Attitude

I love teaching this class.

Last week, I got my times mixed up and started packing up thirty minutes early. I stacked my books, snapped my CDs back into their plastic cases, and gathered up all my papers. "I'll see you after lunch," I told the class, popping my glasses and pencil case back into my bag. "We'll be finishing the work we were doing on comparisons."

Cheng, sitting in the back row frowns. "Teacher, no. Not time."

I stare back at him, then look up at the clock. "Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, you're right, Cheng! I made a mistake -- we still have another thirty minutes to go!"

Cheng beams at me.

And here is what is truly amazing: after Cheng says this, the rest of the class don't protest. Nobody elbows him in the ribs or even gives him a dirty look. In fact, they all nod happily. "Not time yet, teacher. Thirty more minute."

When I was teaching in Cyprus, barely three minutes into every class I had students checking the clocks on their cell phones, craning their necks to see the classroom clock, and yawning. Ten minutes into the class, they were ready for a break. If I'd ever gotten the time wrong back then and packed up half an hour early, anyone who pointed it out would have been risking her life. I always planned my lessons carefully and worked hard to make them meaningful and entertaining. But staring at a classroom full of yawning, miserable students, I used to feel like the worst teacher in the world. I'm not teaching any better now than I was then, so what's going on?

Here's what's going on: these students I'm teaching now have great attitudes. Even the ones whose attitudes aren't perfect, are way ahead of the game because they all want to learn. Sometimes I look out at their sea of earnest, hungry-for-knowledge faces and I could weep for gratitude. What a huge difference a good attitude makes.

"Okay," I say, "we've got thirty more minutes, so let's carry on with page 81."

Everybody looks back down at their books.

We're studying the difference between contractions and possessives. It's not a thrill a minute, but several people in this class are keen to learn grammar -- they have actually asked for more of it. The only one who actively doesn't like it is Cheng. But even when faced with the prospect of another thirty minutes of loathed grammar, he reminded me that I was jumping the gun, that we had another thirty minutes of class. He may be regretting that now, but he's doing a great job of hiding it, and good for him.

Like I said, I love teaching this class.

The Hexadecimal Representation Of Color

One evening, I stood outside with my husband admiring the rapidly darkening sky. A thin sliver of moon hung low over the mountains, surrounded by a whole array of stars, sparkling and flashing like so many diamonds. I craned my neck back and asked, in a purely speculative way, "I wonder why it is that some stars shine so brightly...?"

My husband cleared his throat. "Because their cores contain massive fusion reactors which release tremendous amounts of energy. The gravitational friction of stars crumbling inwards makes their cores heat up, and that causes nuclear fusion. So hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms, and -- in a nutshell -- that releases an enormous amount of energy which pushes outward against the gravitational contraction of the star..." He went on like that for some time, too, and the amazing thing was that I understood him. Briefly.

My husband does things this all the time. If you ask him what the five kinds of life are, he'll tell you: monera, protist, fungi, animalae, and plantae. If you need to know the capital of Sierra Leone or what the Five Pillars of Islam are, he'll tell you. If you're struggling to make sense of simultaneous equations, he's your man. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, if you're not on his side you don't stand a fighting chance. He's not patronizing and he's not really a know-it-all. He's a teacher.

Teaching isn't a glamorous occupation like fire-fighting or being an astronaut; you'd be hard put to find groups of fashionable people breathlessly hanging onto a teacher's stories at dinner parties. It's not a particularly well-paid occupation either, and unless you've got tenure it isn't really a secure one. You're around grubby, noisy, unreasonable, squabbling people all day long, so teaching is generally an infuriating, demanding, exhausting, and only sometimes, exhilarating job. But there is one great perk of being a teacher: you tend to Know Stuff. There are real benefits to being a teacher -- and being married to one as well.

Last year, on a trip to a local castle, I found the English explanations on the tourist information plaques a little confusing, so I asked my husband if he knew when the castle was built. A guide was standing nearby and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him open his mouth to speak, but my husband launched into a long, detailed explanation of how the castle wall was built during the Byzantine period to defend the town against Arab raids, then further construction was done on it during the Luisignan and Venetian periods -- and I saw the look of amazement in the guide's eyes. We looked like every other middle-aged tourist couple around and in fact we were like every other middle-aged tourist couple around, except for the fact that my husband knows his local history inside-out, having taught it here. I love this because I love learning things.

Before we got married, my husband and I were colleagues, and he had the reputation for being a teacher who would do his level best to get through to the thickest student. I've had complete strangers walk up to me on the street and compliment me for having the good sense to marry a man who can explain things so well and so patiently. And I know I profit from being married to someone who likes to teach. Someone who, knowing full well that I have a hard time with math, will do his damnedest to talk me through an equation or a mathematical formula.

