Teaching Methods in Turkey

Last week I had a disagreement with my professor. She was arguing that since Haiti hadn’t developed under neo-liberal policies of the Washington Consensus, we might conclude that developing countries shouldn’t adopt neo-liberalism. I didn’t defend neo-liberalism, but I gave some convoluted comment that Haiti’s unemployment, corruption, and political instability were too insurmountable for any development policy to succeed. I eventually clarified: “I think that any policy path that Haiti followed could only lead to varying levels of failure,” a view which my professor called “very dark.”

This was as close to a discussion as I’ve come in most of my seven political science classes at Boğaziçi University. My professors here are probably more well-educated and more talented than my teachers at Arizona State University. But they’re generally not better teachers.

To explain this point, I’ll classify my teachers into four categories: Egalitarian Facilitators, Structured and Participation-based Lecturers, the Charismatic Professors, and the Uncharismatic Lecturers.

My best educational experiences have come from Egalitarian Facilitators. These teachers, inspired by a romantic Socratic tradition, often emphasize to their students, “I really don’t know anything.” They make students sit in a circle and then sit down next to us, rather than standing at the front of the room. The class discusses ideas, from which important points organically emerge. Students get to know each other’s ideas better, and teachers can better gauge what ideas have connected and which ones haven’t.

I haven’t looked into it, but I assume this style is better for retention. Active discussion or debate will make the class and the ideas more memorable. I’ve often left such classes still arguing with the other students in my head. There’s also social pressure to learn and present one’s ideas in an organized, coherent, and persuasive fashion. Indeed, in those instances where I make a fool of myself in a class discussion, my ego drives me to learn the material even better.

Unfortunately, I have not had any classes like this at Boğaziçi University, although I have heard they exist. Perhaps the reason more professors don’t use this strategy is that it’s high risk. For instance one of my Global Studies professors at ASU invited class discussion and tried to be casual with the students. But he actually didn’t know anything. It was a problem.

The second category is Structured and Participation-based Lecturers. These professors cling to their role as the teacher, rather than a “first among equals” position, but they recognize the value of student discussion and comments. Class discussion is an addendum to the lecture, if necessary.

Two of my younger professors here at Boğaziçi employ this style almost identically. Both use power-point presentations that communicate the broad strokes, and then they draw in the details themselves. At the end, or intermittently throughout the lecture, the teachers will ask if there are any questions. It’s sometimes a discussion or sometimes a test of who’s been paying attention.

Importantly, these tenders for questions are often met with silence. My Turkish classmates seem loathe to participate, and my impression is that many don’t do the readings. Often exchange students, though an extreme minority in the class, make up a majority of the class discussion. If I were one of these professors, I would be skeptical of using the Egalitarian Facilitation approach.

The third category is that of the Charismatic Professor. He or she is an expert from upon high. I do not mind this approach at all, as long as the professor is moderately entertaining and truly an expert.

At Arizona State this approach was used by my National Security professor. He spoke clearly, concisely, and fairly about US foreign policy and national security in the late twentieth century. Two of my professors at Boğaziçi also belong in this category, including my professor for Turkish Politics, who is also the chair of the department. He’s a dynamic speaker. He makes jokes (usually in Turkish sadly) and even uses profanity. He lectures on very big ideas in a way that guarantees retention. That said, his lectures are highly repetitive and unwieldy—he could benefit from a little more of the structured and participation-based method.

I think that many a doctoral candidate dreams of being the charismatic professor. It’s a position of power and prestige, and it promises a payoff similar to a recital or a monologue. But only some have the talent to actually be a charismatic professor.

Those that fail in this regard fall into the lowly fourth category—the Uncharismatic Lecturer. This speaker may well be an expert, but regardless he or she is unable to communicate and educate.

This often entails a specific deficiency in public speaking. For example, my first political science professor at ASU used an impossibly slow rate of speech. He told long stories to explain twenty-second ideas. I would hear the beginning of a sentence, anticipate where it was going, work a little on my Sudoku puzzle, and return my attention just as he concluded.

