Traffic wasn’t usually a problem until we were on the bridge, but one December morning, we came to a complete stop just a few blocks from our apartment.

“What’s going on?” Sankar asked, looking up from his text messages.

Up ahead, we could see a cherry picker truck. It seemed to be blocking a roundabout.. As we inched closer we could see a dense-looking artificial Christmas tree standing sentinel in the middle of the grassy circle. Perhaps fifteen feet in height, it was made of some kind of tufted green substance and blanketed with tiny white twinkling lights. A bright red, eight-pointed star already sat on top.

The tree had only about a third of its ornaments; this project could take awhile. What to do? Noticing a break in the oncoming lane, Ümit backed up a quarter car length. Then, with a snort of exasperation, he swiveled the steering wheel, turned sharply, and headed toward a different O-1 entrance ramp.

As we got into a long line of cars on the First Bridge, I pondered a Christian holiday causing Muslim commuters to be late to work.  I also thought about my job. My one-year contract would end in late January. I was a better teacher now, at least according to survey results I had just received. My students had given me above average ratings, and several had even commented, “She is a good teacher.” I was enjoying my coworkers. Six of us teachers who shared an office had become friends, telling jokes, passing snacks, and occasionally going out for coffee after classes. I was pleased to be included in this group. Everyone else was under thirty-five.

When ÖzU first offered me a teaching contract, I was so grateful that I thought, even if Sankar was transferred in the middle of a school year, I would stay and soldier on, finishing out the year, perhaps living alone in a small apartment on the Asian side. I thought the job would be just the thing for me: absorbing and fulfilling. And it often was. But it was also becoming too much. I was starting to dislike standing in the classroom for four hours each day and spending another three or four hours every day preparing. I was on a treadmill and I wanted off.

But the idea of not re-upping when my contract ended put me in a quandary. First, I had made a major fuss about getting work here in Turkey, and I had received considerable help getting a job. Second, work had carried me away from the boredom and frustration so corrosive to expatriate marriages. I actually believed it had rescued my entire Turkey experience. It had changed my focus from myself to my students. I had allowed me to have a professional experience just like Sankar. It had even boosted my self-worth, fragile after years at home raising kids.

Teaching here had also led to a significant personal discovery. Despite my struggles with unruly students, I loved the interplay of culture and language that teaching English as a Second Language involved. I wanted to pursue ESL teaching back in the States, and I planned take a certificate course when I returned, although I had no idea what my marketability would be at age 57. Now, with a year of experience under my belt, I asked myself: If I taught at ÖzU for another six months or even a year, would that increase my chances of getting a teaching job in Minnesota? I wasn’t sure it would.

I did realize that, if I wasn’t employed here in Turkey, I would certainly experience some unproductive days. But I didn’t think resentment would make a comeback. The decision not to work would be mine; there would be nobody else to blame for it. Still, it was an open question, sort of like, “If I stop taking the medication, will my headaches return?”

My teaching colleagues worked because they needed income. I was different. I didn’t need the money. My $28,000 annual salary wasn’t necessary to keep Sankar and me afloat. So increasingly, a Grinch-like voice in my head whispered: “Why are you giving up five full days each week? Why are you giving up eleven months each year?”

I had thought that, by moving to Turkey, I’d be saying goodbye to Christmas. There hadn’t been any signs of the Nativity in Yemen back in 1979 and ’80, and I didn’t expect any in Istanbul, either. While packing to move, I had, however, tucked a few Christmas ornaments into my suitcase. I thought maybe I’d be able to find the top of an evergreen tree or some potted plant to decorate when the time came. Last year, I had taken off for the States in mid-December to celebrate the holiday back home. This year, Sankar and I would be staying in Turkey. Angela and Greg would join us.

At Istinye Park mall, located in an upscale neighborhood  north of us, a huge cone-shaped Christmas “tree,” laden with gold stars and red garlands, now stood on the main floor. Hundreds upon hundreds of artificial red poinsettia blooms decorated the edges of the mall’s many balconies and arches, with strands of white lights hanging from them. Thousands of Westerners lived in Istanbul and I knew this was a commercial effort, but I felt sentimental during the Christmas season, and a dose of familiarity helped prevent homesickness.

Rows of blue and white lights now twinkled high above historic Istiklal Avenue. When I entered a men’s shop to look for a gift for Sankar, the middle-aged woman waiting on me confided, “Ever since I was a child, I loved Christmas!” At grocery stores in Kuruçesme and Levent, I stared in amazement at entire aisles devoted entirely to Santa hats, wrapping paper and ornaments.

It was a delight to observe creative and sometimes quirky Turkish efforts to commemorate the holiday. One shop window displayed a Christmas tree made of pale wooden dowels, with red and white wooden balls on their ends. A shoe store had a tree made entirely of overlapping red leather slippers. Santa Clauses of all sizes, made of ceramic, wood and felt, were everywhere. Several malls even had life-size mechanical versions that moved their lips and tilted their shoulders. Beside them, shoppers—mostly adults and mostly Turks—posed for pictures.

Perhaps all of this shouldn’t have surprised me. Turkey had been Christian for a millennium and the original St. Nicholas was the fourth-century bishop of Myra, a town in southern Turkey. And Turkey was secure in its identity, unlike neighboring countries bitter about Western colonization.

Christmas tunes burst forth in shopping centers and at Atatürk International Airport. Most were secular, but some lyrics were apparently not well understood. Over and over, we heard Loreena McKennitt’s devout “The Seven Rejoices of Mary,” with its verse about “the Holy Baby.”

We needed to find a Christmas tree. From what I understood, the city of Istanbul prohibited the cutting down of any kind of tree. And, although artificial trees were available, I wanted something real. So Sankar and Ümit, two good sports, neither of whom grew up observing Christmas, went to a nearby nursery and bought a four-foot-tall potted pine. It took some effort for them to lug it up to our apartment. When it reached there, I decided it needed as much light as possible, so I placed it out on our balcony. After Christmas, we would give it to Ümit’s mother to plant in her garden.

Earnest about helping me observe a major religious holiday, Ümit accompanied me to the mall to buy decorations. He quickly found a string of hot pink lights and held them up, declaring, “These are the best ones.”  I ended up buying them along with a matching set of ornaments.

The drive to the mall took Ümit and me through a tunnel. Now, the inside of that tunnel glowed with tiny white lights. “What are these for?” I asked Ümit.

“New Year’s,” he replied.

The New Year was already looking busy. It was possible we’d be transferred home in June. And in the early months, we had three groups of visitors arriving. Each would stay for over a week, a nice diversion from work. I was already feeling distracted, however, by something I wasn’t able to participate in. Waverley had gathered a group of expatriates—mothers from the international school—who went out each week to explore Old Istanbul. They called themselves The Monday Ladies.

A year before I would probably have dismissed a group like this as a bunch of bored wives trying to kill time. But I now wished I could go with them. I longed to wander the narrow passages of the Bazaar Quarter, poking into obscure mosques and defunct Byzantine churches. I longed to have the time to soak up the atmosphere of Constantinople.

With this allure and a feeling that my time in Turkey was growing short, I broached the topic of leaving my job with Sankar. He was surprised. The job meant a lot to me. He understood my desire to delve into Istanbul, but was wary of old patterns reemerging. “Don’t assume we’re leaving here in June,” he warned. “You might be sitting around here all year.”

He was right. But now that I’d opened the door to leaving, little things at work began to annoy me. Management tended toward severity. After I received eighteen positive and two negative ratings from my students, my boss said she wanted my reaction in writing. I  pretended I didn’t understand, murmuring that I was flattered my students thought so highly of me, but I knew which ratings I was being asked to address.

