First Day Teaching

Today I met my students and taught my first linguistics and conversation classes. All of my students are undergraduates, and I am teaching just the freshmen and sophmores. The first years were very timid. As they sat down, they filled up only the very back chairs of the classroom, leaving the two front rows completely empty.

Although their grammar skills are excellent, they have never spoken with a native speaker of English; most have only studied with Turkish-born speakers. So to them, my accent was quite difficult to understand. They seem to be very bright and eager - the girls especially. Some of the boys I can already tell are going to be a challenge. I've already found the "joker" - I think there is one in every class.

Speaking of challenging, the linguistics class is going to stretch my abilities. We are covering all of the major branches of linguistics from phonetics to phonology to semantics to tree structure diagrams. A dirty little secret is that I've never really done a tree structure diagram, because my linguistics department wasn't exaclty Chomskyesque (new word). I keep telling myself that I just need to say one chapter ahead and at least act confident.

As I mentioned earlier, the students' grammar skills are incredible. I was corrected today by Okan when I called a verb past tense, but it was really progressive something, something. Note to self: learn English verbs inflections before next Monday.

As native speakers, we just *know* how to use all of the simple, progressive, perfect, perfect progressive aspects and how to pair them with the present, future, and past tenses. But to explain that is another matter entirely. . . Do you know how to explain difference between these three sentences and when to use each?

She has been studying.
She had been studying.
She will have been studying.

Me neither; I will be learning A LOT this semester.

As I have been able to talk to family and friends on Skype during the last few days, I realize how easy technology has made going abroad. I remember just 12 years ago when I spent four months in Kenya. Letters and the occasional phone call (when you could find a working phone and figure out how to use it) were the only communication I had. Now I have email, a cell phone, a land line, and Skype. I guess it is kind of the best of both worlds: experiencing a new culture with the ability to stay in touch with the people you love.