A Case Of Mistaken Identity

"Nat saw that the sky was growing dark," Ceyda reads out loud, stumbling over every word and managing to butcher both pronunciation and intonation. I smile encouragingly, but wince internally. I hate having students read out loud; I don't see the point to it. But we are doing an adapted version of Daphne duMaurier's The Birds, and having the students read it out loud is the only way I can be sure that any reading goes on at all.

"The day was cold and bright," Ceyda reads, only bright comes out breet. The other students all smirk and titter. They're no better or worse than Ceyda, but for some reason, they enjoy mocking her. I grit my teeth, thank Ceyda for reading, and pick one of the mockers to read next. He goes great guns until he gets to the word windows, which he reads as wine-does. The others titter.

It's Kemal's turn to read next and he's actually better than the rest, using rising intonation for yes-no questions and sailing through a lot of hard-to-pronounce words. Everyone looks suitably impressed until Kemal gets to a part about the birds flying inland. Three girls smirk and nudge each other and one of them bursts into giggles.

"Just what is so funny?" I demand.

"Hojam," one of the girls laughs, "he say inland!" She rolls her eyes and glances at Kemal. "Pronounce aye-land," she advises him smugly.

I shake my head. "No it isn't. See? It's spelled I-N-L-A-N-D -- there's no S there."

The girls frown at their books. "Hojam, mistake!" one of them tells me. "Island spell S not N."

I go to the board and write ISLAND and INLAND. I draw an island, then next to it a long line depicting a shoreline. I put in waves and the odd fish. "This one is an island," I explain, "and this one--" I quickly draw in arrows to show wind blowing away from the sea "--is inland. In towards the land, you see?"

They frown at the board so I hand them a dictionary and they pore over it until they find inland. Only then are they prepared to believe me.

Things like this happen all the time in my classes. I've had students make wonderfully funny mistakes, insisting that curious meant very angry, that my treasious was what Golum said in Lord of the Rings, and that impotent meant vital. Inland and island are pretty tame stuff in comparison.

I can't help but be amused and sometimes irritated by some of my students' false language hypotheses, but this is a perfectly natural phenomenon. When the brain sees something it hasn't encountered before, it automatically identifies it with the closest thing it remembers.

And if I ever find myself too irritated, I just take a trip down memory lane to the time I first confused the characters 日本 'Nihon' (Japan) and　本日 'honjitsu' (today's).

It was my first week in Japan and I was in a Tokyo restaurant with two fellow fresh-off-the-boat Americans, Mark and Carol. Every beginning Japanese student learns the kanji 日本 for Japan, but 本日 is slightly more advanced and we'd never seen it before.

Mark noticed it first, on a sign on the wall. "Can that be a mistake?" he wondered, pointing. "Isn't the 日 in 日本 supposed to come first?"

I blinked. "You're right! That doesn't make sense, does it?" I said. "I'll bet that's supposed to be 日本, but someone accidentally got it down wrong."

The waiter brought our food just then. He set down plates of steamed white rice, bowls of soup, and plates of broiled mackerel. We started to eat, but 日本 and 本日 stayed in our minds.

After we'd finished, Mark and I stared at the sign, then looked at each other. "Should we tell them about the mistake?"

We decided not to tell him for some reason. Thank God. The term we were so sure was wrong was actually 'Today's Menu' and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Japan.

I still know Mark and Carol and we've never forgotten that awful encounter with 日本 and 本日. To this day, we can't get over how close we came.

Three Little Gifts

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

A few weeks back, my youngest daughter had to take the cat to the vet. Our cat, although really still a kitten, managed to get out of the house the other night. She was gone for five nights and apparently had a wild old time out there, consorting with the half dozen toms who live between the farm and the mosque just behind our house. Our neighborhood -- in fact, the town in general -- happens to be overrun with cats and kittens. On almost any given day, you can see stray cats climbing out of garbage cans, nipping into alleys, racing across busy roads. All too often they don't make it across, and you can see the sad evidence of that too.