And then my Turkish colleagues. They sometimes acted as if we foreigners were just a necessary evil. Although formal meetings were conducted in English, occasional department discussions in Turkish excluded us. And how was it that they almost never asked us native speakers for English help? (A rare and admirable exception was the deputy director, who stopped me in the corridor one day with, “Sue, is it better to say ‘I am in the Internet’ or ‘I am on the Internet?’”)

There was an administrative assistant to whom we teachers had to go for office supplies, copier assistance, and other support. Friendly to the Turkish teachers, this person managed to “help” us foreigners as little and as grudgingly as possible.

“It’s because we’re needy,” Caitlin explained. Yes, we foreigners did have extra needs. We were clueless about department minutiae and we periodically needed help with paperwork for our work permits. It was very rare to meet unfriendly Turks, and now came the enticement: if I quit, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.

And finally, there was the upcoming Christmas season during which, regardless of whether or not I signed a contract for 2012, I’d have to work straight through. While Angela and Greg were here, I wouldn’t have much time to spend with them, nor would I have much time to shop, bake or decorate. I did understand that Big Nergis couldn’t give us five or six Christian teachers days off without looking unfair. We had taken advantage of all of Turkey’s Muslim and secular holidays. But still, I found the situation irritating.

Caitlin also felt squeezed by the holidays, and she and I discussed this dilemma. Finally, we decided to ask Big Nergis if we could work on Friday morning before the Sunday holiday (thank goodness we didn’t have to work on Christmas Day itself) instead of our usual Friday afternoon. That would extend our holiday weekend a half day. We’d have to make special arrangement, however, as classrooms would be full of regularly-scheduled students. After Big Nergis agreed, we decided to combine our two classes and meet in the auditorium.

“I know—we’ll show a movie! The Grinch who Stole Christmas,” Caitlin suggested.

“Huh? A Christmas movie?”

“We did it at Bilkent and it went over just fine.”

She was right.

As the holiday approached, Neslihan, a colleague who occasionally asked me for help with her American Studies doctorate papers, presented me with a pretty music box that played “Deck the Halls.” The elegant Çirağan hotel, formerly an Ottoman palace, hosted Christmas carolers from the British School, including one of Waverley’s daughters. Turks sitting in the lobby applauded. Adjacent to the carolers stood a gingerbread house of such dimensions that it looked like the Houses of Parliament. Next to it, customers could buy little Christmas trees made of white chocolate and adorned with the words, “Mary Christmas.”

Angela and Greg arrived the week before Christmas, and our gifts for each other began forming a line on the living room ledge overlooking the Bosphorus. They admired Istanbul’s decorations and enjoyed the balmy weather that allowed us to stroll comfortably outside.

We ate a huge Turkish meal that week at Gokhan and Burcu’s apartment alongside their small artificial Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve we went to St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church on Istiklal for late afternoon meditation. Christmas Day dawned sunny and 55 degrees and, after gift-giving, Angela and I walked with some sense of irony to the seaside Rumeli Hisar fortress that Mehmet the Conqueror had put up in four months in 1453 prior to conquering Constantinople. We climbed its ramparts and composed photos that included the European fort’s stone crenelations, ships gliding back and forth on the Bosphorus, and the distant hills of Asia. Two continents in a single frame. I would never forget this unusual family Christmas.

Back at work on the 26^th, I was still hearing “Merry Christmas” from my Turkish colleagues.

“It’s over,” I told them, “but thank you.” The wishes, oddly, kept coming. Was it because Turkey’s religious holidays generally involved multiple days? On December 29, several large boxes appeared near the office photocopier. The next day, an artificial tree had been assembled next to it, and the doorways in our suite of offices were adorned with shiny red garlands. Two cute little Santa dolls were rappeling up a ladder made of string on one doorframe. They had almost made it to the top.

I stood and stared. How had my colleagues gotten the date of our holiday so wrong? How had they not known?

But it turned out I was wrong. On New Year’s Eve, Noel Baba (Father Noel), a secular character long promoted to commemorate St. Nicholas, makes his rounds (I am not sure if chimneys or sleighs are involved), leaving gifts for Turkish adults and children. Preparations were right on time.

I would miss my friendly colleagues and our camaraderie, borne out of a kind of shared suffering. I knew that once I left ÖzU, I wouldn’t see them much again, and that pained me. And I felt guilty choosing leisure when they had to work. My array of economic choices was surely undeserved. But then I reminded myself that I hadn’t missed one day of work, not even one hour of teaching during the entire year. I had tried my hardest every class period, and although I hadn’t been a very effective teacher at first, I had listened to advice and I had improved.

I had earned my $28,000.

Finally, one morning as I struggled with an inattentive class, my decision crystallized. Teaching is above all a dance between teacher and students, and students can make or break the experience. Unfortunately mine were disrespectful, inconsiderate, and even disruptive. I would never quite understand why this was the case in such an otherwise courteous country, but I guessed their family wealth made them feel entitled.  I no longer wanted to teach spoiled kids.

Of course some of my students came from humble families and some of them were appreciative. But the image of Deniz strutting across the classroom in thigh-high suede boots trumped that of shy, simply dressed Yildiz. And the sight of Nilgun and Hamza roaring down Kuşbakışı Caddesi in a late-model SUV overpowered that of Recep trudging out of class with a worn backpack slung over his shoulders. I was painting in broad strokes, kind of like the hot pink holiday decorations around me. Kind of like a Grinch.

“And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

That’s one thing SHE hated! The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!”

Yes! That was the truest true of all. Above all, it was the noise that was driving me away from Ozyegin. The noise from my students, who talked while I talked, and whom I had never been able to quiet nor tame.

And so, feeling as sour as the infamous Seuss villain—and just as eager to force a change—I pressed the GONDER button on a email to big Nergis late one December evening, informing her I wouldn’t be returning for a second year. But first, I called Sankar’s secretary, Didem, who had been of such great help ferreting out job contacts, writing letters, and setting up interviews for me. I wasn’t very eloquent in giving her my reasons, but I did thank her sincerely for her help. And I told her how deeply I had appreciated having the job. I meant it.

As I packed ornaments and bows away, I felt lighthearted. In less than a month I’d be out of the classroom, the Work Caravan to Asia disbanded. Then I could begin the rest of my life in Istanbul.

The post A Grinch-y Christmas appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

“There are two kinds of relative clauses,” I began. “One is important for understanding the meaning of the sentence and the other is just extra information.”

I stood in front of my students explaining English sentences introduced by which, who, or that. As I wrote an example on the white board, three young men sitting beside the window began talking among themselves. Perhaps they didn’t understand what I was saying, and needed to discuss it.

I turned from the board and waited for them to stop, but they kept on. It now appeared that some kind of unrelated, amusing anecdote was being told. I moved a few paces toward the offenders, catching the eye of one of them. The rest of the class fell quiet. A truck rumbled by outside and the radiator hissed a blast of heat.

I remembered being caught talking in class in my student days. I would halt in mid-sentence, if not mid-word, my face scarlet. And I’d take care to be quiet during the rest of the period. But not these young men.

After a few more moments, all three looked up at me and finally fell silent. Great: I had made my point. I turned and walked back to the board. As I did, a conversation broke out in another part of the room.

What a difference a month had made! I was now so busy that I didn’t have time to question what I was doing here in Turkey or, most of the time, how I was doing it. On the home front, Sankar and I were enjoying a good stretch; most evenings we formed a companionable tableau: husband and wife sharing their workdays over dinner. Sankar was good at listening to my concerns and added office anecdotes to the mix as we tossed around our latest impressions of the Turkish culture. Our lackluster social life was no longer a problem; neither of us had the energy to care.

