I’m always racing to catch up, and am never done when the others are.) My attitude is not great. I notice the high performers who are just beginning to produce for real, using a verb they know and trying out a different ending in an original situation with vocabulary from a different session. I’ve forgotten how to say “thank you,” even. All I remember is onion. I didn’t try to learn it. It just stuck. Today when I was washing dishes, a word I didn’t remember in class (but others did) came back to me. The word for aubergine, which is a vegetable I so dislike that I can’t even remember its name in English. Oh, yeah: eggplant. So it wafted into my brain and I said to myself, “How strange,” and now for the life of me I can’t remember the word again.

It’s been like that through this whole session, with words floating by like clouds: words I heard but didn’t even try to learn, for want of time.

The gap between the accomplished students and those few like me who aren’t getting is seems to be getting ever greater. As a teacher, how does one bridge that? Interestingly, another challenged student said today that he was sad class is ending. I was surprised, since he always seemed disinterested and never participated. I asked why. “I was just beginning to get it.”

Ray said that his curriculum is strongly grammar-based because Turkish is so different from English, with its challenging word order, infixes, alphabet, etc. He also focuses in a specific sequence on key verbs — I want, I have, I like (istiyorum). Had we been students preparing for a trip to Turkey, however, his curriculum would have been different to some extent.

At the end of class the group got sentimental, realizing that the class was over. He’s a sweet man. Sometimes I thought I saw his frustration poke through at having to repeat things a million times for students like me. It raised my affective filter. Today I spoke softly and volunteered only once. Iwas “hayir” [wrong]. So I really didn’t feel like trying. I do wish I’d had time to practice. Any teacher would get frustrated when students don’t pick up what seems easy, or what they should if they practiced.

Someone wanted to take a group photo. I thought it was a good idea and grabbed my camera, which ended up being the one we used. I figured out how to turn on the self-timer, and squished into the picture just in time.

After class as people left, I went up to him to thank him. His wife’s mother died on what was to be our first day of class last week, so he had to cancel. —“I know it must be hard for you to be here, with what’s going on in your personal life.” He thought a moment and said, —“Well, not really. It’s hard before I get here. But once I’m here it’s okay. It’s like a performance. Teaching is like acting.”