February 22, 2021

Call me hoca

Hello all,

Today was my first day of teaching! I am teaching speaking/listening classes twice a week to pre-intermediate students. I spent my afternoons last week hammering out a lesson plan, and then hammering out another one when I was told I should plan for four 20 minute sections of class instead of the four 40 minute sections originally listed. I was given a pretty good syllabus + textbook, unlike many of the other ETAs, but other faculty told me that if I just followed the book, no one would show up to the classes. Last semester, in classes of 30, it was common for just a couple of students to actually show up to the online class. The final takeaway I had after lots of lesson-planning conversations on Friday was: it doesn’t matter if you follow the textbook or not, do whatever you want, just please get them to speak.

In a very non-ideal schedule move, I had four hours of Turkish class this morning, a half hour break, and then several hours of teaching. My class officially has about 60 students, but only 30 showed up, and there were only around 20 by the end. Still pretty good turnout! My general plan had been to talk about the US/Turkey as a note-taking exercise, then split students into breakout rooms to prepare presentations. However, I hadn’t turned on the ‘breakout room’ function in Zoom, so I didn’t end up doing that, and at any rate they all seemed very happy to tell me things they knew about Turkey and the US. It worked well to ask them about their hometowns: Malatya is famous for apricots! Ankara is famous for goats! Adana has a very old bridge! I ended up spending most of the lesson on this because they were just so excited to talk. And they also enjoyed telling me about America: New York, the city that does not sleep! Central Park! Los Angeles! Hot dog! Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves! 6ix9ine! And, many times over, Elon Musk/Tesla/SpaceX! (Most of my students are going into engineering.) We ended up going for much longer than the four 20 minute sections because they kept going and going. There was a moment of chaos when I gave them a Google doc to sign up for presentation topics, but that was some on-the-fly lesson planning and I don’t mind a little failure in a generally good class. At the end, they said that the class was more interesting than doing things from the book and that they learned a lot (the Mississippi River! Joe Biden is old! Utah has beautiful rocks!). I asked them what they were interested in—American TV shows (How I Met Your Mother is very popular here), computer games, etc.—and one student even interrupted me as I was closing the class to say, teacher! I didn’t tell you about my hobbies! So in general, I found them very talkative and excited to share, and I enjoyed hearing them so much!

I had figured, I might as well make class as fun as possible just to get them to show up, because even if they don’t get all of the skills that the textbook would cover, they don’t get any skills if they don’t come to class. One drawback that I’m realizing now is that for the students who don’t attend, it’s much harder for them to follow the class if there isn’t a clear schedule of what pages we complete when. This is really a conversation I need to have with colleagues, but I’m not sure how much I’m responsible for creating a class which can be easily followed asynchronously. I mean, I’m teaching speaking and listening—I’m really not sure how you can acquire those skills without having a live conversation.

One student (who seemed so eager to impress that she was at one point clearly reading Google results on George Washington) sent me this message after class. Like, 100% sucking up, but I am 100% here for it!!!

I'm sorry to bother you, but I'd like to tell you something!!! I'm thrilled with the lesson!!! You had a very good lesson!! You are very kind, sweet and smart!!! Thank you so much for your hard work!!! You are really a great teacher and I am very happy that I can learn a lot from you!!

I had a very long day last Thursday (7 hours of Zoom Fulbright orientation then meeting the head of the school of foreign languages and being assigned an unexpected project), and at the end of it I was feeling overwhelmed and lonely. Friday was much better—I got to spend lots of time having tea and chatting, my favorite activity!

Walking home today, two different cars of strangers pulled over to ask if I needed a ride (I turned them both down) and I passed villagers harvesting fruit and a man grazing a cow by the side of the road and lots of chickens. I went down to the sea and drank a soda that tasted like Skittles while the sun set.

I don’t think I’m doing much exploration and ‘taking full advantage’ of my time yet, as urged in the Fulbright orientation, but I continue to be quite happy to be here!

Warmly,

Netta hocam ¹

Turkish Nutella in a tube:

Mediterranean sunset:

A little cross-eyed fellow who sometimes joins me for lunch:

The preschool on the first floor of my building, whose sign advertising “Engilish” makes me laugh every day (English = İngilizce in Turkish):