To my surprise, learning my students’ names had only taken a few days. I’d started with the easiest one on my list, Melike. The word means queen in Arabic, and I had guessed my student would be a young woman. Yes, and Melike was lovely, with wavy hair and big brown eyes. Another student on the list was named Onur, which sounded like Honor. It turned out I was right: onur is actually the Turkish word for honor. A rare cognate. The name seemed to fit this alert, blue-eyed young man.

As my students introduced themselves to me that first day, I scribbled hurried clues on my class list. “Curly hair.” “Tall and thin.” “Pudgy.” For one girl, “Looks like Kristen Wiig.” The first thoughts that popped into my mind, many were politically incorrect. One thin, goateed young man seemed furtive, unable to meet my eyes. “Al Q sleeper cell,” I jotted. But Orhan soon emerged as a class clown, and I found out he was the son of a NATO engineer. One day after class he confided, “We have mountains in Turkey that are hollow and full of NATO weapons.” Good to know.

The young women, fully half the students at this business- and engineering-focused university, were feminine and attractive, with long hair and the latest clothing styles. Particularly eye-catching were their boots, made of soft leather or fine suede in shiny browns and pale tans, and sometimes extending to mid-thigh. The young men looked older and more formidable than the men in the freshman English class I had taught in Minnesota. It was their coloring. Blond peach fuzz on the chin of a 19-year-old is barely visible, but a 5 o’clock shadow on a Turkish youth could turn him into a 30-year-old.

They hailed from cities and towns all over Turkey. Mardin, in the southeast, close to Syria, which in less than a month would erupt in civil war. Bursa, home to Ottoman sultans. Trabzon on the Black Sea, home of the mythical Amazons.

The School of English Language Instruction (SELI) was designed so that students could complete all five eight-week modules in one year. This seemed optimistic, and Sankar and I discussed it. Could either of us, motivated and undistracted by hormones, progress from zero to college level in a foreign language in just one year? We didn’t think so—even if we were totally immersed, which our students were not. There would simply be too much vocabulary to learn. The vast majority of OzU students couldn’t do this either: even the best ones failed a level once or twice, often taking two years to complete SELI. My level, Intermediate was considered the most difficult.

To reinforce grammar concepts, students completed a myriad of worksheets. These were designed by previous teachers and stored deep within the staff’s shared online “Z-drive.” It was great to have this resource, but the materials were often rife with mistakes. A typical example: “The teacher was busy taking the attendances.”

I loved my new colleagues — and have put pictures of some of them in this post, just so you can see how wonderful they are. I admired their near-mastery of English, in many cases accomplished with little or no time spent in English-speaking countries. And I knew it was hard to be corrected. But why weren’t we, the five or six native English speakers, tasked with vetting materials before they were put online?

I felt uneasy each time I got on the Z-drive to pull up materials. I could correct a worksheet and then save it to my own file; nobody would care. But what if I did a Save All—and I sometimes did, when I was feeling puckish—preserving my edits for everyone to access? My intuition warned that I might be overstepping a boundary. Would someone discover I had changed their work, and then reprimand me?

During the first few days, my students had been quiet and respectful, content to watch my PowerPoints and sit through diagnostic tests. On day two I got the chance to directly help a student when Talat, originally from a Kurdish town in the southeast, approached me during a break. How hard it must have been for him to form the words in English: “My family. . . is have . . . trouble. I don’t can buy the books,” came out in a whisper. I later learned that his mother had died when he was small, and that his father was only seasonally employed. I thanked Talat for telling me and went straight to Big Nergis.

“Tell him to come see me,” she suggested, and when he did, she loaned him a copy of the Intermediate textbook. The next day I purchased the supplementary book for 35 lira, about $20, and gave it to him.

By the end of the first week, my students’ behavior had begun to deteriorate. I started to notice murmuring that soon became a buzz of outright talking and occurred throughout the four hours I taught them. Most were attentive when I presented a new grammar concept, but whenever I told an anecdote, for example, about how a particular phrase was used in the U.S., or about my own strategies in learning a new language, they turned their faces from me, clearly uninterested. In a language class in which listening was key, the increasing noise was disruptive and worrisome.

Big Nergis believed in team teaching and so each of us had a teaching partner with whom, a couple of days each week, we switched classes. Although this added complexity to our jobs, it gave the students variety in accents and teaching styles.

During my first module, I teamed with Halime, a bright young woman who, like many of the SELI teachers, had graduated from large, prestigious Bilkent University in Ankara. As part of her training, she and several others now teaching at Ozyegin had been sent to Ames, Iowa, for several months to teach English literature to high school students. Caitlin and I laughed when we discovered that this had taken place during the winter months, and teased them that perhaps their “opportunity” had actually been a punishment. They laughed: the trip had had its challenges, most notably the freezing weather and lack of fresh produce, but they’d also spent time in both Chicago and New York.

Since I spent two days each week with Halime’s students, I had a whole new roster of names to learn—and students to shush. And the shushing was more difficult because these students treated me more like a substitute.

This rudeness, in an otherwise exquisitely polite culture, surprised me. I had been warned that 19-year-old Turks, sheltered and rarely given the chance to make their own decisions, might seem like 15-year old Americans. But I’d long had the impression that, while American students are exceedingly casual—putting their feet up, wearing pajamas to class, munching on snacks during lectures—the rest of the world’s students show their teachers great respect. Not so here.

My students’ inattentive behavior—and my uncertainty over how to manage it—made me feel less like a teacher. It reinforced my fear that I was merely an imposter. The students I was supposed to be helping were denying me the satisfaction of a job well done. I had never been treated in such an overtly dismissive way.

Observing Caitlin try to teach over student chatter just weeks before, I had vowed that I’d have a quiet class. Ah, the hubris of inexperience. I simply hadn’t imagined having this kind of discipline problem at the university level.

I tried to come up with reasons for the racket. I knew most of my students were living away from their parents’ control for the first time. They were trying to adjust to new freedoms and they wanted to make friends as quickly as possible. This led to a lot of socializing.

And the over-optimistic design of our program seemed to set students up for failure. Most were not particularly word-oriented in the first place, so they were bored by vocabulary and grammar lessons—and had little hope of success even if they did apply themselves. That made just about anything else in the room more interesting.

The physical setting was another culprit. Students sat in small chairs with desk arms that curved toward them, and their chairs were packed closely together along three sides of the room. The crowding, I felt, made everyone restless. The school had given each student a small Netbook laptop that they carried along with their textbook. That was too much for the tiny desk arms. After chatter, the most common sound in my classroom wasn’t tortured English pronunciation, but a sharp, slapping noise when a textbook or Netbook hit the floor. I couldn’t complain or ask for changes: the following year the entire university was moving to a brand new, multi-building campus some miles east.

Umit offered his take. “They study with money” he told me. ÖzU was not a public university; it was private. Here in Turkey, the general belief was that public university students, subject to more stringent entrance requirements and lower tuition, were disciplined, respectable scholars of modest means, while private university attendees were pampered, affluent brats. Upon hearing of my new teaching venue, every Turk I talked to made the same comment: “Oh, you have the spoiled kids.”

Back home, college students either went to a lecture intending to listen, or stayed away. They didn’t usually show up and disrupt the class. But here, students didn’t have the option of missing class: if they missed more than three days without excuse, they failed the entire module. To monitor this, I went down the class list making checks four times each day, at the beginning of every class period. This spawned resentment and a flurry of doctor’s excuses, causing me to joke about the “feeble health” of my students.

We were treating our students like children. “Why do we take attendance every hour?” I asked Little Nergis. She sighed, and replied that ÖzU had tried doing away with attendance, but that had resulted in students wandering in and out of classes at will.

I also wondered whether student anger might have also played a role. Anger at the lack of control they had as they were processed through the rigid Turkish educational system. After taking a grueling national exam during their senior year of high school, they were herded into universities based solely upon their scores; neither character, talent, nor other accomplishments were considered. And they were told to feel lucky if they gained a spot; a half million students were turned away each year due to lack of space. Once enrolled, students were expected to continue straight through to graduation. Semesters abroad or, heaven forbid, gap years, were viewed as frivolous, if not educationally fatal detours.

