In My Room at MEF International School

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Autobiographical songs are the usually the very definition of maudlin -- tearfully sentimental screeds. (For all you Dan Brown Da Vinci Code fans, the term derives from the Old French word Madeleine, describing the weeping of Mary Magdalene.) Brian Wilson’s song, “In My Room,” an early Beach Boys hit, touchingly portrays a boy describing how his bedroom is a haven from his teenage angst, but does not mention the Playboy magazines under his mattress.
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MEF: Model Educational Facility, or Marble Educational Farce. Here’s why I have come to this sad conclusion:
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MEF International School (MEFIS) was an afterthought, possibly intended to bring in more money to the MEF National School or, hopefully, some prestige. MEFIS is therefore the stepchild. Like Cinderella, we get the leftovers. My Room is nested on the third floor of the National School’s Music Building. When I must meet with administrators or colleagues, or even need to make photocopies, I face a long, uphill, exposed-to-the-weather walk to the building where the other MEFIS classrooms are located, as well as the cafeteria.
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My Room is actually located on the fourth floor by American standards, since in Turkey the ground floor is the bottom one and the first floor is the next one up (amazing concept!). However, to get to the ground floor, I have to walk down a flight of marble stairs before I can begin climbing the three flights of marble stairs to My Room. Each flight of stairs consists of 20 marble steps. There is no elevator, hence no wheelchair access. But then, of course, there are no handicapped people in Turkey, as well as no homeless people, no homosexuals, no radicals, etc. In Islamotropolis, these aberrations only occur among the infidels.
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My Room originally consisted of two L-shaped piano practice rooms. To create My Room, MEF simply removed the dividing wall. Get a piece of graph paper. Starting at the upper left, [1] draw a line down 6 squares; [2] now go horizontally to the right 12 squares; [3] go up 6 squares; [4] go left 4 squares; [5] go down 2 squares; [6] go left 4 squares; [7] go up 2 squares; [8] from there, draw a line to your starting point. You now have a crow, pigeon and seagull view of my room if the roof were removed (which, if such were to occur, would rapidly fill up with guano, since these birds are always swooping by or landing on window sills during the daylight hours).
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My desk with its circa 1995 computer faces the entryway [7]. On the opposite side of My Room is a mauve “Pearl River” Yamaha upright piano (just tuned today!). Behind the piano, the walls are filled with 3-tiered open wooden cabinets containing six guitars with broken strings, six dusty, unused electronic keyboards, boxes full of discarded drama texts, some ridiculous metallic, so-called Turkish drums, two nice conga drums and, closer, a freestanding cabinet containing my music theory packets and a CD player so old it does not have a pause function. Imagine trying to explain the significance of the six-note French horn transition between the major theme groups in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 without being able to pause! I knew you would understand my frustration.
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My Room has two large windows at stages [1] and [3]. The window at stage [1] has protective metal bars to prevent someone from entering my room from the adjacent roof. The window at stage [3] has no such bars, so that a child could fall four stories to certain death by gravity + marble. So, by MEF thinking, it is more important to protect the unusable guitars and dusty electronic keyboards than the children. For reasons obvious to me but not to MEF, I have positioned my piano in front of this window.
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Position [2] consists of a solid wall of window panes, with a magnificent view of an escarpment of apartment complexes that rises higher than the school, looming above an under-developed valley adorned with serpentine, broken-linked waves of attractive, modern stone walls separated by waste dumps and hungry dogs. Somebody spent a lot of lira to put up those pretty walls, but nothing has yet to come of this speculative investment.
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Into My Room come children from grades 5 through 9, winded from the climb up the flights of marble stairs. There are not enough chairs for the students in grades 8 (24) and 9 (22) to sit, so the late-comers have to plunk down on the floor or squeeze in onto the heaters. I have to buy pencils and sharpeners to give to those students who arrive without them. Turkish pencils do not have erasers, and classrooms do not have wall-mounted pencil sharpeners. Every student is expected to carry from class to class a zippered cloth bag the size and shape of a Taco Del Mar burrito containing the equivalent of the contents of a competent secretary’s right-hand desk drawer: pencils, pens, erasers, pencil sharpeners, highlighters, adhesive tape, white out, permanent markers, post-its, paper clips, rubber bands, you name it. In the meantime, since I received no classroom supplies this year (I even had to buy my own printer and ink cartridges), I provide my students anything extra or lost from the above categories from a mobile cabinet, a three-drawer knee-banger on coasters with broken knobs that fits under my desk and slides away at the slightest nudge so that I frequently have to disappear under my desk to pull it back into sight, usually bumping my head in front of my bemused students. (Actually, I always do that on purpose to make them laugh.)
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I am going to miss these kids, and my fellow ex-pat teachers. But I will not regret leaving MEF International School.
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