I don’t believe this. I’d written copious notes about what we did today and when I went to save it, the fucking thing ate the entire entry. When the f will I learn to compose offline. I am furious. I have no time with this stupid school schedule. I haven’t had time even to take a walk for two weeks. So just now I spent an hour and a half writing, trying to finish before I go to bed to wake up for yet another six o’clock morning for yet another nonstop day to come home and do nothing but homework and then go to sleep for another six o’clock morning, and now everything is fecking GONE. I am livid, and I am having a very hard time containing my fury, but feel I must since I now live in a barn with neighbors. I just want to scream.

I can’t recreate all that. I won’t. I don’t have time. Unfortunately, this summary of this last class will be cursory.

Ray began with dictation as before (but now he speaks and lets us write before he writes on the blackboard. 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 like me who aren’t getting is seems to be getting ever greater. As a teacher, how does one bridge that? Interestingly, one of the slowest student said today that he was said class was ending. I was surprised, since he always seemed disinterested and never participated, and 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.

Topics

He said he would never do this much in an ordinary class, but since it was our last he wanted to show us a lot of different things:

• Daily dictation of date (see above)
• Review of vegetables (choral work with an overhead projector image of veggies; a round-game/race starting from either end of our semicircle: each person says the kind of veggie they like and that the people before them like, and whoever gets to the end first wins; a ball- and beanbag-toss from one person to the next, each said what veggie they like, etc. (I can see how this could get out of hand with kids, cuz it even got out of hand with us)
• Some word order and morphology stuff, with new words tossed in
• In pairs, people put up posters of Turkey that he hands out. As a group people mill from one to the next, identify its location out loud. At the front of the room he points it out on the map. Turkey is beautiful. I need to take US posters wherever I go on my internship
• Using handouts of a map of Turkey and cardinal directions, we looked at postcards from Turkey (if I do that, I should make sure they’re blank, cuz I got carried away reading the letters on the back). One person named a place on the map and the other would find it and say whether it was N, S, E or W Turkey.
• He taught us a song, first in chunks and then we sang the whole thing. I tried at first to do it just by listening, but it was hopeless. I needed to use the handout with the lyrics.
• He passed around Turkish Delight.
• Finally, he put on music, called three people to the front of the room to teach them a hop-kick dance, and suddenly called everyone up to their feet, made us hold hands, and danced us around the room, out the door onto the balcony and back in the other door, and then we disbursed.

Suddenly the group got sentimental, realizing that the class was over. He’s a sweet man, whose only obvious flaw in this context was his frustration showing through. It really raised my affective filter.  Today I spoke softly and volunteered only once, to be told, “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.”

Note on the French intensive class

Their teacher had them combine scenarios from previous sessions and create new dialogues and conversations. I don’t think we could have done that in Turkish — except for the few I mentioned who were really getting some of the basic tools in hand. I didn’t have enough building blocks to be able to produce original language.