Nobody needs any more cats around here, so a trip to the vet's was definitely in order. My daughter put the cat into her carrier, went outside, and flagged down a dolmuş. It was full, so she sat in the back with the cat in her cat carrier on her lap. When it was time to get off, she dug a handful of change out of her pocket and made her way to the front of the dolmuş to pay the driver, leaving the cat in her cat carrier in the back, next to the last remaining passenger. "No!" he cried in shocked tones. "No!"

My daughter turned to see what he was protesting. He was pointing to the cat carrier and waving his hands from side to side in the universal I don't want this! gesture. Apparently, he thought he was being left a gift. "I shook my head and waved my hand," she said. "And boy, did he look relieved when we got off."

Our cat, it turned out, was one week pregnant. Narrow escapes all around.

Spilled Coins

Yesterday, I took the dolmuş home. I like to take my change out early so I can sit back and enjoy the ride, so I pulled out my wallet, but no sooner had I done this than there was the sound of metal pinging on metal and I saw a fistful of gold-and-silver one-lira coins rolling every which way. I stared at my wallet. Did it actually have a hole in it? It didn't look like it did, but I'm a klutz: I've spilled a lot of coins in my time.

There was a student sitting just across from me who had just gotten on the dolmuş himself. I pointed to the coins on the floor and then at my wallet. I frowned and he nodded. Clearly, I must have spilled the coins. The student was fiddling with his own wallet and showed no inclination to help me pick up the coins, so I bent to retrieve them, collecting a total of almost ten lira. I hadn't realized I had that much money in coins! The boy now bent to pick up coins himself, and after the last one had been retrieved, I held out my hand to him. He frowned and opened up his palm. And suddenly the penny dropped, if you'll forgive a bad pun. He had actually been the one who had spilled the coins! How embarrassing! I deposited the handful of coins into his outstretched hand, my cheeks on fire. I hoped he didn't think I was trying to fleece him of his money. What if it got around school that the American teacher was such a tightwad she would stoop to rob a poor student of his coins?

Fortunately, when I got off the dolmuş, the student smiled and winked at me. I hope he understood that it was an honest mistake. Or maybe he'd stolen the money himself and was paying his respects to a fellow thief.

Eggplants from Heaven

My colleague Leonard is from Nigeria. The other day, he and some Nigerian friends were taking the dolmuş home after a trip to the market to buy produce in bulk.

"We bought tomatoes, zucchinis, onions, and beans," said Leonard. "When we got onto the dolmuş there were a lot of other people who'd been at the market too and they also had big bags of vegetables. One man had three huge bags of eggplant. We'd seen them selling it in the market and they were very cheap, but none of us knew how to cook eggplants, so we didn't get any."

When they got to their stop, Leonard and his friends grabbed up their bags, paid the driver, and hopped off. It wasn't until they got back to their shared house that they realized they had one of the bags of eggplants.

"We rushed back to the dolmuş stand," Leonard told me, "but of course it had gone and we couldn't find the man with the eggplants. We didn't want him to think that Africans are thieves, but what could we do? And after all, it was an honest mistake."

I asked him what he did with the eggplants. "We took them back home and cooked them," he said, smiling. "We think God must have wanted us to have those eggplants. Whatever the case, we all know how to cook eggplants now."

The Agony Of The Ecstasy

"Teeeeacher!" Nazli is halfway out of her seat. She's had her hand up for the past minute, but I've been ignoring her. Nazli is a prime time-waster. She can find reasons for not bringing her homework, forgetting her book, wool gathering in class, and just about every other dubious thing you can imagine. I've taken Nazli's mobile phone off her so often it's become the class joke.

"What is it, Nazli?" I say in This had better be good tones.

"We go --" she stops to consult with a classmate "--auditorium?"

"Why should we want to go to the auditorium?"

