102-14. Our Blogging Queen

The time has come, once again, to reveal what's in the virtual gift box!

It meant a lot to me that so many of you chose to blog with me this semester for extra credit. That takes real motivation and commitment in such a busy semester as this one has been.

I have no hesitation in crowning Ayşe as our Blogging Queen. Her blog meets royal standards and is everything a blog should be. I was delighted by each and every post, in which I saw evidence of creativity, analysis and attention to detail, self-exploration and a kind and generous spirit. I particularly loved her "hot vocabulary" list and "quote of the month" section as well as the picture of Benjamin and Elaine from The graduate. Right at the end of this semester she changed her template to mark the 'beginning' rather than the 'end' of blogging. Actually I just find this blog breathtaking and cannot find proper words to praise it - I would encourage you all to read it. Ayşe has been blogging with me since September, so this is a special award to me. I have seen her grow and develop immensely through her blog and this has made me feel closer to her. I know we will be blogging together for a long time to come. Thank you, Blogging Queen. ♥

I would of course not neglect to mention the other wonderful blogs - first Tümay, a newcomer to blogging, who posted 28 times, tying Ayşe in quantity! Tümay was a very enthusiastic blogger and I could look forward to at least one post after our morning class every Monday. So Ayşe and Tümay, you are the joint winners of the blog race! (So nice to duplicate that tied-for-first trend, which we saw last semester with Beri and Hasan).

I will now continue down the rankings, with comments on each blog:

Ezgi O. - 27 posts - Ezgi's blog took off in a major way this semester and pretty much blew everyone out of the water for some weeks.

Simge - 20 posts - Our returning 'Little Blogger', I especially love how she 'talked' to the characters in our stories on her blog. :)

Melek - 16 posts - We're happy to have this newcomer who made many sensitive interpretations of our course readings.

Hasan - 16 posts - Hasan's unique voice is back with us this semester, and I am proud of the changes I've witnessed in his thinking. ;)

Hazal - 15 posts - Hazal is such a wonderfully talented writer and an astute commentator on the human scene.

Nazlı - 15 posts - Another new blogger who showed incredible effort - don't miss her post on 'The rainbow coding in The bluest eye'.

Can - 14 posts - Can is a perfectionist, and it shows. His writing has gone from strength to strength.

Cemre Naz - 13 posts - Another returning blogger who incorporated so much of our class discussions and material into her blog.

Gamze - 11 posts - Gamze made a huge amount of effort on her blog and it is a delight to read - don't miss her wonderful African song/video, I guarantee it will make your soul sing.

Reşide - 11 posts - A new blogger who worked hard to create a permanent reminder of our wonderful novel.

Congratulations to all of you listed above, as you have met (and even exceeded) the criteria for extra credit, and your final grade will thereby be increased by one increment, for example from B+ to A-. As you know, I was looking for steady blogging over the semester as well as comments made on your blog and mine and on other students' blogs. Although I had 12 posts in mind as the cutoff, I must say that the effort and care that Gamze and Reşide put into their blogs convinced me that they had earned this honour as well - quality won out over quantity here!

A warm thank you goes to all of you who did some blogging, even if you could not meet the extra credit threshold:

Didem, Tuğçe K., Atalay, Ezgi Y., Elif, Bahar, Onur O., Zeynep, Mehmet Ali, Billur, Tuğçe Y., Ece, Merve, Deniz K., Sıla, Can Ç.

Finally, I cannot encourage you enough to *keep on/start/resume* writing on your blogs - that goes for all of you reading this, not just the people mentioned here. And I promise this:

I will be your ever-dedicated reader and commentator.

Thank you to ALL students who blogged with me in this academic year. Your blogs will be the outstanding models for my future students. I'm really very proud of you.

THIS IS NOT THE END OF MY BLOG, SO STAY TUNED... ;)

Sonja - out. ♥

'The Crown Jewels at the Tower of London' by Edgley Cesar, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0

102-13. Shuffle @ Mayfest and its star, HASAN CAN SARAL

It is always an honour for a teacher to receive an invitation to marvel at the talents of one of her students - and the rock/pop band Shuffle was well and truly worth travelling to campus on a Sunday for. They were awesome - and I'm not just saying that. But the one who shone above the rest was my dear student Hasan.

