totally comfortable with crying children, not being able to communicate with either them or their parents built a kind of will between us that kept me from going over to offer help.  I stayed a few feet away and smiled and waved at the parents and children, hoping to offer the "let me know if you need me to pry him off of you" look. As it turned out, just as the ceremony was ending, and I could just taste the up coming air conditioning blast, one of my bosses asked me to hold a screaming child so his mom could go.  Sure no problem, Mom is asking for help, so I know I am not crossing any boundaries. Except, that this child is nine, which may sound young, but in all actuality nine above the age that I can easily physically restrain.  This child was WAY stronger than me.  Especially when he did the child patented noodle- and -kick.  It took everything I had to pry his fingers off of his mom's wrists, at which point instead of waving goodbye and leaving, mom stood there and cried.  OK.  Once his mom finally turned and walked to the car the child completely lost it.  I wasn't any more help in the comforting department than I was in the picking-him-up-and-getting-him-to-school-department, considering all of my comforting words came in a language that probably sounded like Martian. Just as his Mom got to the gate, another boss told me to give up and let him go, at which point he ran full steam off of the school premises and towards his car.  She said she would take it from there.  Good luck 8-months-prego-lady, you go for it.

Well my first class of the day, was my darling first graders that I told tales of from orientation. You know, the class with the children doing flips off the tables, screaming on the tops of their lungs etc.  Let's just stay that class behaved pretty much as expected.

My next class, surprise, surprise, had my wrestling buddy in it.  He didn't stop crying the whole day.  I soon found out that not only does he not understand me, he doesn't understand ANYBODY.  His family just moved here from Norway, and he speaks no English and no Turkish, so spends 8 hours a day in classrooms with teachers and children he can't communicate.  No wonder he's sad.

My second grade classes were a little better, because they kind of get this whole school deal.  Not that much better though.  I still had to do A LOT of moving seats, confiscating of school materials being used as weapons, and desperately trying to get them to listen.  I went home from that first day feeling like the WORST teacher.

I walked into day two filled with dread.  Please don’t let it be as bad as day one. Please.  And it wasn't! My favorite part of the day was my little wrestling-crying-Norwegian buddy.  Day two, he wasn't sad anymore... No-sir-ee. He was PISSED.  He let us all know how much he hated this situation by throwing every pencil he could find and by making loud farting noises whenever it got kind of quiet in the room.  The rest of the class seemed pretty capable of ignoring him, so I took the pencils that he had, and let him do his thing.  When I had the children draw a picture of them selves and write their names, I gave him one of his pencils back, and smiled like I hadn't noticed a thing.  When I came back around he had drawn a monkey, which I thought was just fine. At least he's busy.  I encouraged him to write his name on his paper, which he refused.  Thinking maybe he didn't understand, I started to spell his name and mock-write it on his paper.  Exasperated at my idiocy, he shoved my hand out of the way and wrote PENIS. Hmmm… "What's that?" I say, innocently. "Penis," he smiles. Alright... He knows at least ONE English word. Awesome. So I flipped over the paper, smiled sweetly again, and said "This time draw you!" And walked away.  five minutes later he proudly brought me his paper. On it was a suspiciously familiar looking girl in a suspiciously familiar looking dress, with the word "PIG" on top.  OK.  We are up to TWO English words.  Since then he has gotten more and more comfortable. He does work in class, and knows his numbers and colors in English.  Perhaps all he needed was to be able to express his anger symbolically.  (On a side note, I'm looking into getting his art framed to hang on my wall.)

For three of my four classes I am beginning to find things that they like.  One class LOVES to draw and color, they all LOVE guessing games (like guess the number, and "Little Mouse, Little Mouse), one class loves dittos and they’re work-books (freaks), and at least two of them like it when I tell stories. My fourth class is still trouble.  Yesterday, by the end of our lesson, I had accomplished NOTHING except to amass a ridiculous amount of scissors that were being used to cut hair, glue that was being used to adhere objects to the table, tattooing pens, flying erasers, paper-clip-chain-whips, and head ache inducing flutes. I have faith that at some point I will find out what works with them, and am hopeful that it doesn't come to Bill Cosby and my dad's favorite "Let the beatings begin!"