Another whispered consultation. "Special meeting."

I'm skeptical, but the others nod and echo special meeting. Uzay, as big a time waster as Nazli, nods emphatically. "Very important meeting!"

During the break, I nip downstairs to the coordinators' office and find out that there really is a lecture we're supposed to take our students to, on addiction. I feel like screaming. This class needs English reading and writing, not lectures in Turkish. The last one I had to take them to was on sexually transmitted diseases and it was a real yawner. The doctor who gave it didn't look as if she'd had sex since Woodstock. She talked in an unrelenting monotone and showed slides with squiggly bacteria and hard-to-see viruses.

"I'll take attendance in the auditorium," I announce to the class, to cheers of delight.

I am sorry to say that the lecture is every bit as awful as I imagined it would be. Where do they dig up these speakers? Even back when I was in high school, our school brought in people with real, hands-on drug experience, ex-alcoholics and past users with more than a textbook knowledge of the subject.

Sitting there with my students, a captive audience, I feel irritated and frustrated with this woman who rattles off the names of addictive substances as though they're a long, dry laundry list. We are shown slides of healthy vs diseased liver and lung tissue, slides and statistics. There is no dialogue, no attempt to engage or involve. If she has managed to work in a mention how drugs ruin lives, I can't figure out where.

Barely ten minutes into the lecture, right in the middle of opiates, students start leaving. I see Nazli sneaking down the aisle. The girl next to me gives me a sidelong glance. "Teacher, very boring!" she whispers. "Is this more boring than my classes?" I scrawl on a slip of paper. She scowls at the paper and her face breaks into a big smile. Yes! she writes back.

Whew. It's not just me!

Next, we are treated to a slide that shows morphine being heated in a spoon held over a candle -- always wondered how they did it and now I know -- followed by a snowy white pile of cocaine that stays on the screen for ages. More students get up to leave, including Uzay, who I know to be a chain smoker. The speaker pauses for a good, long time on a display of Ecstasy tablets. I had no idea that Ecstasy came in so many shapes, sizes, and colors, with so many patterns stamped on them, like pats of butter in a fancy restaurant. We are shown slide after slide of Ecstasy tablets, at least a hundred on each one, in endless array, with an accompanying monologue that is far less interesting than the pictures, which are graphically pleasant but not riveting. I am tired of Ecstasy. Bored to death of it. I wish we could move on!

More students leave.

And suddenly there is a great slide, utterly compelling. There is a collective gasp of horror as we all look at before and after photographs of crystal meths users. If these photos don't put off potential crystal meths users, I don't know what will. If she'd shown this slide at the beginning of her talk, nobody would have walked out. This literally puts a human face on addiction. We shake our heads to see how healthy, beautiful people turn into haggard ghouls in just a few years. All too quickly these slides are removed and we're back to piles of confiscated drugs, statistics, drug-related paraphernalia.

Yaaaawn. More students get up to leave and I throw in the towel and follow them, leaving the good, obedient students -- aka the converted -- to be preached to.

On my way out, I practically trip over Uzay who is standing in the entrance with a few pals.

And they all have cigarettes.

Bag Of Heads

It is four o'clock in the morning, but the rooster next door doesn't know it. The rooster next door doesn't understand time. If he sleeps, it can only be in short, fitful bursts. Because he crows all the time, just about every hour, rain or shine.

I know that a lot of roosters do this. And I know that roosters all over the world sound pretty much the same. Whether they're roosters in America, Japan, Northern Europe, or the Mediterranean, they all have the same staccato aah-ooh-ahh-OOOOH. It's almost always the same four syllables with the stress on the last one, there's always the same edge to it, and the cock-a-doodle-doo always vibrates with the same bravado, the same I'm the king of the castle message.

But this rooster is different.

