Logan_CP#3

J Logan Matthews
CP#3
Sep 11, 2014 (12:00PM-1:00PM)
Pitaria

This was my second time meeting with Ibrahim. This time I waited for him in the lobby for the CIES lunch break to begin. We began talking as we walked to Pitaria for lunch. I asked him about his classes and we ended up discussing some of his grievances and his opinions of what good and bad teaching styles are. The two main points I seemed to pick up were that regular review and comprehension checks were preferred as well as the use of visual aids. It seemed like pretty standard stuff to me but he did not like it when a teacher might go into speed lecture mode to wrap up the classes' learning goals. We moved on to other subjects as we settled down to eat.

I suppose it is nice to have a businessman for a conversation partner as he paid for my lunch that day. However, feeling obligated, I helped him fill out a personal interview form for one of his CIES classes. As one of the last questions was about the three qualities I would look for in a relationship and since I replied with: "Intelligence, Honesty, and Spontaneity;" I had to explain my choices to some degree. Ibrahim's seasoned advice was to seek women of average intelligence to spare myself future problems. I tried to rationalize, mentioning the study I had read once where men with intelligent partners reported greater satisfaction. Of course we both knew the problem lay in infidelity, for reasons that are better left unsaid in a monitored blog. Yet I expressed my inclination towards loyalty and we discussed the finer points of honesty. He still thought that spontaneity was more of a bad quality than a good one until we related it to open-mindedness.

We drifted into other topics of interest like me and one of my friend's interest in nomadic civilizations that are being forced into settlement, namely the Mongolians for their mining industry. I asked about what will happen when he returns to Turkey since this is his last or second to last session at CIES. He told me that he will begin using English in business immediately instead of taking a test like the TOEFEL. He had some doubts about his efficacy in English and I tried to ameliorate them by telling him to focus on the lingo specific to his field. Lingo was one of those words that at this point I was typing on my phone notepad so we did not have to raise our voices in the restaurant and he would immediately translate it into to Turkish if he was unsure. We went through many words like this in a quick manner. So for Lingo I gave some examples in Finance like a Bull/Bear/Mixed market. This led to digressions into the schools of economics for which he still remembered when he was in business school some fourteen years ago. I applauded him on his memory when I mentioned forgetting small things like the path in the Hecht house parking lot leading down to the street sidewalk as we walked back to our studies.