As for the pizza part of my week, I am lucky enough to work with a lot of really cool people in the English department.  A bunch of us went out for pizza and a drink on Wednesday, which turned out to be so fun we'll probably do it again every Wednesday. If my weeks don't get easier, at least I'll have that to look forward to.  This week, operation "make Turkish friends" took off. PHEW.

Things we've learned this week

Teaching young children in a country where you don't know the language can teach you some language quickly. Here are some new words:

Öğretmeni = Teacher (We learned this from the continuous chant of "Öğretmeni, Öğretmeni." Teacher Teacher still sounds like nails on a chalk board, even in a different language.

istemeorim - I don't want to.

Tuvalet - The Toilet. That's not to hard, but vital!!!

Hayır - As covered before this means No but I've heard it alot.

Ne? - What?

One of my other favorites:

Türkçe Billmiorum, English, English - "I don't know Turkish! English English."

Today I had a child look at me and tell me a paragraph worth of Turkish, none of which I understood. I told him "Turkçe Billmiorum, English English." He looked back at me and said ever so sweetly " Ingiliezce Billmiorum." And we were at an impass. I shrugged, he shrugged and then went on to play. We communicated, good enough.

When you start to work with the children of a different culture you get an interesting picture of the relationship between parent and child. The main thing that I feel here so far is that Children have few responsibilities for taking care of themselves. I witnessed a parent feeding their 5 year old child. Coming from a school where children who could barely walk were clearing their plates after lunch, this was hard to swallow, and I don't have anyone to spoon feed it to me.

Parents here seem to struggle with the same issues we faced with our classes in America. I have heard conversations about how a child is eating, the child who doesn't want to be in the English class, and have had several parents swoop in from the hall to pick up their crying child. While I didn't think that I would be getting away from parents I thought that perhaps I would be facing different types of concerns and conversations.

Although the approach and follow through may be different in cultures, I suppose a parent's job is the same all over the world, worrying about their child being happy and healthy.

The First day of School

Henry Miller, an american, wrote "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written." If this is the case we wrote quite a bit of reality today. Usually the first day of school (especially in the younger grades) tends to be filled with tears and misunderstood directions; then the children show up (Ha Ha). Today seemed like a little bit of a circus.

I've done first days of school before, with children who couldn't talk. Somewhere in the back of my mind I just figured that this wouldn't be too much different than that. We would get all of the children to follow our directions by miming the actions. Apparently this was not a safe assumption to have made. Granted it took more than one day to get this all sorted out.

What will make this harder is that as an English teacher I am sort of like a wandering minstrel, traveling from class to class performing my circus act of English lessons. I spend one hour with each of the 5 and 6 year old classes (thats 4 hours with 4 groups of children every day) and then at least 30 minutes with the 4 year old children. This doesn't include lunch or breakfast or any of these other details. So I have at least 90 names to learn, which is no easy task in a language where names are so different. Erin and I have both found it difficult to learn and remember names here in Turkey. First off the Turks seem to speak at a much lower volume, add to that the random syllables that make up a name and I find myself asking everyone I meet to repeat themselves several times. Now I have 90 names to learn, and 90 children to manage, no easy task when you don't have a relationship with them.

Erin and I both had the notion that if we didn't live 20 hours away from ASICC we might have called Patty and Tonya to see if they would hire us back. I suppose it was a good idea to move so far away. Up to today I forgot how nice it was to have the Evelyn and Sharon driven kitchen that was always on time and reliably got food to our children, I knew that I had Patty and Tonya to help me with a child who needed an extra place, and I could close an office door and let off steam with my coworkers and friends who I am missing so much. I have a faint memory of what it was like starting my first day at the children's center and I remember that I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to be doing and that there seemed to be a little bit of chaos. I suppose the first day on the job tends to be that way. Luckily there are no more first days at this job. We get to start building our skills and resources again.