Sadly, I have had several professors like this at Boğaziçi, including a teacher whose sentences are so long that by the time she finishes her thought its beginning could be published in history books. In one class period I counted the number of words she used in seven randomly chosen sentences. The shortest had 90 words, while the longest had 170. Never in my life have I used a sentence with 170 words. There are probably fewer than ten people in the world with this same affliction. It would be the equivalent of converting this entire blog post to nine sentences. Following her is a feat of patience, focus, and intelligence. Two hours would kill lesser beings.

For Uncharismatic Lecturers, I recommend they switch to the structured and participation-based lecture method. A power-point presentation with bullet points at least gives students a chance of getting back into the lecture when their minds wander. If students are encouraged to participate, topics of interest to the students are more likely to come up, and the monotony is at least occasionally disrupted.

For those teachers who successfully use structured and participation-based lectures, I encourage them to experiment more with the approach of Egalitarian Facilitation. Even in Boğaziçi, where many of the students enter and leave class speaking no words in between, I believe that this method could work. A friend attends a seminar where the students can speak in Turkish, and he says jokes and intelligent points abound. Another friend has a German professor who encourages class presentations and discussion. Apparently the students operate fine with these expectations.

Broadly speaking, my American teachers more often fall in the first three categories, including several extremely good experiences with Egalitarian Facilitation. My Turkish teachers are more likely to fall into the final three, and my best teachers here use the Structured and Participation-based teaching method. Especially now that I’m leaving Turkey soon and I have already registered for next semester’s classes at ASU, I am acutely aware of how much I will miss Istanbul, Boğaziçi, and Turkey. But I will be quite glad to be back with American teachers.

Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland is a terrible movie for several reasons.

First, the story transparently replicates The Chronicles of Narnia and other recent fantasy films. In the third act when the forces of the White Queen and the Red Queen are preparing to war over Wonderland, one doesn’t feel like they’re watching an epic and important event. There’s no emotional attachment to the White Queen, nor to the freedom of Wonderland itself. Likewise, the audience doesn’t feel any real enmity toward the Red Queen. She’s idiosyncratic and humorous, nothing worse. Of course fantasy films must have a conclusive final battle in which good defeats evil, so Tim Burton obliges.

Second, Johnny Depp’s performance, like most of his work with Tim Burton, is a stunt and a waste of talent. His performance as Hatter lacks all depth beyond oddity. Johnny Depp is a genuinely talented actor who has made himself a commodity of quirkiness, and his final dance scene is a profoundly embarrassing blemish on his career. Personally, I hope Johnny Depp and Tim Burton never work together again. This pair once made the masterful and enchanting Ed Wood, which makes their combined failures in the last decade all the more disappointing.

Many will laud the film’s visual effects and creative set design, but after Middle-Earth, Hogwarts, Narnia, and Pandora, Wonderland was nothing special.

Finally, Alice in Wonderland’s ending is painfully ignorant. Alice saves the tabula rasa world of Wonderland, and then decides to expand her father’s company to China. She even explains that this shouldn’t be difficult from their “foothold” in Hong Kong. History students will recall the Opium Wars and the Unequal Treaties, events by which British merchants—like Alice—effectively brought ruin to China, home to many of the world’s greatest empires. Good thing she saved Wonderland. Now to destroy a real country.

It’s been a long time since Ed Wood and Beetle Juice. Tim Burton may only have movies like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left in him. This looks to be the case considering his next project is a remake of his own short film, Frankenweenie. If so, he should never make a movie again, and he should also stop ruining Johnny Depp’s career.

Smokers and Climate Change Deniers

Watching a soccer game at a Turkish bar reliably produces one moment of happiness—even if neither team scores. When the halftime whistle blows, all the young men clear their chairs and go outside to smoke. So few people remain inside—where it’s been illegal to smoke since 2009—you’d think someone called in a bomb threat.

Smoking is alarmingly common here, with 60% of Turkish men declaring themselves regular smokers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization lists Turkey as the world’s seventh largest producer of cigarettes, and the eighth largest market for consumption. Indeed, an Italian classmate told me that a common phrase for heavy smokers in Europe is that they are “smoking like a Turk.”