I don't know whether he's old or was born with a deformed voice box or is just plain eccentric, but this rooster has a distinctive cockle-doodle-doo. He will start to crow and then stop as though he's misplaced his notes and is trying to find them. Then, just as you start to think he's forgotten all about crowing, he'll start up again, get half the way through the process, and stop again. I've seen him on my way to catch the bus in the morning. He looks fairly normal: the same curved, iridescent tail feathers, the same Don't-you-try-it-with-me look in his eye, the same proud strut as he patrols the mosque garden where he lives with his harem of frazzled-looking hens.

But in the morning, off he goes. Aahoohahh-- he begins, then his voice suddenly stops and there's a long silence. A silence just long enough to drift back to sleep in.

It usually drives me half wild at this time in the morning. It usually fills me with thoughts of BB guns, slingshots, and water pistols. When it's really bad, I sometimes indulge myself in cruel fantasies. I picture myself getting out of bed, creeping outside in the morning chill through the fig and pomegranate trees, past the sheep pen and hen house, finding the irritating bird and twisting his neck.

This morning, however, I find my earplugs and put them in. Why? Because just recently I saw something that something chilled me to the bone. Something I hope that rooster doesn't know about. Something that makes me think he's got a right to crow as often and as irritatingly as he likes.

It was in the deep frozen section of the supermarket. Normally, I don't go near the frozen foods in winter, but I was in quest of octopus. You'd think that a country surrounded by sea would be full to bursting with fish, but this is sadly not the case. Turks love their meat, and fish is often hard to find here, and expensive. For this reason, I am always on the lookout for things like squid and octopus and they aren't always easy to spot. So when I saw the plain, white plastic bag with its loosely tied string, I peeked.

And I wish I hadn't.

Because it was full to bursting with roosters' heads. If there were any hens' heads in there, I could not see them. Dozens of severed roosters' heads stared up at me, their gimlet eyes blank, but accusing. And never would they cock-a-doodle-doo again.

Aah-ooh--ahh-, the rooster next door begins. I roll over and find my ear plugs and put them in. I can still hear his abbreviated Aaah-hoo-hahh-OOOH, but I can take it. All I'm going to lose is a couple hours of sleep, but I know what's in store for him.

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.

The Truth

Thank you, everybody, for obliging me by trying to figure out the one lie in my pack of truths. I'm beginning to realize that I'm a much better liar than I thought I was. Nobody guessed the truth, so here it is:

1) When I was five, my sister and I were run over.

This is absolutely true and one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me. My little sister and I were sitting at the foot of my uncle and aunt's steep driveway, where there was a lot of beautifully fine sand that we enjoyed playing in. We saw the car backing towards us and felt absolutely no fear. My uncle drove right over us. To this day I can remember how it felt, crouching down low, the undercarriage of the car just brushing our bent heads as we were suddenly enveloped in rumbling, sooty darkness -- then the explosion of light as the car passed over us and came to a screeching halt perhaps teen feet away in the middle of the road. There was not a scratch on either of us.

We saw my uncle, still clutching the wheel, staring at us in open-mouthed, white-faced horror. We smiled and waved. To this day I also remember the spanking we got: we couldn't sit down for three days afterwards. We'd been warned dozens of times not to play there, but that sand was compelling. After that spanking, we found other places to play.

2) When I was in graduate school, a friend and I worked as singers and bar girls in a Japanese 'club' in San Francisco.

My friend and I decided to do this to improve our spoken Japanese. We were really just glorified waitresses, but we were hired to help shy businessmen sing and spend more money. The high point of our time there was when our club sponsored a singing contest and Tokyo Television came and filmed us. Tokyo Television's cameramen showed up late because they'd gotten lost in the wrong neighborhood and had a lot of their equipment stolen. Neither of us won.

3) I can do the splits and stand on my head.

This is true too, though I should point out that I can only do the splits all the way if my left leg is forward and I find the headstand easier to do yoga-style nowadays. While I am the world's most uncoordinated human being, I am actually pretty flexible. I can also stand with my feet together and put both hands flat on the ground. What I can't do is look great while I'm doing any of these things.

