May 2nd

I delivered a most confusing, vexing, lesson tonight, leaving my students stunned, dazed, and looking for answers in a dark vortex of foreign language nonsense. It didn’t help that my poor students had just completed a mammoth exam – relentlessly long and complex – that left them with their mouths only slightly more ajar than their heavy eyelids. I hadn’t realized how confusing the Past Perfect could be until it was mine to present, and in a PowerPoint presentation with 50% fewer pictures of cats doing funny things no less. Of the strategies and routines I’ve developed in the process of becoming a better teacher, I’ve realized how essential it is to play to your audience. Cat-loving students, therefore, get cat visuals to help them remember comparatives and superlatives, the past continuous tense, and nightly routines. So long as the students are at least slightly entertained, they’ll absorb more information than otherwise. I also quiz weekly, which keeps them less happy but more studious. Cats and quizzes, when employed together, can work wonders on even the most unmotivated student.

Life outside of class has been plentiful, meaning my teaching hours have become increasingly scarce as the end of the year approaches. Pomp and circumstance, and the extra exams, have supplanted regular class time. Finding things to do hasn’t been too much of a challenge though. I’ve been running more often, especially now that Spring has unfurled and Bilecik is forever warm. I read a great deal at the Simit Sarayi establishment, new to Bilecik, with its outdoor seating arrangement and its delicious chai. I thank God for these warm afternoons, basking in an experience I understand to be as significant a part of my life as any. My presence has already, I know, dispelled certain ideas about Americans. I particularly find this true in light of my developed relationships to those living and working in town – the store and restaurant owners, the police wandering the streets, and the factory workers. People still stare at me. But it’s this tension, leaning up against the unknown, which compels the mind to reevaluate and to reconsider what’s been assumed.

My job in Turkey, beyond the teaching and the cultural lessons, is to exist as an American in Bilecik. What that means is different for different people, but so long as people can lay eyes on me, and understand that I laugh and think and smile and offer whatever humanity I can muster in a day, I am surprisingly similar in the most basic ways. I am part of this human family that, too often, and so easily, is torn and divided across senseless lines and my job is to uncloak this.

I bring this up in the wake of bin Laden’s death, and my own uncomfortable feelings rejoicing the death of an individual. I think back on the gravity of bin Laden’s career – the mass murder, the bastardization of a beautiful and complete religion, the exploitation and brainwashing of thousands – and I cannot help but find within myself a sense of ease. But immediately that sense of ease is disturbed not by the individual act of killing off a mass murderer, but the scope and ferocity of war and pain in our fragile world that bin Laden so represented. It is exactly what has allowed me to cherish his execution, and what has subverted my most passionate feelings of peace and love. It’s troubling and dark, and I’m most justified and bothered by my feelings.