Holy Crap! Watch OUT!!!

Ok... long ago, I promised a blog posting about the amazing driving stylings of the Turks, and have only just recently gotten the photos that this would be confusing without. So without further ado... lets talk about the traffic laws that aren't. For reals... anything goes: driving with your child on your lap while your other child hangs out of the sunroof, driving with 13 people in one car, or on one motorcycle for that matter.  All perfectly leagal. On top of that, there are no actual lanes that anyone follows.  Whether that means driving into oncoming traffic because you want to go faster, or driving 4 lanes deep on one street. There are no speed limits, seatbelt laws, helmet laws... nothing. We tried our hardest to get pictures of all of this for you, but struggled with how fast they whiz by us.

It's hard to see, but sitting on mom's lap is a little boy.  Notice that mom sits in side saddle (cus she's a lady) and never holds on... except to an infant, or sometimes a watermelon.

Turks have a keen ability to balance on a speeding vehicle, amazing bravery for tackling traffic nightmares like they do, and a can-do spirit when it comes to treating their motorcycles like mini-vans.

Notice how much extra room there is when the child stands in the front? You could fit three more kids, the groceries, and a dog on there. And often they do. 

Another common and hilarious sight is the man who drives the "shoe-mobile" (I named it that). this wise entrepreneur doesn't bother paying for a store or a booth at a bazaar to sell his shoes, but displays them all over the hood and roof of his car.  This way he can be open for business anywhere he deems to be a good location.  When he decides to move on, instead of waisting time moving the shoes inside and redesplaying them somewhere else, he just drives like that.  With all of his merchadise on display. 

 One of my favorite moments so far was taking the bus to the airport to go to Switzerland.  The bus doesn't actually stop at the airport, so when we got near the exit the driver just yelled out, "Airport!" pulled over to the side of the road and told us to get out.  Now... we were on the shoulder of the freeway.  So we had to take our bags and run across three lanes of speeding traffic, jump through the oleander in the center divider, and run though three more lanes of traffic coming from the opposite direction to get to the taxi waiting to take us the rest of the way.  I felt like I was trying to illeagally cross a boarder with all of my most dear posessions. 

When the taxi dropped us off on the freeway, on our way home, we had to HAIL the bus. Worked out just fine.

When First Graders Attack

Alan gave you a little snippet of how his orientations in Kindergarten are going, so I thought I would do the same.  Though I am teaching 1st and 2nd, the school only does orientation for the classes that will be brand new, so I will meet the 2nd graders next week on the first day of school.  Even though most of the 1st graders went to kindergarten at Bahçeşehir (only 7 out of 45 are new) the step to 1st grade is seen as the start of REAL school, so that means they are all new.  My day was relatively easy.  The children spent most of the morning with their "class teacher" and each of the specialty teachers took over for only a half hour, so with two classes that meant one hour of being a teacher.  Should have been a breeze right? Especially since I was tag teaming it with the other two English teachers.  (I am the Speaking and Listening teacher, a Turkish teacher will be the English Grammar and Structure teacher because as American's we don't know any grammar rules, and a third will be the extra lessons teacher.) Out of the three of us, I am the only one who doesn't speak Turkish.

Despite our thoughtful planning, 1 on 8 ratio and only a half hour to survive, we barely made it.  Let me just paint you a picture... the first class we met had about 20 six-year-olds half of whom spent the WHOLE time screaming on the tops of their lungs.  Not because they were scared, or sad, or don't like the way I talk, but because it's funny to scream. Five of the non-screamers played jump-over-the-desk the whole time.  One even climbed up on top of it and did a flip off of it. And that went almost un-noticed for all of the other chaos. The only child who wasn't having a complete hay-day was crying in the corner saying "Be quiet," in Turkish.  A minute or two longer and I would have ended up crying in the corner with him.  Needless to say, I threw out all of my current curriculum plans for that class, and we are going to spend the first few weeks doing classroom management type games.

