Something To Write About

Monday morning. I walk into the classroom and pull out my blank attendance sheet. Up jump three students who are already there, three minutes early. They carefully place their journals on my desk, one by one, and give me shy smiles.

"Thank you!" I say, smiling back.

The door whips open and four more students come in. Each one of them pulls out a notebook and adds it to the pile on my desk. I blink: three minutes until class begins and I've already got seven journals on my desk. Whoa.

The door opens again and two more students come in. They greet me and add their notebooks to the pile. Nine.

I pull out my roll sheet and the door opens again. More students, with more completed journals. I have to work hard to keep my mouth shut, to keep the foolish smile off my face. Just as the class begins, I have a pile of sixteen journals on my desk. Sixteen! Before the class begins!

This is a huge first for me at this university. So much so that I give up trying to keep the foolish smile off my face and try not to laugh out loud instead. "Thank you," I whisper to the seventeenth student, a shy girl from Kazakhstan, who comes in late and actually apologizes as she places her notebook on the by now towering stack.

I've been teaching this exemplary class now for the past four weeks. Every week, I've had almost seventeen completed journals turned in on Monday. These kids are just unbelievable. They are motivated. They are eager. They are -- I swear it's true -- thirsty for knowledge.

They are fun, too, and international. In one class, I have students from Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, Ukraine, Dubai, Japan, and, as always, Turkey. In every single class I've taught before, trying to get the students to do pair or group work in English was like pulling hen's teeth. In this class, getting them to stop is the trick.

This Monday, the class goes swimmingly -- better than any class I've ever taught here. Students happily work together to sort out grammar problems. They compare their answers when I ask them to do it, correct each other in a courteous, cooperative way, and come to see me after class when they don't understand. There is only one niggling problem that lurks in the back of my mind as I move around the class answering questions and monitoring pair work: what in the world am I going to write about now? How am I going to be able to add to my collection of terrible teacher stories? Who wants to read about a class full of paragons who do their homework, come to class on time, and take every opportunity to increase their fund of knowledge?

There is, it turns out, one boy who comes in late and never brings his book, but his presence only reminds me of what I've been through here. When Cem swans through the door without pen, notebook or textbook, I smile indulgently to see the stunned, incredulous looks on his classmates' faces. They don't know it, but I had a whole class full of Cems before. I can handle a stray Cem just fine.

The class finishes. I tell everyone the homework assignment and there are no groans, sighs, or eye rollings. One girl helps me carry my seventeen notebooks up to the teachers' room. It'll take me hours to sort through this lot, but I'm not complaining.

My next class is God-awful. Four students come in late and haggle with me to mark them present. Only two boys have done their homework. Two girls huddle together over their mobile phones and I have to interrupt the class to confiscate them. Another girl comes in fifteen minutes late without her book, and strikes up a noisy conversation in Turkish with the two girls whose mobile phones I've confiscated. I catch another girl without her book copying another student's homework. Two girls are so far ahead of the rest of the class that they sit there, bored out of their minds, inspecting their fingernails. And I could go on, but you get the picture: it's not quite hell, but it's definitely purgatory.

But I don't mind: this purgatory will be followed by the heaven of that perfect class. And at least I'll have something to write about.