I Need All the Friends I Can Get

Well it has been a busy week since I last posted.  Much has happened!  I'll limit this post to discussing updates on my career as an English teacher and more adventures in my ever-continuing struggles with Turkish bureaucracy. 

EB and Yasin Bey at the Mevlana Museum

So, my first real day of work was today, though I managed to not get into the classroom yet.

I'm not teaching on Mondays, and hopefully my schedule will stay the way it is now!  With some help from our friend Zuhal Hanim, all three of the Konya ETAs managed to clear our Mondays, which will allow us to occasionally do a little traveling around Turkey.  The flipside is that I'm teaching 7 hours on Friday, and 20 hrs total.  I have my first classes tomorrow, and I have a little bit of a better idea of what I'll be teaching and what my days will look like, which is nice, though I think it will be a while before I'm comfortable and settled into a rhythm here.  My hours are split between 3 programs and two departments:  I have 8 hours in the Montana Program, which is a dual degree program with Montana State University.  The students will be with me (and my three Turkish colleagues in the Montana Program) until next term, when they'll travel to MSU to continue their schooling there.  I'm not sure of the current proficiency level of these students, but I think they'll come in at a pretty basic level, and will leave as close to fluent as possible.  It is a pretty big task-- I'm in charge of Listening and Speaking.  Oh, and there are only 3 students in the program this year-- so I guess we'll get to know each other really well this semester?  #Replacementfriends! 

Bikeshare in Konya!  (you know who you are...)

Then I have 8 hours in the Faculty of Foreign Languages, teaching the Hazarlik, or prep year classes.  These classes are for kids who fail an English entry exam when they arrive at University.  It is a standard operating procedure for Turkish Universities, and since the past 2+ years the kids are killing themselves to get into university, many see the hazarlik year as a vacation.  Especially since most of them don't actually take classes in English or plan to use English in the future in any serious way, and because hazarlik is pass/fail for the year.  So these kids are infamous for being poor students and not caring at all about class and being really hard to teach.  So yeah.  8 hours with these guys.  I teach two different groups of hazarlik students, four hours each.  For the hazarlik, I have two Turkish colleagues in each section (so a total of 4 for hazarlik colleagues)--  I am in charge of speaking and "video class" which is something that doesn't sound real... I think I show videos and have the students do activities based on the videos, like a glorified listening class.  It will probably be easy but the students might hate it or take it even less seriously than the other portions of hazarlik. 

The Selcuk crest and city crest of Konya-- two headed eagle

My last four hours are in the Faculty of Literature, where I am teaching an advanced writing class, four hours on Fridays (two in the morning, and two in the evening).  This class could be my worst one, because I think it will be the hardest to teach, or it could be the best, because the students will elect to take the class and have (hopefully) a good level of English already.  I think I am excited for it because it is the most legitimate class I'm teaching, and it is the only class where I'm fully in charge... no Turkish colleagues working with the same group of students, no very structured or set curriculum.  I have also agreed to edit my Montana colleague's translation of his buddy's poli-sci monograph from Turkish to English... so I will be proofing that over the next few weeks as a favor to him.   It is about China, Russia, and USA in Central Asia-- the Great Game continued... right up my alley!  My colleague's name is Mehmet and he is very nice-- in his 40s or 50s, never been to the states and only to England for 2 weeks, but his English is impeccable and his pronunciation (the toughest thing for Turks) is pretty nifty.

Inlaid wooden door at the Ince Minare Museum

So.  Today was crazy.  It was officially the first day of classes, but no one really showed up for anything and won't be really coming to class until at least next week.  It's just the way things work here-- very unorganized as students try to work out their schedules and departments try to sort out their business.  If you followed my adventures as a student at Bogazici, you are probably familiar with my rant against Turkish University bureaucracy.  I actually didn't get my teaching materials until this afternoon, and didn't get my schedule sorted until the very end of the day-- some people still are working out their teaching schedules.  So, no one was really ready for school to start.  EB and Adnan both had classes today, but no one came to any of them, and now they too have managed to weasel out of Monday classes, (as mentioned above). 

Originally, Gulbun Hanim (our boss) had me scheduled to teach 24 hours (my max is 21) so I had to finagle my way into a reasonable amount of hours.  So we deal with fun situations like that, and they're always trying to unload crappy classes on us. For example, last Thursday, Gulbun Hanim told me she had 4 hours for me in Mechanical Engineering to teach intermediate English, because they didn't have enough hours for me in our department.  If I turned it down, they don't know what they'll do to fill my hours!  It turned out these hours were from 6-10pm on Friday nights, and that the class sizes would be around 100 students!  And I am already teaching 7 hours on Friday!  AND, as was made clear today, they had PLENTY of hours for me... so it is hard to tell if they're trying to screw us, or if they just wanna offer us lots of options, or the most likely scenario: things here just don't make sense and that's  the rule of the thumb here.  No one thinks rationally or reasonably and they always take the path of most resistance.

Which leads me to our housing situation.  We're still in the Yabanci Sarayi (foreigners palace) in our suites, which still suck.  And I think there's a plumbing problem because our rooms (on the boys side) usually smell like sewage and our showers don't drain properly.  Anyway, it is pretty rough and we still don't have a kitchen or a meeting place, though EB can sometimes just come over and no one will stay anything.  We met with the vice-rector, who looked like David Bowie (very strange in conservative Konya) and he told us the guesthouse we wanted to live in was getting torn down, but that he'd try to get us a kitchen and meeting space in the Erasmus dorms where we are now.  Then Gulbun had the great idea of trying to get us a faculty flat and using the furniture from the soon-to-be demolished guesthouse to furnish it!  It was such a good idea, because the faculty apartments are on campus but sorta tucked away so we wouldn't be living with students, we'd have our own space, and a kitchen, and other Fulbrighters could stay with us when they visited.  SO rational and SO reasonable!  But apparently, the apartments are only for Turkish faculty.  It is pretty stupid, because it is the most logical solution, and it makes us the happiest, and makes the managers of the Yabanci Sarayi happy too because they won't have to worry about having all these exceptions in their dorm, and it will make the rector and Gulbun happy, because we'll finally stop bothering them about our inadequate living situation.  But no, there is a rule, and we are not allowed to rent faculty apartments.  So we're having dinner with the vice rector tomorrow and we'll try to convince him to let us move into a faculty apartment.  But I'm not optimistic.  I think we'll be here for the year.  Lame.

Ok.  That was a lot of text.  And I don't have many good pictures to help the text go down smoothly.  I've scattered some from our past week in Konya, and I will write about some of the fun things I've done while I've been here within the next few days, as long as teaching doesn't get the better of me!  Because life isn't all bad and you probably are more interested in reading about the exciting and fun parts of life in Konya.