Luckily, the second class was DELIGHTFUL.  They almost made up for the terror of the first. These kids were excited to hear from us, and to share the English they already knew ("Hello my name is___" "I'm fine thank you and you?" all of their colors, and numbers up to 20!).  They happily played along with all of our games, and were SO excited to sing "5 Little Monkeys," a personal fave.  The best part was the boy who seemed to know the most English in the whole class, who kept saying something to me over and over in Turkish.  ADIMENTLY.  I responded with "No Turkçe, English?" He turned to the little girl next to him who also seemed to know a lot of English and told her.  She shook her head at him, pointed at me, and said "No Turkçe!" I brought him to the Turkish speaking teacher who laughed, and told me that the phrase he had been saying over and over to me was "I don't understand you.  What are you saying?!" I'll be teaching them that phrase in English ASAP. The other one I got was crossed arms a scowl, and Turkish for "I don't WANT to learn English." By the end of our half hour he was saying "bye bye" and giving me a high five.  Such a difference between the two classes.

I look forward to the next few weeks and getting to know them all.  I am very hopeful that my 1A class will settle with a little thoughtful planning, and a lot of patience. For now I will leave you with some pictures of the English room decore. We arent allowed to hang anything on the walls because it makes marks, but we are allowed to paint on them... don't ask me how that makes sense.  Anyway, I made some pretty adorable murals, and had a lot of fun doing it.  (The big animals are for the different "clubs" but I don't really want to talk about those.)

Meeting the kids...

Our time has started with the children now, and it is going as expected. This week is orientation week for all of the children. The children have been coming in with their parents and basically we let them play and walk around and introduce ourselves. Of course the day wouldn't be complete without a child running away from me, leaving his sharks at the table, heading straight for dad yelling "HAYIR, HAYIR." (NO, NO). It seems like some things are universal. The "I'm about to cry" look is the same, with the bottom lip out and the big eyes. Children who don't want mom or dad to leave hang on to them in the same way they do in America. So although many of the children look at me funny when I speak to them in English, they seemed ready to join in the singing and dancing when I brought out the Ukulele. So far this week has only excited me for the idea of what the rest of the year will look like.

Our First European Adventure, Switzerland

One of the many reasons we decided to pick up our lives and move across the world was to satisfy our urge to see more of what the world has to offer. It just so happened that while we had a week off 4 of my relatives - Dad, Grandma (age 90), Aunt Rosemary and Uncle "der" Bob - were visiting Switzerland. No better reason to have our first European Adventure than that.

So the adventure started. Once we landed we were met by Dad at the Zurich Airport. It was great to see him again. I haven't felt too homesick here in Turkey, but it was comforting to see a familiar face again. Dad drove us directly to our first meal in Switzerland, Alpen Magronen - the swiss take on Mac 'n Cheese. Onions sauteed in lots of butter poured over macaroni and "a good helping" of Swiss cheese, mix in a little applesauce and it is perfect, a great way to start our swiss tour.

If I were to label the first two days of our tour I would label it a "Country Life Tour." The region of Switzerland we were in is the Canton of Obwalden, a rural community directly in the middle of Switzerland. On our first day we were taken by a distant relative to visit their farm. For those of you that are interested in living on a self-sustaining farm where little is wasted this would be the place. They had about 20 milk cows, 15 chickens and several gardens where they could harvest produce. Connected to their house was a small store where they sold their goods to passing hikers and neighbors. They made everything from cheeses to liqueurs.

After we toured their farm we had lunch in the house, then up the mountain to their cabin where we had dessert, an award winning dessert of ice cream, meringue cookies and a sauce made from coral berries. If the family didn't make it they had friends in the community that did, it was a testament to the small town spirit and what hard work can do for you.

