Dealing with kids who aren't yet ready to learn

While this blog is mostly filled with positive stuff, occasionally the less-than-rosy aspects of adjusting to a new culture need to be noted. That said, I hope I don't sound like a whiner here, but I've experienced some difficulties with younger Turkish kids in the classroom—namely, with trying to keep them in their seats and keep their attention for more than a couple of minutes.

This has proved especially true for many kids in the first grade, who apparently aren't yet ready to put down their crayons once in a while and pick up a pencil, and actually do a bit of work. I never thought of myself as a rigid, slave-driving sort of teacher, and I've certainly heaped mountains of praise onto the students for correctly identifying, say, Colin the caterpillar (who has a lead role in one of their textbooks) or several colors. But of course they all had learned, last year in kindergarten, how to identify—and say in English—the colors blue, red, purple and yellow. So for these first few weeks of the school year I've somewhat helplessly stood by and watched them review all this stuff from kindergarten ("all this stuff" amounting to perhaps a dozen words in English, tops), and watching them happily color in their work books, and ... well, not much else, actually.

Don't get me wrong: quite a few of them are indeed ready, and are very enthusiastic and "serious" about learning (if you can actually use that adjective to describe some very cute five year-olds). It's just that the others' inability or unwillingness to even try to learn seems to contaminate the whole classroom, and before you know it, utter chaos has unfolded—to the point where I, the teacher, feel utterly helpless. And, yes, actually and utterly invisible. A weird, unsettling feeling, to be sure.

Perhaps a lot of the problem stems from me being a non-speaker of Turkish. Every day, it seems, some of these young children will approach me and just start speaking away (in Turkish, of course), entirely unaware that I haven't the faintest idea what they're saying. And I'm sure when I speak to them, even though I'm giving instructions in very simple English (and often acting them out, if possible), they, too, must have a hard time figuring out what I'm trying to get across. But that may not be the entire explanation. Part of it may just be cultural differences, of which I may have very little "control" over, after all.

But hopefully things will improve soon, for all the students' sake, of course. Already I think the school administration is reconsidering the wisdom of assigning a non-Turkish speaker to teach such young kids, who have very limited language skills. And it looks like I'll get to spend some more time teaching the few native English speaking kids at our school—which will, at least for me, turn out to be quite a silver lining.

Regarding the photo: Sure they're cute, but...Also, Nesterin & Ipek (in the background) have provided lots of free counseling.