Follow Me As I Discover Land, Language and Self...
In June 1934, in the midst of strenuous efforts to create a new history and a new language, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] made surnames compulsory for all Turkish citizens. The usefulness of the measure was hard to dispute. A few families had acquired surnames; some individuals had nickames. But the majority of Muslim Turks were known only by their forenames. To help identify them, documents specified their parents’ names. In military…
Driving to work in the morning I got up early on Monday, May 2, and checked my email and Yahoo News even before my 6:30 am alarm went off. In between breakfast and putting a bit of makeup on, something made me check my email again, and there was an urgent message from Angela telling me to turn on the television. I called upstairs to Sankar. Instead of riding the…
I am grading essays this week, a tedious job. I mark the same errors over and over. Subject-verb agreement. Singular-plural error. Because my students all speak the same first language, their English mistakes are predictable. And, oddly, they are often brought to me by technology. Most of my students have electronic dictionaries, which they fervently believe will help them become better writers. They look up words to impress me, even…
I passed the ¾ year mark here a couple weeks ago, and am thinking that a big part of managing here (and in any new place) is simply knowing what to do and what not to do. ACNOWLEDGE THE SNEEZES. . . It is quite necessary here in Turkey to offer a blessing when someone sneezes. The Turkish saying is “çok yaşa,” choke yasha, which means lots of life. Last…
As a new teacher, I have joined the hunt for creative ways to inspire students. Moving toward the end of an eight-week term, the textbooks and practice exercises I’m using have become routine, the class periods I teach predictable. So, on a short break from reviewing the English conditional tense last week, I was delighted when fellow teacher Andrew, from Manchester UK, mentioned a song relevant to the topic. Its…
For the past few weeks my thoughts have been on events in the Middle East. Many of you know we have Libyan friends, made through a University of Minnesota host family program back in the early eighties. We are quite concerned about them: the family and four children who live in Tripoli, and the eldest son, Sami, studying engineering in the U.S. Such is the normal level of fear in…
The weekend before Valentine’s Day, the Turkish Postal Service opened a “Love Post Office” in our neighborhood mall and offered free delivery of romantic messages. Two weeks ago I started classroom teaching. Twenty Turkish students, ages 19 to 21, eight of them women. The names were my first challenge. I have Yildiz and Yalcın; Özge, Özham, Onat, Uğur and Onur; Erdi and Erşen; Gamze and Gizem and Gökalp and Gökay. None of those names tells me whether…
The founder of modern Turkey and its president from 1923 to 1938 was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Many people reading this blog have heard of Ataturk and perhaps many, like me, have wondered why his name echoes that of his country. It turns out that the name means ‘father of all Turks,’ and he took it after he became the Turkish leader. Born in Salonika, a part of the Ottoman Empire that is now Greece, he was given just…
It’s gone. I didn’t notice its absence until last week. And I didn’t take enough time to savor it. Here I was, pleased to be back in Istanbul after a brief trip to the States. When I walked outside one morning and noticed that my shoulder and neck muscles no longer tensed up, I realized that I was finally at ease here. That at-home feeling, fought hard for during these past…
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full-time job, and when the alarm wakes me at 6:30 on Monday morning, I wonder what I am getting myself into. Will this job become tedious? Will I regret giving up my leisure time? Will I be an effective English language teacher or will the challenge be too difficult? I arrive at Ozyegin Universitesi at 8:30 am. Only three years old, it occupies…