Day 2 of the Country Life tour was the first annual "Obwaldner Hilla Rundfahrt" or the Obwalden Church tour. In every small town in this area there is a Catholic church. It was surprising to me the opulence that each of these churches possessed for the small villages they were in. One of the most opulent churches was in the town on Melchtal, a town of less than 500 people. The amount of marble and gold in the church would definitely have been able to feed the poor in times of need. After visiting 8 churches of different sizes and amounts of gold it wasn't too surprising why the Protestants objected to how the Catholics were using their money.

Our tour of the swiss country life came to an end with another nice meal at the house of Maria Achermann, whose visit to California was part of our Tour of California back in July. While my grandma was visiting this is how it went. Someone who had come to visit California had come to Grandma's house for coffee and they wanted to do the same for her while she was there. My Grandma must have hosted the entire area of Obwalden because it seemed like every day was spent going from house to house eating. The people had a genuine need to pay back her kindness.

Our final day was spent in Zurich with Joseph, a 3rd cousin, who is a principle at an elementary school. We first went for a tour of his school and then out to lunch with Joseph before we set off to see the city. Zurich is a beautiful city filled with a pervasive sense of calm even during it's rush hour times. Once again we toured 2 of the largest churches in town, Grossmünster and Fraumünster. Although these two churches were the size of the cathedrals of Rome, they were surprisingly bland compared to the churches of Obwalden. If the goal of the builders was to provide a sense of grandeur and awe both sets of churches did so, only Zurich's were grand in size, not opulence. After his parent meeting Joseph met Erin and I for a drink next to the Limmat river. It was a beautiful end to this brief glimpse into the Swiss life.

Overall the Swiss trip didn't include seeing the sights. Instead it was spent visiting family and getting what I felt was a true vision of what the swiss life is like in the smaller towns. Everywhere you go in Switzerland you are surrounded by beautiful views of the mountains, lakes and rivers. What I really felt I learned this trip was that Obwalden is built on the relationships of the people and their sense of duty to their community, their neighbors and their relatives. It was touching to see how much they went out of their way to make us feel welcomed. Not only will I be traveling back there some day, Erin and I want to look in to the citizenship process for Grandma, then we can make a chain down to my Citizenship, it's a long shot, but worth a try.

Istanbul: Hagia Sophia, and The Blue Mosque

Sorry about the confusing order to these posts, but I'm going to flashback to Istanbul to share with you what I got to see on my day out with Nanette.  (Alan is SO sad he was sick.  Poor guy.) So here we go...

I'll try not to be too Wikipedia on you, but these buildings have SO much facinating history, I'll just keep to the good bits.

Our first stop in Sultan Ahmet (old town Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus) was Hagia Sophia.  This massive, gorgeous, testiment to human ingenuity, and the power of faith was almost cripplingly overwhelming for me.  Upon entering, I began to feel that my anxiety over the ocean, and my dislike of Costco might be connected under a larger umbrella of Megalophobia, of the fear of large things. I can only describe the feeling I had as a slight pressure in my lungs and a racing heart beat the whole time we were in there. The reason this building felt so large in comparison to a sky scraper, is because it was designed in an unprecidented way: dome upon dome upon dome with no support system in the middle.  Check it out:




Unfortunately, neither of these pictures really does justice to the enormity of this building.  I guess it's just too big for the camera.

So to continue on about how amazing this place is: it was first built in the 3rd century... that's 1700 years ago! Sometimes my brain hurts just thinking about how ingenious some people are.  They didn't have any sort of crane or forklift or anything to help them build this, and it's architectual design is nothing short of amazing.