Hmm. . .  anger over loss of control. Who felt this more acutely — my students or their teacher?

What could be done? In the past, Turkish teachers had apparently used corporal punishment, and national laws had recently been passed protecting students of all ages. The upshot was that teachers were legally forbidden from asking misbehaving students to leave the room. At ÖzU, all I could do was write up an “incident report” and send the offender to talk with Big Nergis after class, guaranteeing an even poorer attitude once the student returned.

One small tool I did have was the Classroom Participation Grade (CPG), an extra half-point awarded to each student each week for good behavior. This didn’t sound like much, but could total five points at the end of the module and mean the difference between passing and failing. Students that felt they had a chance of passing tried to earn that half point every week.

An ultimate tool, albeit of little immediate help was that students failing a module three times were generally asked to leave.

I also recognized that I had contributed to the problem. During my first weeks I had been too nice, too easygoing with my students. Now, it was difficult to shift to a sterner persona. I should have brushed away my tendency to defer to the culture as the guest I was, and started off assertively.

Two students got under my skin. One was Yildiz, pretty and dripping with disdain, and the other was Can, who actually had pretty good English speaking skills because of visits to the U.K., but spent class periods goofing around.

One day, after watching Yildiz turn again and again to her neighbor with an apparent joke while I spoke, I got angry. I yelled at her—probably for close to a minute—in English. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it was something like, “Why can’t you listen? Why are you here if you’re not listening? (I already knew the answer to that.) As I went on, Can piped up with a rebuke, “She can’t understand you.”

My words silenced Yildiz, but what does the teacher do after she stops yelling? She turns toward the materials she was attempting to cover and tries to calm down enough to teach them, aware that she is now asking her students to focus and concentrate after she has done something unusual and upsetting.

The result? The miscreants could see that my rant had accomplished nothing; they could see that I had used up my arsenal, and so they paid even less attention . The others in class—the perhaps 2/3 who were not causing trouble? Well, this was an obedient and sociable society and these were nineteen-year-olds. They kept silent.

The only exception was an unusual young woman named Gül, rose. Tiny, with pale skin and relatively short dark hair, she never wore boots or up-to-date styles, but instead dressed in white Peter Pan blouses with print skirts, geeky white anklets and dainty old-fashioned tennis shoes. Every class period, she sneezed just once, but in an idiosyncratic squeak that quickly became humorous. She paid attention and didn’t hesitate to raise her hand when she had questions, which was often. Definitely her own person, Gül was liked by all. As the final exam neared and we began to review, she finally turned to the misbehavers and addressed them in her firmest voice, “Gerçekten!” Meaning, Really? You’re going to continue this kind of behavior even now?

In my first weeks, I had mentioned my talkative students to Turkish colleagues and they had nodded wearily. Yes, even experienced teachers admitted that their students were “chatty.” But I sensed it was worse for us foreigners, who couldn’t understand what the students were saying. In fact, there seemed to be a hierarchy of respect at ÖzU. The teachers who received the most deference were, not surprisingly, older, male, and Turkish. Those receiving the least were younger, female, and foreign. Caitlin fell into this category, and when several of us discussed this problem one day, she shared some half-serious advice. “Get the class to think you’re really cool, and then drop the ‘f’ bomb on them.”

The module continued relentlessly, the busy days blurring together. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, trusting that I’d eventually adjust to my role and surroundings. As the days and weeks wore on, lesson planning and answering diverse grammar questions became easier. I also learned something about Turkish culture, noticing that students who had colds constantly asked to be excused to the tuvalet. It turned out they wanted to blow their noses, something that Turks consider impolite in public. I now recalled Big Nergis’ unusual behavior with the tissue when she interviewed me.

I also conferred with Big Nergis. She told me that Turkish students were more likely to cooperate if they felt I had a personal interest in them. To help establish this, she told me, I should hold individual conferences early in the module. This was good advice, and I followed it in the subsequent modules I taught.

But for now, the constant noisy chatter continued. And, although the problem was often on my mind, I stopped mentioning it to my Turkish colleagues. It seemed an admission of my weak classroom management skills. I feared my students didn’t respect me; how could I invite disrespect among my colleagues as well? Thus I did the same thing the Turkish teachers did with their Achilles heel, English grammar. I buried it.

I had taken the job to feel better about myself, to grab hold of something that seemed, at least in my own country, increasingly scarce. To prove that I wasn’t old and washed up. I did feel a burst of pride whenever a new acquaintance asked me what I did, or when I told people back home that I’d managed to find a job in Turkey. And I felt satisfied when a day’s lesson went particularly well. But triumph and pride were nowhere to be found when I really needed them, hour after long hour in the classroom

By week five I had recovered enough self-possession to begin casting about for activities that might distract students from their socializing. Sometimes I succeeded. I played the song, “If I Had a Hammer” to illustrate the Second Conditional, and the students loved it, begging me to play it again and again. I put a series of grammar and vocabulary questions into a PowerPoint. Then, during our last period on Fridays, I divided the students into teams, gave them scratch paper for their answers, and got ready to keep score.

My male students were particularly thrilled. One team stood up, put their arms around each other in a huddle, and issued a fierce battle cry before I displayed the first sentence:

This is the car ______________ was in the accident.

1. who
2. that
3. it
4. he

As groups puzzled over the question, the guys kept busy yelling what they thought were wrong answers to other teams. The girls were quieter, content to provide much of the brainpower. The entire class fell silent–such bliss!—as I unfolded answer slips and delivered the verdict. When the game ended, such a roar came from the winning team that I was sure everyone on the floor heard us. From then on, last periods on Fridays were always reserved for games, and we all rallied together for at least one hour each week.

At the end of each day I walked outside to meet dear, familiar Ümit. He had complained about having little to do now that both Sankar and I were working, and I didn’t know how he occupied himself during the hours we were away. But he was prompt in picking me up at 4:30 each afternoon and had made friends with the ÖzU guards as well as a fruit and vegetable vendor across the street from the school.

When I emerged from the building, Ümit sprang out of the car, rounded the front to the right passenger side, opened the door with a flourish and stood smiling, waiting for me to get in. I had put up with that ever since I arrived in Turkey, but now I cringed. Several of my colleagues were coming out of the building a few paces behind me. Thankfully, they were busy talking to each other; I didn’t want them to see me getting into such a fancy car. Surely they would wonder why such a privileged person was working at all. I felt like a middle school student who is suddenly embarrassed at the existence of his parents.

I greeted Ümit and ducked quickly into the car, head down. Being “the rich American who rides around in a late-model BMW” was not the kind of relative clause I wanted to describe me.

Months later, however, I wondered whether it might possibly have garnered me more respect from my students.

The post Too Many Words appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

Bugra Akçay. Duygu Ikibüdük. Piril Kücükçolak. Erden Öz. Ceyhun Uyanik. I sat in my office reading my class list. Nineteen students. I had no idea which names were male or female. How was I ever going to get to know them all?

More importantly, how I was going to perform as an ESL teacher? Although I loved words and enjoyed writing and editing, my formal knowledge of grammar was weak at best. I couldn’t identify predicates or dependent clauses, and the act of diagramming a sentence was foreign to me. True, I could learn these concepts before teaching them, but I worried my understanding would be superficial. If questioned, I feared I would find myself in deep water.

How quickly one set of insecurities is replaced by another.

I had started work Özyeğin University in January of 2011. My first hurdle had been getting there each day. Sankar and I lived on Istanbul’s European side but he, and now I, worked on its Asian side. We only had one car, and using public transport would be complicated, involving buses and ferries as well as mini-buses called dolmuşes.

