From the mixed up desk of Geoffrey Stevens

----- I thought all my Isikkent homework would be done when I finished writing that darn play, but then Wednesday night I had to create and layout a newspaper for my 8th grade newspaper club. It’s been like pulling teeth to get them to write anything and pass it in, and now Maddy (she’s doing the 6th grade version) and I are designing and laying out the paper ourselves just to expedite and streamline the process. We spent a good 2-2.5 hours on it, and we still didn’t have all the kids’ articles to put in there. I wished there was some way the kids could have done it, but there was no way we could have had 12 kids crowded around 1 computer as they decided/argued/screamed how the issue would be designed and where everything was going. So Maddy and I saved ourselves from intense aggravation by sucking it up and choosing to go the mild-to-medium aggravation route instead. I now know just about everything there is to know about MS Word text boxes, so if you have any questions, fire away. Next week, the debut of the 6th grade’s Isikkent Enquirer and the 8th grade’s Isikkent Intelligencer!


----- A few days ago I went to Burger King and got a Whopper meal to eat while I was staying up late to watch the movie Ray on a school night. I sat down at my desk, turned the movie on, and before I ate my burger I went to take the pickles out (I’ll eat them by themselves, but not on burgers). Well, there weren’t any pickles on this particular Whopper, but instead there were a bunch of jalapeno peppers! And all I ordered was a plain, everyday Whopper, nothing special. Now, if you know me, you know I don’t like spicy food, mainly because my tongue can’t handle it very well. I took the peppers off, of course, but while I was eating it, the burger was still piping hot. I guess the pepper juice was still all over the burger, because I was trying to down my Whopper and I started sweating bullets. By the end, I had to go into the bathroom and towel off.

The next day, I saw a Burger King ad on TV where they were advertising this new “jalapenos on everything” deal they’re running. Except nobody in Turkey correctly pronounces jalapeno (Hal-a-pain-yo) correctly. Instead, they call them Jal-a-pain-os.


----- A kid in one of my classes asked us in a thick Turkish accent, “What is…booblaygoom?” She meant to say bubblegum. That’s the sort of stuff that happens when you go from a language like Turkish where every letter is pronounced, and pronounced the same way every time, no exceptions, to English, with all its silent letters, crazy spellings, wacky pronunciations, and its one million exceptions.


---- The Turkish word for joke is saka (pronounced “shahkuh). Whenever someone pulls a joke or a prank on someone, they yell out, “Saka!” When I first got here, not knowing what saka meant, I thought all the kids were yelling out, “Sucka!” Like, “Got you, sucka! Fooled you, sucka!” I thought, wow, where did they learn the American word, sucker, and isn’t that a tad rude?


---- Another word I misheard was Cep Phone (pronounced Jep Phone). It’s what they call a mobile phone here in Turkey, but what I heard them say was Jap Phone. I thought, well, sounds a little racists, but I guess a lot of these electronics are made in Japan, so they must call them Jap phones for that reason. Turns out that “Cep” means “pocket” in Turkish, so cell phones and mobile phones are called pocket phones here.


----- In order to motivate my kids to do their worksheets in my middle school classes on Jazz and America, I told them I’d award a mix CD to whomever had the high score in the class. Most of the kids still cheated off each other and all had the same right and wrong answers. I’ve been told that sort of thing is very Turkish. When I tallied up the results and told the kids with the best scores that they won, they all wanted very different music. Several of them wanted Evanescence, which surprised me. Now Evanescence, an American band with strong Christian undertones in its music and lyrics, is a huge hit in a Eurasian Muslim country? That sure threw me, but the kids probably don’t pa much attention to the lyrics. If it sounds good, that’s all that matters sometimes.


----- The radio stations that specialize in American music don’t play any edited, swear-free music here. They just air the regular song in its entirety, no matter what time of day it is. Occasionally, when my second graders are doing lots of coloring or busy work, I’ll throw the radio on for some background music (Multiple Intelligences education in work, people!). So I flipped on the radio, and that song by Eamon, where he says “fuck” about 100 times in 3 minutes is playing. And this is at 11 in the morning! A couple of the second graders with decent English skills were like, “Ohhhh, that’s a bad word! There it is again! And again!” I quickly turned the station, but not before a good 5 F-bombs were dropped on my 8 year olds. Thank god an FCC official wasn’t in the room.