But my favorite part is the religious history behind the Hagia Sophia. When it was first built in 360 and for the next 1000 or so years, it was an Orthadox Cathedral, Christian in design.  Then in 1453 when Constantinople was conqured by the Ottomans, they changed it to a mosque.  At that point some of the Christian alters and mosaics were removed or covered, but many remain. In 1935 it was secularized and became a museum. Today, a beautiful mix of Eastern and Western religion and art coexists.  Mosaics of Jesus and other Christian saints cover the walls, while in other places Islamic elements were added, like the round paintings near the base of the domes, and the four minnirettes built outside. It was such a lovely feeling for me to be surrounded by such differing faiths both finding a home in one site of worship.

Constantine             Christ                   Zoe

Still more facinating for me is the trivia surrounding Empress Zoe.  Many of the mosaics on the walls depict Christ and Mary, but one of the mosaics dating back to the 11th Century shows Christ in the center, with Empress Zoe on the right, and her husband Constantine on the left.  Interestingly, the origional heads have been scraped off and replaced with the current ones.  Theory has it that Zoe had her own head placed on the body to the right, and her first husband's head on the body to the left.  And each time Zoe divorced and remarried (3 in total) she had the head of her old husband removed and replaced with her new husband. Pretty egocenteric don't you think?!
On to the Blue Mosque.  Built between 1609 and 1616, the Blue Mosque was built under the reign of Sultan Ahmet, who was looking to out do the Hagia Sophia in grandure.  Though I dont think he accomplished his goal, his color palet is much more to my liking.  The Blue Mosque is still in use today, and at the height of Ramazan, it was very crowded with tourists and worshipers alike. There is a seperate entrance for tourists, along with headscarves and floor length skirts for hussies who are dressed inappropriatly (like me).  It's a beautiful building, and I very much enjoyed gathering together with the worshippers, but I also felt like I was intruding a bit, so we didn't stay long.



We saw a few other sights while we were there, but I didnt get any good pictures, so I'll wait to tell you about them until I go back to Istanbul with Alan.

Work a week, Have a week off! A great way to start.

Week one is officially in the books and there isn't too much to report. This week we spent most of our time in meetings and planning for the first few weeks of school, but there were no children around, except for the few children that belonged to teachers at the school. Both Erin and I are ready for the children to show up. We can't talk anymore about what we are going to do, we have hit the point that we just need to meet the kids and get started. I will be working in the Anaokulu ( the kindergarten program) as a wandering English teacher. I will visit each of the 6 classes ranging from ages 4-6 about 5 times a week to spend at the most 40 minutes doing an english lesson. These lessons will range from singing to crafting, but my focus will be on listening and speaking skills. I am enjoying the group of teachers I work with, they all seem dedicated to creating quality education for young children. I think I would be able to be of more help in planing sessions if they didn't only speak in Turkish. I suppose I have to learn Turkish.

On Friday night we were invited to an iftar dinner with our new coworkers. Iftar is the time during ramadan when muslims get to break their fast. It was a lovely meal at a restaurant on the harbor that included lentil soup, grilled chicken or köfte (meat balls), several different salads and for dessert, baklava. I was surprised to find out that the syrup on top of baklava isn't honey! Instead it is a syrup made from sugar, water and lots of my favorite, butter. It was a great night and a chance for us to socialize, since many of the teachers can speak English quite well.

Now that we have worked one whole week, we get a week off. It just so happens that Bayram (the 3 day celebration at the end of Ramadan) is happening next wednesday thru friday. Our school decided to extend it to the entire week and we will be making up the time on a weekend later in September. So our first European adventure is upon us; Switzerland here we come!!! We will fly out tomorrow then and spend a week with Dad, Grandma Stehli, Aunt Rosemary, Uncle Bob and a whole host of Swiss relatives. The excitement is building, but first we must figure out how to get to our 11:30 flight at an airport 2 hours away without a car. Tricky. Once again we will be relying on our boss and reliable friend Adnan to help us with translation at the bus station. Then off to meet the fam.

Swiss cow picture taken on my last trip to Switzerland

Have no fear, I will take lots of pictures, and you will know all about the trip as soon as we get back next Friday.