Ayse

Hey! Here is your English teacher. I come from Turkey, where I grew up under a Mediterranean sun before studying elementary school teaching at a university in Central Anatolia. Coming from that kind of climate, I still haven't quite figured out how to survive a Czech winter — every year I tell myself I'm prepared, and every year I'm wrong.

Before teaching stole my soul, I played football for years and then spent two seasons as a referee, which taught me the two most useful classroom skills there are: making instant decisions, and not caring when 25 people disagree with them loudly. Craving a new challenge, I got into volunteering here in Czechia, and somewhere between all that I also finally started the book I'd been "about to write" for roughly a decade.

My Czech lessons with locals have produced more comedy than competence so far, and I've made peace with that. When I'm not in the classroom, I'm usually cooking something ambitious, doing or watching some kind of sport and wrestling with a sudoku that's clearly above my level. What I love most, though, is the classroom itself — those small moments when a student suddenly gets it in English, and you can see it on their face before they even say a word.