There’s some ugly reasons for this high level of consumption. “Anti-smoking groups say international cigarette companies in the past picked the Middle East as a key market and distributed free cigarettes to promote them.” Likewise, the Turkish Temperance Society says that tobacco companies introduced higher-nicotine, shorter cigarettes in Turkey in anticipation of 2009’s smoking ban. When I first read this I filed it into my voluminous, ever-growing mental cabinet of Turkish conspiracy theories. But actually in November of 2007 Phillip Morris International really did introduce “Marlboro Intense Cigarettes” to Turkey. I suppose nothing is beyond an industry that has tobacco vending machines in Japan.

There is some good news. Turkey’s smoking rate is increasing by between 1% and 1.5% every year, whereas the rest of the developing world averages an annual increase of 3.4%, according to the World Health Organization's smoking statistics from 2002.

This is quite a culture shock for a student from the United States. Consumption of cigarettes in the US has decreased by half since the mid-1960s, such that now approximately 23.9% of American men and 18% of American women are regular smokers. I suspect that many members of my generation were effectively brainwashed by dozens of hours of DARE programs and PE classes dedicated to proving smoking’s lethal abilities—I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.

In a recent Brookings Institution Report, Hakan Altinay, an alumnus of my political science department here at Boğaziçi University, used the metaphor of global smoking to discuss climate change. Over a billion people in the world continue to smoke cigarettes despite the high likelihood that this will decrease their future quality of life, and possibly kill them. Likewise, over a billion people (at least a hundred million or so living in the United States) seem willing to continue current patterns of consumption and carbon emission despite the strong evidence that this will decrease their future quality of life, and possibly kill them. In both cases, people ignore evidence (often with the help of embedded interests) and defer a high cost now for a much higher probable cost in the future. To make matters worse, these people are voters.

When I see Turkish men file out of the bar to light up, I have many feelings. The cultural difference and the physical comedy of everyone leaving entertains me. I feel a little disgusted—all of those people smell like ashtrays. And I feel a bit of condescension. My government effectively spent tax revenue to train me that smoking was bad while these Turks, for whatever reason, did not find this healthier, better smelling path.

But I also imagine what a Turk feels when they see a road of Ford Explorers with one person in the driver’s seat, dozens of golf courses in the desert, and heaps of trash bags on the curbsides. We have our equally disgusting and unenlightened patterns.

At least Turkish smokers are mainly hurting themselves. By contrast, our willing destruction of the earth will mostly hurt millions of other people, particularly in developing countries like Turkey.

Sıcak Fuzz

“Why do the police carry machine guns?”

It’s true. If you see a police officer on patrol in Istanbul, Turkey, it’s quite likely that at his side (I’ve never seen a female police officer) there will be an MP5 sub-machine gun.

Now, if someone were to shoot a woman in front of a policeman, I imagine the officer wouldn’t be able to use that weapon, for fear of also shredding the dozens of civilians that occupy just about any street in Istanbul. They’d have to chase on foot, which is probably harder to do with an MP5 slung on your shoulder.

It’s also odd that police officers in Turkey don’t patrol the streets as much as they guard the police station—a more militaristic, bunker approach. If you were mugged on Istiklal Caddesi (Istanbul’s busiest street—probably in the top ten worldwide), you might be able to find a police officer to help you. But walk a hundred meters down a particular side-street, and you’ll run into the police station, most likely with half a dozen heavily armed police officers standing outside of it. A Turkish friend of mine assures me that police stations are a common target of terrorist attacks, so these battle formations are necessary, but I have been unable to find any news reports of it myself.

My first five months in Turkey, I managed to avoid police officers altogether. In the last month and a half, I have been less lucky.

When my back pack was stolen in Antalya in early February, I was at a police station within the hour. I didn’t have any illusions that my backpack would be recovered, but I supposedly needed to file a police report to get a new passport from the US Consulate.