We decided to double up, starting out for work together each morning. Ümit would drop me off first, and then Sankar. We set our alarms for 6:30 and rose just as the sun was peeking from behind the hills across the Bosphorus. Ümit arrived to pick us up at 7:15.

Between 7:30 and 8:00, traffic on The First Bridge (thus called because it was the first built to span the Bosphorus; before 1973, crossing was only by boat) would become fierce. We tried to get on its entrance ramp before the rush. It had three lanes of traffic going each way, with extra right-hand lanes on each side reserved (on pain of fine) for police cars or emergency vehicles. Each day I was impressed with the Turks’ forbearance: nobody veered into this empty lane even during the most intense traffic. I recalled Costa Rican roads, where even the hint of a jam up had everyone crowding onto the shoulders. Not in controlled, obedient Turkey.

There we sat, Ümit in the front seat, dressed in a suit and tie, his jacket folded neatly on the seat next to him. Sankar and I in back, he on his phone talking to Poland or South Africa, his enthusiastic voice precluding any conversation between Umit and me. I generally looked out the window, marveling at the wide, misty stretch of water we were crossing and checking out progress on the tiny Ortakoy mosque, so concealed by restoration scaffolding that I called it “mosque in a box.”

Once we got across the First Bridge, Özyeğin was just two exits away, past a steep grassy hillside on which, in the spring, landscapers would portray the Turkish flag and the enormous word, Turkiye, in begonias.

Ümit would drop me off at the university’s entrance, a wide expanse of smooth marble always slippery with dew, which made me think of a big, fat American lawsuit. Then Sankar and Ümit would head north along the Asian shoreline, slowing down through quaint old seaside towns like Cengilköy and Küzgüncük, and continuing past The Second Bridge (completed in 1988) to the 3M offices. In the late afternoon, we’d reverse this process.

Relieved I had something to occupy my time, Sankar never complained about this new routine, which required him to sit in the car for an extra half hour or more each morning and afternoon—and get up earlier to do so. And I never apologized.

On my first day, I reported to Director Nergis, who led me to a desk in an office with floor to ceiling windows. “This is Susan,” she announced to the other teachers I would share the room with. “She is from the States.” Nine faces swiveled toward me.

“Where in the States?” someone asked.

“Minnesota,” I replied.

“I’m from Bloomington!” This from a skinny young woman with bright red hair, whose desk was directly across the aisle. We smiled at each other in surprise. Minnesotan Caitlin Shea, would become a trusted colleague and friend in my new workplace.

Others in this office (there were two office, thirty teachers in all) included Halime, a brainy, golden-haired young woman from Gumuşhane (gumuş=silver; han=caravanserai) in northeastern Turkey; Selin, petite and pretty, from industrial Zonguldak near the Black Sea; Erim, a talented photographer from Balikesir not far from the Aegean; and Nurgul, a bundle of cheer with dark hair and eyes, also from western Turkey.

A new eight-week teaching module—and my classroom teaching duties—wouldn’t start until late January, so Nergis asked me to spend the interim perusing the textbooks used by Ozyegin’s School of English Language Instruction (SELI). In addition, nearly every day I accompanied one or another new colleague into their classroom.

I loved watching others teach and discovering what exercises might help convey my language to learners. Petek, a pretty young woman wearing a red and black print dress and slim black boots, had her Upper Level students playing a language game that involved walking around in two concentric circles. Whenever they needed to stop or change directions, she blew a whistle and they immediately obeyed. I was impressed with her authority.

Giti, originally from Iran, had a magical effect on her beginning students. With huge eyes and an equally big smile, she flew around the room, encouraging and cajoling. When a student got the right answer, she exclaimed, “I love you!” Giti’s class was all smiles.

Caitlin had a relaxed approach with her Pre-Intermediate students, kidding and laughing with them. They clearly liked her. But I noticed a some side conversations going on while she was trying to teach. She responded again and again with “shhh,” but it did little good. I vowed to have more control over my class.

Selin, though young and slight, seemed to be able to silence her Advanced class with a stern look. I was beginning to see the force of the Turkish personality. She was busy conducting a speaking test by calling students in groups of two up to her desk. While this went on, to my surprise, a male and female student canoodled—quietly—in the back of the classroom.

Selin’s students were filing out of class when one of them, a young man, tapped my shoulder and asked where I was from. When I said Minnesota, he exclaimed, “I lived there!” He went on to tell me that he had been an AFS student in Deer River, MN, located, he informed me, between Duluth and Bemidji. He described how surprised he had felt as an Istanbulu landing in an American town of only 800 people and settling on a farm, where he was expected to help take care of livestock. The Deer River community, he also told me, was “freaked out” about a lone Muslim in their midst, even more so when he told them his grandparents had moved to Turkey from Iraq.

I thought of all of the emotions and adjustments his move had undoubtedly catalyzed—in the good citizens of Deer River and in this traveling Turk. “You had a big effect on a small place,” I said. “Good for you!”

There is apparently no age limit on the fear of eating lunch alone on the first day of work. Would anybody ask me to join their table? I didn’t need to worry. Just before noon, Selin scooped me up and guided me to the cafeteria. I would never forget this considerate gesture.

In the hours I wasn’t observing, I sat with the stack of Pearson English textbooks Nergis had given me. Each book was organized around units: Personality, Architecture, Transportation, etc, but I was unsure what I was supposed to get out of them, and I felt like an imposter flipping through pages. Could others tell I didn’t know what I was doing? Later, with more experience, I would know to examine each unit and try to think of supplemental exercises and discussion topics, but I didn’t know that then, and simply proceeded woodenly in an attempt to look busy.

Also in front of me was a packet of forms and goodies the department secretary had given me. I received a loaded cash card that covered lunch in the cafeteria each noon and also refreshments at the snack bar. Sankar also got a free lunch at work; nationwide, Turkish policy seemed to be: use food to keep your workers close at hand. I was given a health insurance card that would supplement coverage I had through Sankar.

I received automatic deposit forms for my monthly paycheck. My salary would be deposited in FinansBank. Since Sankar used GarantiBank (Turkish is considered an “agglutinative” language and tends to run together words that in English would be separate) for his paycheck, I asked if my salary could instead be deposited at Garanti. No, came the answer. Hüsnü Özyeğin, the man after whom Özyeğin University was named, owned FinansBank. All teachers would bank with Hüsnü.

Nergis also presented me with a thick, bound binder outlining the SELI curriculum, which she told me was proprietary to OzU and should not be shared. In the form of a one-hundred-plus page table, the manual outlined all of the concepts we were to teach our students, including reading, writing, listening and speaking, for each of five levels: Beginning, Pre-Intermediate (called PIN), Intermediate, Upper, and Advanced. Wow! A smaller document served as our week-by-week guide.

All of this material seemed daunting, but it did promise a high degree of structure, which was comforting. As an adjunct professor in St. Paul, I had been given free rein over how and what I taught my freshman English class, the sole requirement being that I assign a research paper. That had felt like too little supervision; I’d had to discover too much on my own. That wouldn’t be the case at Özyeğin. At Hamline no one wanted to take the time to standardize what was taught, but at OzU, control and uniformity were vitally important.

One afternoon, a driver took me to the office of employment to get my work permit. My hiring seemed to refute what Monica and Felicia had told me about spouses not being able to work in Turkey. They were correct in a general sense, but I was in a special category: native speakers were considered essential to teaching English to Turks.

Toward the end of my first week, I received some final paperwork: a couple of printed flowcharts anticipating student behavior problems. One outlined steps to follow when assignments were turned in late, and another provided a process for dealing with classroom discipline. Again, organized and structured, but: classroom behavior problems at a university!?

