December
11, 2015
Last
Friday, Alex and I were invited to guest lecture at our university
representative, Meltem’s English classes. We skipped our Turkish classes that
morning and were excited at this opportunity to actually ‘lecture’ since we
don’t get to do that through our speaking clubs. Meltem said we could lecture
about any topic we wanted, she wanted this exercise to strengthen her students’
English listening skills.
Alex
decided to create a PowerPoint about Christmas, as she loves the holiday, and I
decided to lecture about American government, as I love America and government
studies. I think it’s important for students to understand American vocabulary
that they might see or hear in the news, such as “Congress,” “Supreme Court
ruling” and “Secretary Kerry.” I wanted to them have a basic understanding of how our government is set up and how it works. In order to understand why
our government is a democracy, I whizzed through early American history and
lectured about colonialism, “no taxation without representation,” and the war
for independence from the British monarchy. When
we got to the slide about Presidential Elections, kids shouted out "Is
Donald Trump really going to win?" They were also confused about why we
have 2-term limits on presidents..."if it's a democracy, people should be
able to reelect a president if they want, right?" I told them while that
is true, we prefer diversity of ideas to tyranny. They also asked a lot about
Native Americans, much to my surprise. Needless to say, it was an engaging
discussion and very much enjoyed by me. At the end of my lecture, I shared some
photos of growing up in the DC area and my White House internship. On my
timeline slide, I told them I empathize with their struggle to learn English,
as it is also my second language.
After our lectures, kids played a trivia game and
enjoyed being competitive with one another. For example, we quizzed them with
questions such as “What are some Christmas traditions?” and “What do the stars
and stripes represent on the American flag?” I felt
like a true cultural ambassador on this day, because I was quite literally
sharing with them American history and government. I could tell students were
enlightened to learn that the stars on our flag represent the 50 states of
America, and the stripes represent the 13 original colonies. Sometimes the best part about teaching is the moment you see your students enlightened by knowledge.
