It turns out teaching is actually hard...

Ahh… a chance to breathe. There have only been a few periods of my life when I was going literally non-stop, and this is one of those times. Luckily, ViaLingua was kind enough to not give much over the weekends, so I am finally getting a chance to relax and do some things for myself. Like correspond with all you wonderful people.

Let me outline a typical day from the last week. I get up at around 7 and frantically finish my lesson plan that I didn’t finish last night because the apartment was too hot to be awake in. I get to school at around 9 and have all my materials ready to be printed/photocopied/etc.. Crap, the printer/photocopier is broken/the power is out for a few hours. Damn. I run around frantically writing, cutting, pasting, drawing, getting ready. Then, I teach people who don’t know English English while speaking in English. I’m not exactly sure who’s brilliant idea that was, but astonishingly enough it seems to work. Sometimes they stare at me blankly, sometimes they participate and we have fun, like the lesson where we all gave one sentence of a story in simple past (ie, we walked to the disco). After that, the teachers would tell us what to do better and sent us out for lunch. (Just an aside, you could not believe how cheap good food is here. There is a place that sells mini-pizzas and stuffed pitas that are quite tasty and filling. Kate’s and my bill came out 3.50 YTL, which is a little over $2.00). We go back to school for 3 hours of teaching methodology and grammar points, then we lesson plan for another hour and a half. Then we can leave, but I usually stick around to print stuff, draw stuff, check e-mail, etc. Then Kate and I head home to cook dinner. After we eat, we try to write reports (we have to write 2 reports a day, one on the lesson we taught and another on the one we observed), but its usually too hot (its much cooler in the mornings, it doesn’t cool off in the apartment until around 4 or so) and I fall asleep. I feel I am learning a lot, but I don’t have much time to do things like get a phone or get travelers checks cashed.

We did have a little time to go around and drop of resumes and talk to potential employers, from which there are some choice tidbits of stories. The second school we went to was painted olive green. We waited a while and were greeted by a 20-something British man with a scraggly beard and a “I’m with stupid ” T-shirt, (We learned later that he was the Director of Studies). It turns out the school was only founded 8 months ago and was created by a bunch of teachers that were fed up with the crap from other schools and started their own school. We really liked the renegade school, it had a great feel.

The other school we went to, English Time, is like the McDonalds of Istanbul language schools. There are around 8 or 9 in the city. The woman we talked to, however, was quite sweet and gave us a lot of advice about working in the city, such as how to find an apartment, how to get a bank account, etc.. There was also another person who was observing the interview who is the new head teacher of another English Time school, she was about our age and from New Zealand, (if you have never heard a New Zealand accent, I recommend you ring one up immediately and chat for a while. Some words sound just like a Midwestern accent, but then she’ll drop into a weird British/Irish accent, and you’ll think to yourself “who is this person). She was also really sweet and funny. After the interview, she asked us, out of the blue, “Do you two ever play role-playing games?” We gave a hesitatant yes, I thought she meant like role-playing activities in English class, but we asked her to clarify. She said “Well, I have a friend that wants to start a Wheel of Time game.” So she really meant good old pen and paper dice-chucking role-playing games. We asked her why she asked and she responded, “You kinda look the same type as my friend who plays.” So we obviously can’t fool anyone into thinking we are actually cool and totally normal, maybe its something in our pheromones. Damn smells always giving us away. Anyway, she said she’ll e-mail us later.

Other news, we actually have a phone number! The bad part is it won’t work on the cell phone I bought from home, so we need to buy a Turkish cell phone. When we have that up and running, we’ll e-mail the pertinent parties.

That’s all for now, I will leave you with our cute kittens outside our house.