Özyeğin University was growing in leaps and bounds. A baby boom generation born in the 1990s had now come of age with a nearly insatiable demand for higher education. Our department had doubled in size from 250 students in 2010 to close to 500 in 2011, and was expected to double again in 2012. Back in Minnesota the opposite was occurring: Hamline and many other colleges had lost students because of the recession, leading to serious budget crises.

In late January, the teaching module ended and I joined other teachers and supervisors, two in each classroom, to proctor the module’s daylong final exams. It was my first official duty as a teacher.

We teachers read word for word from an English script to instruct our test takers, guide them through the listening phase of the test, and announce breaks between sections. We were also told what to say if a student arrived late; how to accompany a student if they needed to use the bathroom during the exam; and what to do if a student finished early and wanted to leave (forbidden). It was a clear and definitive no-nonsense tutorial on how to proctor an exam. In fact, “no-nonsense,” I was beginning to realize, was not a bad way to describe Turkey as a whole.

After exam day, we convened in groups under the guidance of supervisors to correct the tests. To control for errors, two teachers went over each test paper. A strict protocol existed for marking essays, which involved first agreeing as a group of eight on scores for five sample student essays, an hours-long exercise. After we finished all the marking, scores were entered into a computer program that calculated whether each student had a score of 65% or higher and thus passed the course, or would have to repeat it.

After grades were finalized, we all received two days off while Nergis, taking into account exam results and teacher preferences, determined new teaching assignments. I was assigned Intermediate, supervised by another Nergis—Nergis Enmutlu (en=most; mutlu=happy).

A word here about Turkish last names. Prior to the 1923 formation of the Republic, Turkey was largely rural, its citizens provincial and rarely in need of more than a first name. Despite this, Ataturk asked all Turks to give themselves last names. Some Turks went the time-tested “son of” route, which involved attaching “oğlu” to the end of their father’s first name.  Davutoğlu, Mustafaoğlu, etc. Many named themselves after natural phenomenon:  Gül: Rose; Nergis: Daffodil; Deniz: Sea; Yaprak: Leaf.

Others focused on ideals or characteristics: Dilek: Wish; Özlem: Desire; Keskin: keen or sharp; Kutlutan: lucky; Öz: soul or authentic (this one was either quite frequently chosen or the Öz descendants were highly prolific, one runs into Öz-es all over Turkey).

Other Turks linked their names to fierce animals such as Arslan: lion, or more explicit expressions of strength such as Sert: Hard; Çetin: Tough or Şimşek: Lightning. A former Turkish Prime Minister’s last name was Demirel (demir = iron; el = hand).

Because she was petite, my new supervisor, Nergis Enmutlu was referred to as “Little Nergis,” while the head of SELI, Nergis Akbay, though by no means large, was referred to as “Big Nergis.”

As I observed my colleagues during the several days of planning, I was impressed with their confidence and industriousness, and also with the almost clockwork-like way they proceeded through the day. I felt like I was now part of some kind of teaching factory with hundreds of moving parts, an odd sensation for someone accustomed to spending much of my time alone, writing, and doing freelance editing. Right now, given that teachers had to take time from their schedules to explain procedures such as Moodle, the online classroom management system, to me, I was an errant particle jamming up the works. But once I caught on and understood the multitude of tasks at hand, I, too, would be part of this smoothly-functioning machine.

The last time I had worked full time was in 1987, almost a quarter century before. Now, I’d be putting in twenty teaching hours each week plus twenty more preparing. Locating materials, adapting them to my class’s needs, coming up with examples to illustrate grammar concepts, figuring out how much material to cover each day, and correcting essays. It occurred to me that I had probably taken on more than I could handle, and I recalled a similar situation three decades before.

Twenty five years old, with a new master’s in international nutrition, I longed to work in a developing country. My father had recently died, however and my mother didn’t want me to leave. Sankar, then my fiancé, also wanted me to stay close by.

Believing that once marriage and family intruded, I’d never again have the chance to live overseas, I put up such a long and vigorous fight that both my family and Sankar threw up their arms in defeat. I accepted one of the first jobs offered me: a position with Catholic Relief Services in The Yemen Arab Republic.

What a shock! My new home, the capital city of Sana’a, was so dusty that I could hardly breathe. And the Yemenis looked alarming: silent, black-shrouded women, men with daggers jammed into belts at their waists. The language sounded guttural and unappealing. Almost nobody spoke English. How was I ever going to adjust?

Other arriving expatriates had similar reactions and many promptly turned tail and went home. The dropout rate for Peace Corps Yemen was reputedly one of their highest in the world. But after all the fuss I’d put up, I knew I had no recourse but to stay and make the best of it.

Now, here I was in a similar situation. (Do patterns like these stalk us?) I had been so intent on getting a job that I hadn’t even begun to consider what that might mean. I would be away from home for nine hours each day, standing in front of students for four of them. And I’d signed a one-year contract. It now became ultra-clear to me why teachers needed to be contracted.

There was absolutely no way I could utter a word of complaint about what I had committed myself to. And just like all those years before in Yemen, I felt like the Fates were chuckling at my obstinacy.

My first day of teaching finally arrived. My Intermediate class would meet from 8:40 am to 12:30 pm on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, and from 12:40 pm to 4:30 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All of the class schedules worked similarly; Nergis had devised them so that students and teachers wouldn’t have to get up early every day.

At 8:30 on Monday morning, wearing black slacks and a cardigan over a white shirt, I walked out of my office and headed down the busy hallway toward what was to be my classroom. I carried a notebook in which I’d carefully scripted my announcements and the sequence of events for my first class period. I also had with me a stack of handouts and my new work laptop, like a pizza delivery box. Draped over my slightly trembling left arm was its long charger cord.

At the end of the hall, standing off to the side in the rush of students stood a diminutive couple, perhaps in their late forties. They were dressed simply, she in a loosely crocheted cardigan over a plain blouse and a mid-calf-length plaid skirt, with a headscarf that covered most, but not all of her hair, he in faded gray dress pants and a neatly ironed white shirt. On their faces were both pride and awe. These were clearly parents from the Turkish countryside, their son or daughter most likely the first in the family to attend college. They stood quietly, looking wistful, seeing their much-loved son or daughter off on the first day.

The couple’s presence pulled me out of my nervous self-absorption, and I found it poignant. I gave them what I hoped was a teacher-ly nod of competent reassurance.

I entered my new classroom, a smallish modern room with chairs lining three walls facing a white board, and a window on the far side. Each chair had a tiny desk attached to its arm. I put down my computer and stack of papers, and smiled at the young woman and two men who were already seated. They looked a bit surprised, and all of a sudden I was not at all sure I should have arrived early. A perennial early bird, I had been propelled out of the teacher office and down the hall by a combination of nerves and American custom. But none of my Turkish colleagues had followed.

My Turkish teachers at EFINST had always arrived late, and now I guessed that was what my current colleagues were planning to do: wait until all students were in place and make a grand entrance to show who was in charge. But I simply couldn’t do this, at least not on the first day. I wanted to welcome my students to class, not have them welcome me. I hoped my behavior wasn’t sending some kind of message of weakness.

As I bent down to connect my computer, my shoulders ached with fatigue. For years my teacher friends had told me of difficulty sleeping the night before the start of a new year. But I hadn’t expected to wake up at 2:30 this morning, unable to get back to sleep at all. The problem was that, the day before, curled up on the couch wondering what in the world I had gotten myself into, I had taken not one, but two naps.

As my students filed in, I busied myself with my laptop. Would I be able to successfully project the “First Day PowerPoint,” prepared by my Turkish colleagues, but full of errors I’d had to edit? I had tested it in an empty classroom last Friday and it had worked fine, but what about now? Did I have enough material for four hours of teaching? And most important, would my students be able to detect my nervousness and inexperience? At least my new colleagues would not be observing me!