Kafka wrote about days like this. Of the ten or so police officers in the station at this time, everyone was busy, but no one was working. Walk around. Check on things. Shuffle some papers. Talk to someone waiting to make a police report. Smoking break. Drink çay. Bam—you’re a police officer, and you even get to carry a machine gun.

The long wait was on account of a translator since my Turkish wasn’t good enough to fully explain what happened.

“I can call a friend who speaks Turkish and she can translate,” I said.

“No. We’ll have a translator.”

An older man with bloodshot eyes, a fat lip, and a gash on his forehead tells the officers he has a friend who knows some English.

“No. We have a translator.”

For three hours thereafter I waited for the translator, whose arrival was as mysterious and elusive as the messiah’s. At various times I was told:

“The translator is coming.”

“The translator will be here in a half hour.”

“There is no translator.”

Finally, the officers advised me to leave my phone number with them; they’d call me when the translator arrived. I was mostly relieved when that call never came. And luckily the US Consulate never asked for my police report.

I interacted with Turkish police again this past weekend when I was renewing my tourist visa. The process is shady—take a bus from Istanbul to the border, cross the border, turn around, and buy a new visa. My sense is that it’s frowned upon but too common for officers to prevent it.

There’s also a nuance in the geography of the border. First there’s the gate to leave Turkey. A kilometer or so away is the gate to enter Bulgaria. In between is a complex that includes a police station.

The last time I executed this immigration maneuver I simply exited Turkey, went through the police station, and re-entered Turkey, without ever officially entering Bulgaria. This time a police officer said I had to go into Bulgaria. It was snowing outside with a strong wind that blew the icy rain into your face, and my feet were already frozen.

“I did this before and I didn’t have to go all the way to Bulgaria.”

“The rules changed.”

Anyone who believes the police officer at this point in the story should never travel. Rules clearly didn't matter to this person. When I entered the room he and his co-worker had been surfing YouTube, which is illegal in Turkey. Unable to articulate my skepticism and discontent in Turkish, I made the walk, and twenty minutes later I had a new visa.

These are the extent of my own experiences with Turkish police officers, but another story I heard was less innocent. While bumming free internet at the hostel where a friend of mine works, I overheard a German woman in her mid-fifties retelling the woes of her last few days. This woman had a Turkish boyfriend who was usually “nice,” except when he beat her up.

On this occasion her boyfriend had beaten her—I didn’t catch why—and she went to the police station. Her boyfriend came too. She doesn’t speak much Turkish, so the police asked her boyfriend what happened. They decided it was a personal matter and that the two of them should just go home. The German woman said that if they don’t arrest her boyfriend he would beat her again. That’s exactly what happened.

A few minutes from the police station, he continued to beat her in the middle of the street. He broke her teeth and pulled out clumps of her hair (I could see the patches left of it on her head), but pedestrians also treated this as a personal matter. Finally two Western European young men stopped her boyfriend, and brought her back to the police station.

After this second beating in the same day, the police told the German woman they would arrest her boyfriend and keep him locked up for the night so she could leave the city, and country, without him trying to stop her. Five minutes after she had left the police station, her boyfriend called her. He had been let go by the police immediately and was now following her on the street.

This woman’s experience was horrifying of course, but it’s important we don’t exclusively blame Turkish or Muslim culture. Three of my friends have a remarkably similar story from their travels in Greece. A pregnant woman was being beaten by her husband in a public place. Here also the police and bystanders all agreed it was a personal matter.

Importantly, I don’t mean to demonize Turkish police. For example, last weekend after I received my new visa, two police officers offered to give me a ride back to the bus station in their police car. I didn’t ask for this favor, nor was there a compelling reason for them to offer it, but it saved me from waiting for public transportation in the cold. They gave me recommendations of the best places to eat, and dropped me in front of a restaurant they liked.

On the whole, however, I hope I don’t have to deal with Turkish police again before I leave.

Where Do Rights Come From?