Just look at how cool he is:
<----


I am so impressed by this guy's many talents - he seems to have a bottomless well of them! And to top it all off, he has a killer smile and he's not afraid to use it!

Here's a photo of myself and some ex-ENG students enjoying the performance:

Thank, you Hasan!

To all of you: next time Shuffle plays, kaçırmayın!

102-12. Precious and Pecola

As you know, because of the Bayram this week I showed the film Precious by Lee Daniels to Sections A2 and D2.

I chose this film because it dramatises many of the same themes we saw in The bluest eye. It's set in Harlem in 1987. Precious (Claireece Precious Jones), the African-American protagonist, is 16 years old, semi-literate, overweight and unattractive. Physically abused by her mother, sexually abused by her father since the age of 3, Precious is pregnant with her father's second child; the first child, nicknamed 'Mongo', has Down's Syndrome and is being cared for by her grandmother. Precious is suspended from school for being pregnant (I don't know how this is legal, actually), but her principal recommends an alternative school, and it is here that she meets dedicated teacher Miss Rain and a small group of female classmates ranging from former drug addicts to gang members, all of whom are struggling to improve their reading skills in order to get their GEDs (a qualification equivalent to a high school diploma). After giving birth to her second child, Abdul Jamal, Precious learns that her rapist father has died - and that he has given her the HIV virus.

Here are some of the heartbreaking parallels between the lives of Precious and Pecola:

• Both are unwanted by their mothers and raped by their fathers.
  
• Both are very black and 'ugly' and suffer from an extreme lack of self-worth: "We're just ugly black grease to be wiped away" - this line really affected me.
  
• Neither girl opens her mouth at school, and both are teased and bullied.
  
• To escape her abuse and her torment, Precious envisions herself as a diva on a floodlit stage wearing beautiful costumes and watched by an adoring young man; Pecola tells Frieda and Claudia of the pretty dresses and jewellery given to her by the three whores and eventually goes mad, believing herself to be a bird that can fly away from the pain.
  
• Precious slowly does her hair in front of the mirror as a slim blonde white woman gazes serenely back at her; Pecola loves little white girls like Shirley Temple and ends up believing she has blue eyes, the bluest eyes.
  
• Precious writes in her journal that she wants to be "skinny, light-skinned and have long wavy hair"; Pecola is jealous of Maureen Peal's light skin, green eyes and soft hair.

I watched this film with an enormous sense of shame. I know I am not personally responsible, but I feel a collective sense of guilt that African-Americans are still living in such appalling conditions in our country. Maybe you know the old saying, 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'.

However, unlike Pecola, Precious gets a chance at redemption. She develops friendships with her teacher, classmates and the male nurse who helped deliver her baby; she wins a mayor's award for literacy; she greatly improves her score on the literacy test; she rejects her mother once and for all after her mother confesses to having allowed her husband to repeatedly touch and rape her daughter; she starts attending therapy groups for survivors of sexual abuse; she gets her firstborn child back and vows to teach her children, to meet their needs. She is a tower of strength, and Daniels shows us her humanity, as Morrison showed us Pecola's humanity. By the end of the film we no longer see an obese black girl, we see a person.

Please read more good posts about this film:

• Tümay
• Simge
• Ezgi O.
• Cemre Naz
• Ezgi Y.
  

'Peacock feather' by Panache, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

102-11. The bluest sky

I am haunted by one passage in particular from The bluest eye:

"The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. This sky was always blue" (p. 105).

In many ways, this one sentence exemplifies not only the racist and classist segregation of Lorain, Ohio, but everything that is wrong with our world. We gluttonously consume without thinking of the consequences, the human cost, the ecological cost. As long as the skies of our lives are blue, we give little thought to the suffering of others, and we are determined to maintain that blueness even if we have to paint it on, thereby creating an artifice and ignoring the encroaching orange patches all around us. I believe humans should strive for happiness, but we have an enormous blind spot, and our capacity for happiness will, in a most profound irony, cause our ultimate destruction - unless we can find happiness in alleviating the misery of others and working to solve the enormous problems we are faced with. We need to derive our contentment from an understanding of the whole, not lie under our blue sky oblivious to the choking pollution just over the way.