Duygu, Bugra, Erden, Ceyhan, and all the rest. My students had taken their seats and were staring quizzically at me. I stood up straight, produced a shaky smile, and began to teach.

The post Rookie Teacher appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

Dear readers, A bunch of you have asked me where I am currently. I’m home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this site I am blogging about the years I lived in Istanbul: 2010 through 2013.  

I was enjoying my thrice-weekly Turkish class. My classmates included four Japanese women, wives of engineers directing construction of a transportation tunnel between the city’s European and Asian sides; a young Polish woman who was engaged to a Turk; and Annika, my Swedish friend from the first class. Our teacher Ferda, my former tutor, was warm and encouraging, and seemed, despite our constant errors and mispronunciations, to comprehend most everything we tried to say. Having Ferda boosted my confidence, and I felt increasingly comfortable using Turkish while out and about.

The class would be ending soon, however. I wanted to keep moving forward with Turkish, and indeed I could take more classes. But what I really wanted was a meaningful, regular way to engage with the Turkish culture. Increased use of the language would, I felt, follow that.

Sankar was busy traveling to The Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, South Africa, and Dubai. In November he was heading back to the States to teach a leadership development class for 3M. He loved those teaching interludes. “Maybe I will teach a class or two when I retire,” he mused. His life was in full gear.

Although I wanted to be happy for him, in private I seethed. Before we moved to Turkey, I had embarked on a teaching career, teaching freshman composition at a small college in St. Paul. I had enjoyed it, and would have loved to continue. But instead, here I was, stuck in first gear, weeks and months ticking by. Resentment building

Would I ever get back on some kind of professional track? My chances didn’t look good. In America, The Great Recession continued. Online, I read over and over again about middle-aged professionals who had lost their jobs. News articles described gray-haired citizens applying for dozens of jobs with little success, their professional lives seemingly cut prematurely short. They warned that job seekers in their fifties or older might well consider themselves permanently sidelined. Already feeling professionally insecure, and living in an even more youth-oriented environment than the States, I was struck by this message. It was easy to conclude that I might never hold a job again. And it wasn’t the faceless recession I had to blame; it was 3M and my husband.

I wanted a job! This negative news, and my envy of people busy working made me put an ever higher value on employment. Employment in Turkey would give me status. It would ward off boredom and resentment. It would be the answer to my problems. I was sure of that.

Sankar listened to my concerns, no doubt feeling a bit of guilt. To his credit, he had no qualms about the idea of me working in Turkey, no concern that my taking a job might make his life less convenient. Skilled at calling up resources—and out the door for another trip—he turned to his secretary, Didem, asking if she could help.

Didem was turning out to be a fabulous secretary, if indeed that title was big enough to encompass all that she did. Creative and full of initiative, she seemed to embrace our current neediness. She had, in addition to her normal duties: downloaded manuals so I could figure out how to use my apartment’s appliances, obtained an extra pass into the U.S. embassy grounds for our nephew, Jon, for its July 4^th celebration; facilitated our health club membership; helped me enroll in Turkish classes; found an English-speaking dentist for us; appointed an honest, energetic cleaning lady to help us keep up with rigorous local standards; and even helped Sankar cast a last-minute vote in the U.S. midterm elections.

Didem’s motivation? Sankar had championed hiring her, and she wanted to prove herself. And, since he was often away and unaccustomed to having a personal assistant all to himself, the amount of other work he gave her was light.

Now Didem called and asked me what kind of job I wanted. I had a small editing business back home and had noticed that English signs, menus, and labels at Turkish museums were quite often misspelled or grammatically incorrect. I’d been shocked when visiting Ephesus, Turkey’s most popular tourist attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to discover that the main sign at the entrance, professionally produced and surrounded by high-quality photographs, read:

I had heard visitors snickering at these kinds of mistakes, and I knew this would appall the Turks, who perennially felt looked down upon by other Europeans. I was on Turkey’s side. I wanted to help make its signage perfect.

I told Didem I would love to be hired as an editor with the tourism bureau, but that I had recently taught English and would consider that kind of job as well.

Didem started by taking me to a graphic design firm for help producing business cards advertising my editing skills. The new card was turquoise and white with an icon depicting waves on water, and read, Ingilizcenizi Mükemmel Yapabilirim! (I can make your English perfect!)

Didem encountered an advertisement for English tutors—I am not sure where—and called the number listed. She reached a young American graduate of Northwestern University who was living in Istanbul because he had married a Turk. The guy, Ian, gave private English lessons and was looking for some associates to work for him.

“I have a good feeling about him,” Didem told me. I called Ian and the two of us met for coffee at Gloria Jean’s coffee shop in Ortaköy (orta = middle; köy = place), halfway up the Bosphorus.

Ian told me his clients were mostly businessmen whose jobs required better English, and he invited me to join his group. A week later, he held a meeting with me and two other new associates to explain his teaching philosophy. I thought the meeting went well and I awaited assignment—but never heard from him again.

At this point, Didem explained the difficulty of matching me up with the folks who wrote the signage for the country’s tourist sites. “These are government ministries,” she told me, grimacing. “They won’t be interested in outside help.”

Secretaries can be many things, but most are not creative freethinkers that take wide latitude in doing their jobs. Didem was an exception. She now began writing to Turkish universities on my behalf. I had given her some ideas, but I didn’t really know what she was putting in the letters. How was she describing me? Was she inflating my credentials? It felt like a dream to have someone assisting me with such a tedious, potentially discouraging task, and I didn’t ask for details.

Didem forwarded to me an online application from Sabanci University, one of Istanbul’s most prestigious private schools. I clicked it open only to discover that the very first question on the cover page, even before name and address, was “How old are you?” “Ancient,” I thought, and set it aside.

She followed up her letters with phone calls, and one day she informed me that a woman named Nazan Gökay at Yeditepe (Yedi = seven; tepe = hill) University had agreed to meet with me and chat about opportunities. I contacted Nazan and we set up a meeting at another waterside café in Ortaköy.

Nazan was a partially-retired English teacher with dyed-scarlet hair, who looked to be in her late sixties. After pleasantries, she asked me if I’d be interested in working as a prep teacher, and I asked her what that meant. Her answer opened up a world of possibilities.

She told me that nearly all universities in Turkey teach their classes in English. But, because of less-than-optimal high school English teaching, most entering college students don’t have the necessary language skills to begin their coursework. They have to pause—some for up to two years—in order to become proficient enough at English that they can do college work.

This situation provides a huge opportunity. Programs called hazırlık, prep, are attached to every university, and employ a veritable army of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. Would I be interested in working in a prep program? I certainly would. I didn’t have EFL teaching credentials, but surely, I thought, I could provide assistance with student writing.

How fortunate are those who hear Opportunity’s knock. There, sitting alongside the Bosphorus with a stranger, my life’s direction changed. For the first time, I started thinking about teaching English to those who didn’t speak it.

Didem now began targeting her letters to prep programs in Istanbul, using a list I gleaned from Nazan and the Internet. She also contacted regular college English departments. We avoided public universities even though they were considered more prestigious, because schools under government control had strict and often arbitrary rules. For example, you could only teach something that had been your college major. In my case, that was nutrition.

Many of Turkey’s private universities were new, established to help educate a baby boom that had just reached young adulthood. Although they were a great deal less prestigious, they were less stringent in their faculty requirements. Within a couple of weeks I had interviews set up at four of them: Bilgi, Kadir Has, Koç, and Özyeğin.

I went first to Bilgi, which means “information” in Turkish. The university, founded in 1994, was located in a modern, yet shabby part of Beyoğlu north of Istiklal Avenue. Ümit told me the neighborhood was not particularly safe, but that it was improving, and indeed a new-looking police station sat right across the street from campus. Inside, I met with a friendly American woman who was in charge of Bilgi’s writing center. She told me they were not hiring at the moment, but asked me to get in touch again the following spring.

