Motivation

During the last week of classes, I gave my class a treat. An American girl we know, the daughter of two of my oldest, dearest friends, would be coming to stay with us for a few days after a short trip around Turkey. I thought it might be fun for her to meet my students and give them a chance to use their English to talk to a genuine native speaker roughly their own age. The one thing my EFL students lack is motivation. Perhaps meeting a young person like Leah would make them see that English is, above all, a communicative tool, and not a hateful punishment devised to keep them from fun activities like football and drinking.

The day before Leah was due to arrive, I told my class a little about her and asked them to think of some good questions to ask her.

"How old are you!" bellowed Ahmet immediately.

"As I just said, she's a university student--" I began.

"Where you from!" Ahmet interrupted. Ahmet likes to be first. He feels the need to pre-empt others from answering the more obvious questions.

"Tee-cha say American girl from California," Fatma interjected, making a face at Ahmet.

"Tee-cha, what is she looks like?" asked Ahmet, getting right down to the nitty gritty and asking the one question clearly on every boy's mind.

"What does she look like?" I murmur rhetorically, hoping to reinforce the proper grammatical structure, but also irritated. "Why does it matter what she looks like?"

Ahmet leaned forward, his eyes glittering. "You know," he said, his voice husky with lust. "Nice girl?"

"Very nice," I said severely. "Her parents are my good friends."

"Pretty girl too?" demanded Mustafa, trading side-long looks with Ahmet.

Ignoring them, I turned back to the board. "Let's have some more questions. Come on: can't anyone think of anything besides how she looks?"

"What she studies?" asked Hakan, a shy boy in the third row.

"Yes," I said, "that's a great question." On the board I wrote What is your major?

"Teecha," roared Tufan from the back of the class. "How many boyfriend she has!"

I had hoped that we would come up with twenty good questions in half an hour, but in the end, it took us an entire class period. How many boyfriends do you have? did not make it onto the list.

When I saw Leah at the arrivals gate, I realized what a huge hit she was going to be. Not only had the little girl I knew grown into a bright and personable young woman, but she was also drop-dead gorgeous. When I took her into school the next day, I almost felt like throwing a veil over her first.

The minute Leah stepped inside the classroom, I gave up trying to coach my students on what to say. They only had eyes for Leah. And you could almost smell the testosterone in the air.

"Do you like Turkish people?" asked Ibrahim, one of the few boys in the room whose mouth wasn't hanging open.

Leah answered that she liked them very much. Every face in the room seemed to shine at this news.

"Where you are living now?" asked Kemal, amazing me. Kemal is shy and he tends to let the others speak for him.

"Paris. I'm studying there."

An oooh went up around the classroom and even the girls perked up at this. Özgül, who is lazy and spends most of her class time biting off her split ends, suddenly sat up straight and began to pay attention.

"There is a saying, Anything a man can do, a woman can do better. I wonder, what do you think of this saying?" asked Anthony, the show off. Anthony is my lone West African student. With his superior fluency and vastly greater vocabulary, he regularly wipes the floor with the others.

Envious eyes turned towards Anthony as Leah answered him. "Yes, I believe that." She smiled. "I'm a feminist."

Quickly, I wrote feminist on the board, followed by A person who believes that women and men should have equal rights, but no one paid it -- or me -- the least bit of mind.

"What is your ideal mate?" asked Emine, reading carefully from a piece of paper in her hand, and this time my mouth dropped open. Emine doesn't speak, period. She sits there looking like a sphinx and has a habit of shying away when I come close.

Leah considered this carefully. "Well, he'd have to be honest. I really value honesty."

Two dozen male faces suddenly seemed to radiate honesty.

"And he'd need to be kind, too, because I definitely value that in a man."

The two dozen honest expressions suddenly melted into tenderest compassion.

"And I'd want a man who was smart. Intelligent."

I had to hide my smile as tenderly kind suddenly morphed to shrewd and sharp -- something I don't see a lot of from my students.

Suffice it to say, Leah's visit was a huge hit. Students asked questions and tried to comprehend Leah's answers. Her pictures of Turkey fascinated and delighted them -- the things she had found compelling amazed and pleased them no end; the things that had bothered or irritated her bothered and irritated them too.

The lesson I attempted after she left fell flat on its face, but it didn't even matter. Motivation had been achieved.

A few days after Leah flew back to Paris, I came back to class and announced that Leah was happy to share her Facebook user name with everyone in the class. For the first and last time, I had the undivided attention of every single student.

My couldn't-be-bothered-to-learn students now know English words like feminism, empowerment, cultural anthropology, folklore, and honesty. And I couldn't get over how many of them wanted me to help them with compositions for a change. For the next week, I looked at a good two dozen 'compositions' that went roughly like this: Hello Leah. I am Ahmet, a Turkish boy. You came to my class. I am study engineering. I like football too much. Please write to me. But you've got to start somewhere.

And now I know how to motivate my students. Or, at the very least, my male students. Wish I knew Orlando Bloom...