I recently started my second semester at Boğaziçi University, and this term I have classes that are narrowly targeted to my interest in global development. One such class is the Politics of Developing Countries. In our second week, one of the articles I read was Charles Tilly’s “Where Do Rights Come From?” Of the two dozen or so articles I’ve read through the first weeks of school, this gets my prizes for least painful reading experience and most provocative content.

Charles Tilly (1929-2008), an American Ivy-League professor, argues in his essay that civil, political, and social rights developed in Europe as a result of international and intra-national struggle. Tilly explains that the pre-18^th century preference of European regimes to use mercenaries was becoming increasingly expensive and unreliable in the 1700s, necessitating the conscription of national militaries. However, using a nationally conscripted military carries several problems to a society: able-bodied men are removed from the economy; fathers and husbands leave their families for long and uncertain amounts of time; and a new layer of taxes has to be permanently levied on the population. With all these drawbacks, it’s obvious why empires (including mine) have opted to use mercenaries when possible.

To assuage unrest from new taxes and divided families, rulers needed a carrot for the population—like rights. According to Tilly, rulers negotiated away political rights and freedoms to keep the populace cooperative.

A significant variable in each country was the sector of society with which rulers negotiated. If rulers only had to bargain with feudal lords or large landowners to get their peasantry to fight, then those lords would gain increased liberties, but the public at large would remain fairly repressed—Russia is an example. In Sweden, by contrast, rulers bargained at the village level, forcing them to confer more rights unto the population than other European states did.

In this way, he argues, citizens’ rights resulted from—of all things—war.

Written in between the lines of this essay is a centuries-old conflict of paradigms—society evolving as a result of class struggle versus society progressing through the evolution of ideas. Of course, I was raised to understand that rights were the natural product of the Enlightenment and the natural rights philosophers.

If we take Tilly’s argument as true, then we should accept that the effects of these negotiations three hundred years ago have been extraordinarily persistent. For example, people in Scandinavian countries—where rulers had to bargain with village elders rather than regional lords—continue to be the most free in the world. In The Economist’s 2008 Democracy Index, the six most democratic countries were Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland.

Likewise, if Russia’s slow expansion of rights is the result of the ability of rulers to “coopt well-established regional power holders,” rather than a generic cultural temperament, it also continues today. Indeed, Russian leaders Dmitri Medvedev and Vldimir Putin each have approval ratings around 70% even though 95% of Russians feel they don’t have a say in their country’s policies. Perhaps that’s because 43% say the country should be ruled with an “iron fist.” This could all be the legacy of how Russia militarized, or it could be a reflection of something deeper and longer lasting within Russian culture. Further still it could be Russia’s geographic distance from the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, proving the point one way or the other is difficult. But while Tilly effectively makes a case that the creation of national militaries could have led to the empowerment of Europe’s citizenries, I don’t see an argument for why it couldn’t have been a result of Enlightenment thinking, or some combination of the two.

I think we can see how Tilly’s thesis could be flawed by taking a look at the devolution of civil and social rights to African Americans in the United States. Imagine being a historian two hundred years from now explaining the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It actually makes a lot of sense, sitting at the desk of this future-historian, to look at the 1960s and see that two decades earlier African Americans fought and died in World War II just as white Americans did. This contribution to society would have given African Americans some bargaining power to attain equal social rights. Particularly on the eve of a new war in Vietnam, the rulers of the United States could no longer withhold rights from a major part of their conscripted military force without creating massive unrest within the society—our cause and effect is impressive, no?

However, such a view excludes more than a hundred years of ideological and economic progress that preceded the Civil Rights Movement, all the way from abolitionism to the Great Migration and the assimilation of African Americans in northern cities.

From my view it would seem that the Civil Rights Movement was a significant achievement resulting from centuries of cultural transformation and internal struggle, a transformation that was influenced—but not caused—by the presence of African Americans in the United States’ conscripted military.

Admittedly, I have done much less in my effort to contradict Charles Tilly than he did to argue his thesis in the first place. Nevertheless, my sense of history tells me that the devolution of civil, political, and social rights in Europe was probably—like the American Civil Rights Movement—a larger cultural process that also included intra-state power struggles.