4) I have read Yukio Mishima's books in the original Japanese.

This one is a lie. I've read a couple of Japanese writers in the original, but never Mishima. I have, however, read almost everything by him that has been translated into English, but even some Japanese people find reading Mishima's Japanese a tough slog; he liked using really old, hard-to-understand characters. His prose was also very dense, and his books tended to be depressing. I like to read the Japanese translations of English books too: I read the first two Harry Potter books in Japanese. They kept me plenty busy, and when I was finished, I wasn't depressed. Win-win.

5) Three times in a row over a couple of weeks I shared an elevator with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, in New York City. We smiled at each other, but did not say anything.

After our third time together in that elevator, Bella and Gloria seemed a lot like old pals. I tried not to stare, but it was tough.

6) For two years, I co-owned and ran a small inn with my husband. Every single day, I baked my own bread, made my own entrees, desserts, and hors d'ouevres, and worked at least fourteen hours.

Our inn was in Scotland. We actually won an award (AA red diamond -- we still have the certificate), met hundreds of interesting people, and made a modest profit, but I have never worked so hard in all my life for so little return. We were more than happy to sell after two years.

7) As an adult, I was deathly ill from the chickenpox. I was so badly afflicted, none of the doctors or nurses in the hospital recognized me when I went back to thank them a week after I got out.

Also true. I was so tormented by the itching I couldn't sleep for four whole days. When I went into the hospital, my eyes were virtually swollen shut and I was one suppurating mess from my elbows to my knees. If you're an adult and haven't yet had a good case of chickenpox, be forewarned -- it isn't fun. And try not to scratch.

I'm passing this on to anyone else who wants to do this because I invariably choose people who are too busy to play. And I promise to use my lying powers for Good alone.

A Lie

First of all, I got this pretty award from Postman and it's taken me a long time to post it (no pun intended) because I am technically challenged and my daughter has been busy with her studies. But here it is, and doesn't it make you feel like you're drinking a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice out on a balcony, in the sun?

Wish I were.




Postman is a funny, prolific writer with interesting hobbies (flying planes, WWII aircraft identification) and skills (bartending). He is also studying Korean, albeit at a higher level than I am. (I've mastered greetings, asking for water, and food groups.) Visit his blog and prepare to be well entertained.


Then I got this interesting award from two more fine writers, Marcia Hoehne and Anne Spollen, and this one comes with a task: telling a few lies about myself.



The truth is, I'm not a very good liar. When I was a kid, I thought I was pretty good, but years later, I read my mother's journals and discovered that she was on to me all along. Since then, I've lost confidence in my lying skill. Nowadays, I stick to the truth to the extent possible.

Still, I am happy to oblige for the sake of this meme. Like Marcia, I am going to change the rules a little to minimize the trauma of lying. Here are six truths and one lie about me. If you can guess the lie, I'll happily give you a free copy of my very first book to come out. (That's not a lie -- I will! But I'm guessing most of you realize how long you may have to wait.)

1) When I was five, my little sister and I were run over.

2) When I was in graduate school, a friend and I worked as singers and bar girls in a Japanese 'club' in San Francisco.

3) I can do the splits and stand on my head.

4) I have read Yukio Mishima's books in the original Japanese.

5) Three times in a row over a couple of weeks I shared an elevator with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, in New York City. We smiled at each other, but did not say anything.

6) For two years, I co-owned and ran a small inn with my husband. Every single day, I baked my own bread, made my own entrees, desserts, and hors d'ouevres, and worked at least fourteen hours.

7) As an adult, I was deathly ill from the chickenpox. I was so badly afflicted, none of the doctors or nurses in the hospital recognized me when I went back to thank them a week after I got out.

If anyone wants to play along with this, I hope you will join in! I would link to you specifically, but my daughter has left the room.