Kadir Has University, founded in 1997 and named after a banking and automotive industrialist, had two campuses, one in the Old City and the other near the airport. How cool would it be to work in Old Istanbul, I thought, imagining an office in an Ottoman era structure facing the Sublime Port, its roof like a wide-brimmed hat, the underneath decorated in gold leaf. Alas, my appointment, late on a Tuesday afternoon, was at the other, airport campus. Ümit and I drove for almost an hour through heavy traffic to reach the nondescript-looking neighborhood and locate the exact address.

I walked into a large, carpeted office to meet my interviewer, who was talking on the phone. Perhaps she was finishing an unpleasant conversation because she looked at me crossly after she hung up, and failed to begin with typical small talk. She asked sharply whether I wanted to teach freshman composition or ESL. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her I was interested in both, but “ESL,” came out. It was the wrong answer.

“Why did you come here?” she snapped. “This is the English department.” Intimidated, I couldn’t think of any way to backtrack, and after only a few minutes I thanked her and excused myself.

How could I face Ümit so soon after all the time it had taken to get here? I ducked into a nearby bathroom and hid out for awhile before finally trudging outside to the car and making a lame excuse. Ümit’s silence on the way back seemed to say, you’ll never get a job here in Turkey. Although I wouldn’t have been able to find the place without him, it was one of those times when I sorely wished I could drive myself home, licking my wounds in private.

Prestigious Koç University, founded in 1993 and named after Vehbi Koç, one of the wealthiest men in Turkey, was located on a huge expanse of land overlooking the Black Sea, about twenty miles north of Istanbul. With its brand new red brick buildings and gleaming cherry wood interiors, the place reminded me of a fine new restaurant that was trying to look old and established. My meeting was with a stocky, round-faced man named Patrick Campbell, originally from Alabama. Campbell was polite and welcoming, but only a few minutes into our meeting he launched into a tirade about the Koç students’ immaturity and unwillingness to do any work. This mini-rant, though apparently honest, was striking.

I met another American, a woman who was in charge of Koç’s English department. She had an opening for a faculty member, and I hurried to apply, assembling transcripts and recommendation letters, but alas, my one semester of teaching was too meager to make me a serious candidate.

Finally I went to Özyeğin (ouz YAY en) University, founded in 2007 and named after Hüsnü Özyeğin, a banking billionaire and Harvard Business School alumnus. There seemed to be a pattern here in Turkey: billionaires starting universities and naming them after themselves. I winced as I read Özyeğin’s home page: “Özyeğin University is the 4^th Best University in Turkey Among Universities started after 2005.”

The school’s lone building was modern and elongated, with floor to ceiling windows. Inside, a young man named Rifat escorted me in and a secretary appeared and offered me a tulip glass of tea.

First I met separately with two women, the head of the department and the director of instruction. As they explained the university’s prep program, on of them apologized that she had a cold, and took a tissue from a box on her desk. Oddly, she then proceeded to hold the tissue for several minutes, still folded, under her nose. Then she put it down, but a moment later she unfolded and stretched it over the lower half of her face. It was interesting to watch her manipulate the tissue, all the while asking and answering questions, but never actually blowing her nose.

The two women asked me how many hours a week I had taught back in the States at Hamline (they pronounced it Hahm LEE nay) University. “Three,” I replied.

“Well, this job is twenty,” they told me.

That information didn’t really sink in—twenty hours sounded like a part-time job. And even if it had, I wouldn’t have questioned it. Getting a job was going to provide meaning to my life here; it was going to prove I wasn’t washed up, as it seemed so many of my generation were, back in the States. I did realize, however, that the job would involve teaching reading, listening, and speaking, not just writing.

One question to me was, “What if you have given a homework assignment and then prepared a follow-up class activity and the students come to class without having done the assignment?” This stumped me, and I recalled Pat Campbell’s complaints about the laziness and immaturity of Turkish students. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to be looking for a specific answer as much as asking what I might do to motivate my students.

The next step, I was told, would be for me to come back and give a PowerPoint presentation on my teaching philosophy. I gulped, but then remembered I had prepared a philosophy statement in a pedagogy class I’d taken several years ago.

The following week I returned to Özyeğin and gave my presentation, discovering at that time that one of its ESL teachers was resigning at the end of the semester and another would be starting maternity leave in the new year. Several follow-up questions that began with “If we were to hire you. . .” seem to confirm that my chances of employment were good.

The fact that this job would be more about my English ability than any hoped-for progress with Turkish didn’t bother me. I’d be working for a Turkish organization, after all, with Turkish colleagues and supervision.

The several weeks I’d spent interviewing had filled my time, providing an exhilarating challenge on the days I wasn’t in Turkish class. But then they ended, and I heard nothing. Ten days went by, then two weeks. I became snappish at home, and I remember a tense weekend in which Sankar and I said little to each other.

Now another possible roadblock arose. I began hearing from friends—both Felicia and Annika—that foreign spouses were not allowed to work in Turkey. That if one member of an expatriate couple held a job requiring a work permit, a permit would not be issued to the other. I had been clear in my interviews, however, that I was in Turkey because of my husband’s job, so this new information left me confused.

On a mid-December morning about two weeks after my Ozyegin interview, our Turkish class was on a field trip to Kadiköy, a charming university town on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Ferda had met the seven of us at the ferry terminal, and conversing in Turkish, we had followed her through the fashionable seaside neighborhood of Moda and the streets of downtown Kadiköy, with their quaint candy shops, fish and vegetable markets, and gourmet food shops.

As we filed along the busy streets, my Turkish cell phone rang. I was not yet used to this new device, purchased to avoid having local callers pay international rates to talk with me, and I fumbled to answer it. With a truck full of Turkish pumpkins rumbling by, I didn’t quite catch the caller’s name, but I did understand that I was being offered a job. At the end of the brief conversation, I had to ask, “Is this Özyeğin?”

“Yes,” was the reply.

I was so surprised and pleased that I felt almost breathless, and decided not to say anything to my classmates that day. My life was going to change dramatically. No more lolling around the house and inventing errands to go on with Ümit. No more dutifully attending Turkish lessons and wondering when I’d ever use the ettirgen verb tense. No more Turkish classes at all. When 2011 started, I’d be gainfully employed!

I called Didem and thanked her profusely. She had spearheaded this search, creating something where there had been nothing. I wouldn’t have gotten the job—or come close to getting any job—without her. I was so impressed that I gushed to Ümit, “In the States, Didem wouldn’t be just a secretary. She’d be running her own business. She’d be rich.” But, although he quite liked Didem, he sniffed and shook his head in disagreement.

On our next class day, when I told her my news, Annika’s face fell.

“I’ll still see you,” I tried to reassure her. We had gotten together for dinner several times with our husbands.

“There will be less contact,” she said stiffly. I felt bad, but vowed to keep in touch. Annika was my first friend in Turkey, member of a tiny, exclusive club.

Felicia simply shook her head and remarked, “You’re going to have a terrible social life.”

In the space of just a few months I’d gone from student to teacher. And as I prepared to go home for Christmas, I received two holiday invitations, one for dinner at the home of 3M Turkey’s Managing Director, and the other from Joy, a fellow newcomer, for a holiday brunch. My social life, moribund for months, had begun to come alive.

And Sankar and I had something to look forward to when we returned. My Polish classmate, Ana, had invited the whole Turkish class to her wedding. It would take place on New Year’s Eve at the Four Seasons Hotel. The same hotel we had stayed in during our look-see visit. We’d now be arriving as invited guests.

It looked as though my life was shifting into higher gear.

The post How To Find A Teaching Job in Turkey appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.