'Untitled' by Guilherme Cecílio, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0

102-10. False loyalties: Pauline and the white woman

For my first post on our novel The bluest eye, I'd like to write about false loyalties. Recall that before she joined the Fisher family as a maid, Pauline Breedlove worked for another white woman (pp. 118-121). Although the family is quite dirty, in a literal sense, and she doesn't especially like the white woman, she is at least getting by - until Cholly turns up drunk demanding money. This precipitates a confrontation between Pauline and the white woman:

"She said she would let me stay if I left him. I thought about that. But later on it didn't seem none too bright for a black woman to leave a black man for a white woman" (p. 120).

Here we see Pauline's unwillingness to betray her own race - not because she loves Cholly or being black, but because she senses that black people have to stick together, and that white people cannot be trusted to help them out of their predicament. Although uneducated, Pauline has wise instincts. And unfortunately, she is right to be mistrustful; because she cannot bring herself to leave Cholly, the white woman withholds the $11 she owes her, money that will put food in the mouths of her children. This cruel conditionality serves to highlight the power inequalities between this middle-class white woman and the hapless Pauline, ones which the white woman seems entirely oblivious to:

"...she told me I shouldn't let a man take advantage over me. That I should have more respect, and it was my husband's duty to pay the bills, and if he couldn't, I should leave and get alimony" (p. 120).

This encounter predicts some of the difficulties of the third wave of feminism, which was once again largely led by white middle-class women. However, what differentiated this period of feminism was the growing chorus of voices from women of colour, oppressed by both race and gender, who argued that the mainstream women's movement at best failed to address and at worst marginalised their specific concerns. The white woman here naively assumes that all women are on equal footing - which is ironic since she employs the black woman - and sees Pauline's abusive marriage as something that can be ended with a simple personal choice. The gulf between the two women is endless.

And notice that the white woman never pays the money that is very nearly a matter of life and death for Pauline. For all her 'concern' about Pauline's self-respect, she ends up consigning her to a further round of suffering and misery. I was reminded of the land owner in "The man who was almost a man", which we read last semester. Many students were convinced that he 'loved' the black boy Dave; here we see the fickleness of such love. Black servants are 'loved' as long as they toe the line, do not talk back. The Fisher family 'loves' Pauline - but how long do you think their loyalty would last if it were in any way tested?

'N' by Cedric Favaro, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

102-9. Spring break philosophising..

Oh my, I'm a bit behind in my posting, aren't I? I mean, this is Week 10, so this should be my 10th post. I forgot to post one during my conference week.. :)

Who would have thought we'd still be dreaming of spring during the spring break? Renewal is coming a bit late this year..

Just five more weeks to go, çocuklar. I can't believe it. This semester has instantly gone from interminable to slipping away far too quickly, I cannot hold onto it..then I will no longer (and nevermore) be your Freshman English teacher, how weird is that, especially when I think of those of you who've been with me since September. I will have to relinquish possessiveness, that's always hard for me. Goodbyes are even harder.

There are many things to be grateful for this year, mostly the things I've come to know about you and the development I've witnessed. It's nice to see your children grow up. :)

I have to say that being around all of you has kept me young. My mother always says I was born 40. Well, I went from being '40' to being 19 again, and I relived part of my youth. That's a rare opportunity for sure. It showed me that although there were many things I could or should have done differently, I would never want to go back. Hindsight is a marvellous thing because it helps you see how you led yourself to the present point. So I encourage you to keep writing on your blogs for as long as you can, because when you look back on that writing at some future interval, you will shake your head in helpless wonder at your precious self, and you will treasure that previous incarnation and embrace it from a distance.

I will miss you..

'The remains' by Manuela Hoffman, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

102-8. My conference presentation :)

Well, I did it. I presented at my first international conference. This was the 44th Annual IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) Conference and Exhibition in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, UK.

You know how I've asked you all to write an I-Search paper at the end of this semester? Well, last year in ENG 102 I asked my students to do that for the first time. My presentation is based on 52 responses: what worked, what I felt needed improving for this time - in other words, you're all benefitting from their feedback. :) This is why, for example, I decided to give detailed individual feedback to the annotated bibliographies this time rather than whole class feedback.

You can view my abstract and even download my Powerpoint slides and my handout here. It would be great to hear your feedback. :)

You cannot imagine how much I sweated over the preparation of this presentation. At one point it was getting out of hand, but fortunately my boss stepped in at that point and invited me to her office to talk through it. I had ridiculously overcomplicated it (my speciality). Once I was given 'permission' to just relax and not feel I had to include everything, it was much easier.