But every teacher has to meet his own special Waterloo, and my husband's has been trying to teach me math. I have a brain that is virtually impermeable to math and anything vaguely math-related.

Still, my husband's math teaching attempts have their uses. As a lifelong insomniac, I'm always on the lookout for things that will lull me to sleep and I prefer natural remedies. Whenever I'm particularly desperate, I just tap him on the shoulder. "How does it go again, the hexadecimal computer color representation thing?" I mumble, and if he's awake, he almost always obliges.

"Okay, hexadecimal -- or base 16 -- is a positional numeral system. Remember?" I nod happily.

"It uses sixteen symbols, generally the numbers 0–9, to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen -- got that?" I nod again, but my head is beginning to swim. Already it's starting to work!

"So, for example, the hexadecimal number 2AF3 would be equal, in decimal, to two times sixteen to the third power -- I haven't lost you, have I?"

I smile and shake my head. "No, I've got that." Which is a total lie.

And, obligingly, he goes on. And on. Something about binary, something else about only zero and one being used to represent on and off...And in no time at all, I'm fast asleep.

A guaranteed cure for insomnia. Just one more perk to being married to a teacher.

Happy Teachers' Day

It's Teachers' Day here. Teachers' Day is a big deal in Turkey, especially in primary and secondary school. A couple of days ago, all the supermarkets and greengrocers started putting pots of flowers and boxes of chocolates on display near the check-out counters. Single carnations wrapped in cellophane have appeared in shop windows.

My husband teaches younger kids than I do and the kids (and more importantly, their parents) go all out, lavishing their teachers with gifts. My husband made out like a bandit last year; my daughters and I had to make several trips from his classroom to the car, all of us lugging carrier bags filled with his loot. Among the Teachers' Day presents he received were three bunches of flowers, two pen sets, a potted plant, a clock, a photograph album, two diaries, four boxes of candy, three batches of cookies, a loaf of banana bread, a foil package of freshly-baked brownies, a mug with his name on it, a fancy nazar boncuk amulet to ward off the evil eye, and a bottle of whiskey. Best of all were the hand-made cards depicting a middle-aged man teaching rows of laughing, smiling children. And the messages crayoned and penciled inside: YOU are the Bestest teacher ever! thaNK YOU THANK YOU! and Welove math now becuase ov you!

"What did you get?" my daughters asked me. All I could do was sigh: for Turkish university students, Teachers' Day isn't a big deal at all: none of my students gave me anything but grief.

In fact, I barely even noticed it was Teachers' Day last year. After an afternoon of teaching that was more hellish than usual, I was putting away my books when one of the girls in the front row creased her pretty forehead and muttered something in Turkish to the boy next to her. He frowned and flipped through the pages of his dictionary. The girl craned her neck to see. "Teechateechazday," the boy muttered as I bent to unplug my CD player. "Teechazday," the girl piped up after him. It took me two minutes to understand what they were trying to say. I felt awfully silly drilling the class stragglers on Happy Teachers Day, Teacher.

Last year, a half-hearted Teechateechazday was all I took home with me besides a headache.

This year, the Turkish Ministry of Education and Board of Health went and closed down every primary and secondary school in our area barely a week before Teachers' Day due to the swine flu epidemic. Swine flu has spread through Turkey like fire through dry tumbleweed, and even though our local schools have had only a few cases, every school had to lock its doors.

We've had cases of swine flu at the university too and hopes have been high; fervent prayers have been wafted up to the heavens and a petition has even been circulated -- all to no avail: no edict has been issued to close us down.

My husband and his colleagues will no doubt still be deluged with Teachers' Day gifts this year, but they will have to wait until school begins again to receive them.

I told myself that this year I knew what to expect, and I would not be disappointed. I knew that nobody would be bringing me candy, flowers, or ceramic mugs.

But as it turned out, I did get a gift. Something even better than flowers or candy or ceramic mugs.

Today I was sitting in the teachers' room when three students from last term came in, graduates of our preparation English program. They had come to talk to me, they said. They wanted me to know that their classmates were complaining about how hard it was to understand their English-speaking professors in the faculty. "But we understand everything they say," one of the boys told me, "because you talked so much to us all the time. Thank you, teacher."

Because I talked so much. Bless them, in all my life no one has ever thanked me for that before!

This evening I will be walking down to the main road to catch the dolmuş home with a spring in my step and a light in my eye. Mugs and flowers are great, but it turns out that heartfelt thank-yous are even better. And a whole lot lighter.