You Can Call Me Mega-Fast Wind

When I first arrived in Van (positioned on Lake Van, right, as seen from space - note the resemblance to a phoenix), my home for the next nine months, I was told the university wasn't ready for me. The classes I was supposed to teach didn't yet exist, and it wasn't possible for them to mentally prepare enough for my style of dress. That's okay, I said. I don't have to teach right away. In fact, I don't have to teach at all. I have no idea how, anyway.

(I got the Fulbright to Turkey because I looked up all the countries which didn't require previous knowledge of the language - there were 13, out of the 200 countries the Fulbright is offered for - and applied to the country with the most spots. I had to write an essay about why I have always wanted to go to Turkey. Thank you, Wikipedia. I don't care what professors say about open code sources.)

Monday was the first day I had classes to teach. I've been assigned a conversation class, meeting five days a week for two hours at a time. When I first heard about it, I panicked; Hassan, the department head, told me not to sweat it. He said that when he taught the class, he would go in and write a topic on the board and just ask questions, so that the students would answer in English. Basically, he told me he just made it up on the fly and didn't give a Turkish rat's behind about preparation.

So on Monday I went to my office hours and wrote science fiction, played Age of Empires III, and then a half hour before class started I had a panic attack. It was small and unembarrassing, but it spoke to my tiny, surly fear - I have no idea what I'm doing.

I walked in the classroom; in it there were maybe 20 or 25 professors, 40 years old and up, waiting to learn English from me. Hassan came in with me, and spoke to the class at length. What he had to say could've been said in three minutes, but, God bless him, he took thirty. During his speech he would occasionally turn to me and tell me how to teach the class. These were things that were sort of intuitive -  like writing vocabulary on the board or correcting pronunciation. I felt a little helpless because this was happening in front of my students, who were saying to each other, "This is him? He looks like a Yeti someone has shaved and then put on a liquid diet. Pass the olives, Mehmet."

Finally, before he left, Hassan told the class I wouldn't be there on Thursday, because on Thursdays I would be at the city campus, teaching the medical faculty for eight hours. This was perfectly acceptable to the students, but because I had never heard of this before, I was slightly concerned. On his way out, Hassan said, "Do not worry - we'll talk tomorrow," as if to communicate that he knew I had no idea about the eight straight hours of English teaching he had added.

There were a few moments of silence. I took a few baby steps. I wrote my name on the board, and asked the students to tell me their names. And it went on from there. It wasn't completely smooth, but somehow we got on the topic of the meanings of names, and an hour and a half later they left. All this with absolutely no preparation. Thank you, Hassan.

Like this blog, while in class I told a few lies. I told them I had met Tom Cruise once, but was too shy to speak to him. I told them that there were seven generations of Cass's in my family. And when asked the meaning of my name (which happens all the time - everyone here knows what their names means), instead of admitting I didn't know, I said it can mean either "fast wind" or "mega-fast wind," depending on pronunciation.