Strangely, I wasn't nervous at all on the day of the presentation, and in the end a mere 8 people turned up (out of 1900), two of whom were my colleagues! But there were questions from the audience throughout and two teachers stayed behind to chat. Best of all, my boss had loaned me her geeky laser pointer remote thingie and that was great fun to use..I got so close to my audience I was practically standing on top of them!

There were quite a few presenters there from Turkish universities: Bilkent, Marmara, Istanbul University, Fatih...but SU had the most - 8! :D

I'm not a huge fan of conferences to be honest, but when I believe in something, I go for it.
My next several presentations will all be based on your marvellous blogs...more to come on that! ;)

102-7. Blog race, anyone?

Once again our blogging endeavours are being spiced up by a friendly race! Ayşe and Ezgi O. (the lovely roommates) have kicked off this semester's competition...Bahar, Gamze and Melek quickly weighed in with their determination, and for a bit it looked as if this would be a female-dominated race, or "cat fight" as Ayşe termed it - but wait! now Onur wants a piece of the action! The prize is up for grabs!

Well, this is some formidable competition - anyone care to take these bloggers on?

'Race to infinity' by The iconoclastic yet iconic ionic icon, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike 2.0.

102-6. Virtual blogging awards, round 2! ;)

Those of you who blogged with me last semester will remember this box. :))

This time I'm announcing this 'contest' well in advance; once again, at the end of the semester, I will be posting some virtual blogging awards here. These will include top blogger as well as those deserving honourable mention. The following attributes will be taken into consideration:
-quantity
-quality (reflection, analysis, creativity, writing skills)
-interaction with other blogs (including mine) and responding to comments made on yours

Last time competition was stiff as Beri (blue ribbon/silver cup winner) and Hasan (red ribbon winner) jockeyed for position in their mind-blowing 'blog race' - but I had to invent a runner-up category for Hasan in the end, so sorry man, wahwahwahhh :D ...and where's your blog race this semester, guys? I'm so pleased to note that most of those in the honourable mention category are back blogging again: Simge, Hazal, Onur, Ayşe, Elif and Can. Your blogs just get better and better. And Bahar, your blog has come on a bomb! Keep it up! Ezgi O., you're certainly on an impressive spree!

Check out all our lovely new bloggers on my ENG 102 blogroll - Tümay and Nazlı merit a mention even at this early stage.

Remember that blogging is an extra credit option this time - and it's not too late to get started! ;)

I really want to give this extra credit...I'm just waiting for your posts!

What's in the box this time? :-p

'Gift' by mrjoro, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

102-5. Assumptions hurt!

We've been talking about this of course, in an academic sense, but the other day at lunch I was reminded of how painful and infuriating it is to be on the receiving end of someone else's ignorance. I cannot disclose the details of the conversation - not that I have any interest in protecting this person's identity, but just out of my own sense of professionalism - but 'someone' made some very arrogant assumptions about one of my family members in order to prove a 'point' about a very controversial issue in Turkey. These assumptions were seemingly based solely on the manufactured fluff that passes for this person's brain. I remained calm, but I did not acquiesce: "Sorry, but how do you know that about my family member?"; "No, in actual fact that's not the case"; "I think you should ask for facts before you make assumptions" etc., but this person's motormouth was in overdrive and no listening was taking place, just a vitriolic spewing of prejudice the likes of which I have not heard in some time. 'Education' makes no difference to this particular issue amongst a certain segment of the Turkish populace: it is a blindly emotional, irrational and deep-grained brainwashed response. When you know and love a person who does not possess any of the negative characteristics of a so-called stereotype, you realise just how destructive and unfair such stereotypes really are. I was so angry afterwards that I was unable to concentrate well for the rest of the day; I just kept thinking of the self-righteous look that such people get on their faces as they bulldoze all rationality. And in fact, it makes sense that they just keep on shouting instead of listening, since intolerance cannot long survive when it's confronted with cold facts.

I've got an announcement to make: protesting perceived fascism with your own brand of fascism is not the solution. As MLK put it, "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."

'Martin Luther King smile' by Nelson Piedra, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic