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.