"You Are Boring"

I'm teaching forty year old professors. It should be easy, right? Civilized, enlightening, reflective? Perhaps even esoteric (I think that's where fresh water and salt water meet; I read it in a book on screenwriting). The answer to these adjectives and most other positives ones you can find in a thesaurus is no. If you compare them to animals, they will most be like man cubs - raised by monkeys, but still four years old.

(Just in case any of these professors has found my blog and Google translated it, that was a little harsh, I admit. You are most like the campers I had at Camp War Eagle. Like twelve year old boys. How about that?)

After a week and a half of teaching, I've spotted the types. There's a fifty-something professor of theology who is the kid who knows all the answers. And all the answer return to the spiritual character of a man. Even the answers about the weather in the Black Sea region. "WE - BELIEVE - IT IS - THE SOUL OF A MAN -"

"Yes, Hiyat, that is very true. What other kind of weather does the Black Sea have? Anyone?"

There are two best friends, women who speak very little Turkish, who giggle at every mispronounciation  I make. Today when we were talking about marriage, I repeated what a student said - that the bride and the groom are ceremonially bathed before the wedding - and these two women began laughing like schoolgirls, laughing so hard they couldn't speak enough words to explain that what I had said was funny to fourteen year olds.

Then there's the kid who won't answer anything. "Faruk," I say, "what is your favorite movie?" And Faruk just shakes his head, 'no'. He's a big man, and he sits in the back with his arms crossed. He has nice ties, though.

Today I had to create two rules: 1) No Turkish, and 2) Only one person speaks at a time. In the beginning I thought we could get by on mutual respect. We are all adults (well, everyone except me). But something happened last night that made me reevaluate.

After class yesterday, I was in my office when there was a knock. A woman from my class came in, and with the help of a friend she told me that it was too loud in class for her to understand. I knew this was my fault and told her I would fix it. Then, she said, "And...you are boring." What? "You...are boring?" We stood confused for a few seconds before she left, and then it was confirmed - my class was boring.

Later on that night I attended an intramural soccer game of my peers (English Dept vs. Education Dept; we play every week, and we roll them. We have this old man who I swear never moves more than twenty feet in either direction, but can pass a soccer ball like a lead bb), I caught a ride into town with a player who had to pick up his wife. It turned out his wife was the very same woman who thought I was boring. With the help of the others in the, I eventually understood that she meant to ask me if I was bored in class. Whoa. Big relief. But then the car went on to talk about my class for the next fifteen minutes in Turkish, and no one would translate.