I have been wanting to post an update on teaching and tonight feels like the right time: it was parent-teacher conference time on Google Meet, and today is my two-month anniversary in Turkey.
I landed in Izmir two months ago this afternoon, and I was immediately whisked away by my principal and the school driver to his home and a warm Izmiri welcome.
I remember the details so well. We had chicken dürüm for supper, and I went for a walk along the harbor and witnessed my first Aegean sunset. I'll never forget it. It's filed away with my first Arizona sunset (1994) among my most cherished memories.
But this is a blog about my new school, so enough flashbacks. Happy anniversary to me!
Describing MEF
MEF Izmir (the acronym is words in Turkish) is a school that I was prepared for, but it still yielded a lot of surprises. The student count is 152, and that's across preschool through Grade 12. I estimate that there are 30-40 kids in the preschool/kindergarten program. The school has two floors, with lower grades (up to 5) on the bottom floor and middle and upper secondary on the top floor. My biggest class is 11, and my smallest class has 4 students.
With all the elementary kids on the campus, there is a lot of play. One of my assigned duties is watching the monkey bars during the Wednesday lunch play period, making sure no precious necks are broken. The playground is known as "the garden."
The big kids have their own place to hang out which is known as the 'red pitch', where they can play basketball or kick a soccer ball around on the break. Another soccer field, called the 'green pitch,' is used by elementary kids and has two goals for soccer practice. Besides my classes, I have supervision four times a week during break periods, of which there are 3: 15-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a 40-minute break for lunch and play.
Here's a video I made during a break last week:
Unique aspects of MEF Culture
Because there are fewer kids to teachers, there is an emphasis on personal interaction -- something that was hard to do at SCHS, my school for the past 18 years, with a student population of 1500+. I am the senior homeroom teacher. This means that I have seniors every day for the first 5 minutes, during which time I am expected to make announcements and check in on them to see how they're doing. I need to know their grades, their favorite clases, their goals beyond high school.
The kids make it easy. They are just as curious about me, and they like to ask me questions about America. Last Friday one of my colleagues caught them gossipping about me and another female teacher. I was touched, as I haven't really led a gossip-worthy life before.
One aspect I really like about my homeroom group is that it includes two American-born Turks, a Scottish boy and a Koren girl. One American-Turkish girl, named "Irem," gives me free Turkish lessons before school. I write out sentences in Turkish the night before, and she corrects them for me. She has some teaching qualities that are coming out in these lessons.
The kids all call me "Mister." That's it. The standard titles at MEF are "Mr/Miss First-name." I expected to be called "Mr. James" this year, but it has always been "mister" or "sir," as in, "Can I use the toilet, Mister?" or "Oh, mister, do you have a stapler I could use?"
It seems strange still.
I'm teaching Year 8 for the first time (the word "grade" is never used after the number here, and I have yet to hear the words, "freshman," "sophomore," "junior," or "senior." It's Year 8, Year 9, etc.) It's one of the most motivated groups I've ever taught. I started them off with a creative writing unit. Now we're reading The Book Thief, a book they chose over The Outsiders and Fahrenheit 451. It's the kind of class that can do a skit or mock trial without breaking a sweat. They take my most creative ideas and demand more. It's pretty cool, and it's my most diverse group, too: 2 Brazilians, a French girl, Japanese boy, 2 German boys, a Pole, a Turkish-French boy, and a Turkish-American girl.
In Year 9 -- the best freshman class I've taught since my cousin, Aaron, was one of my students back in 1999 -- I have a student with one of the most interesting names I have seen: Can. I remember seeing it on the class list and doing a double-take. Of course, that was when I was ignorant of Turkish, a language in which the letter "c" is pronounced like the English letter "j" and the letter "j" is pronounced like the French "je." Can's name -- and I have to say it a lot, as he is the kind of 9th-grader who speaks every word as it pops into his mind -- is pronounced like "John." The town from which I complete this blog, "Selcuk," would be pronounced "Seljuk" by Americans.
The kids have such fascinating backgrounds. I was chatting with the father of a Turk-French Year 8 student this week. The father was concerned because "Teo" had been homeschooled the past four years, while the family was living on a boat, sailing around the world. A large number of families work at the NATO base in Izmir, and their kids have lived in many places. I'm supposed to teach them about the world?
My Year 10 group is the most challenging. I have two students, an Iranian and a Korean, who would walk into any American 10th-grade classroom and be at the top of the class. They're the ones who ask me about who/whom or ask me for definitions to words I, myself, hardly know.
In the same class, I have 3 Iranian girls and a Polish girl who are still learning English. Two of the girls often have their phones out, and when I check, they are on Google Translate, trying to read the texts. My challenge this year, then, is to prepare about 4 kids for exams and advancement, and to prepare another 4 to become versant or fluent in English: all in the same classroom, and in the same 45-minute chunks.
My Year 11 class has been more of a challenge. We're in the first year of a two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme course, and the results have been mixed. There are three or four "serious" scholarly kids -- boys from Malta and Poland, and a girl from Italy, and about the same number of kids who are still showing a Year-10 level of maturity. We are reading Susaki Endo's book, Silence, which is about martyrdom and crises of faith. That doesn't make my job easy in the least.
Another aspect of MEF that is really curious is that we have a House system -- a la Harry Potter -- that is led by an indomitable Scot, who is also our PE teacher. The four houses are named after four of Turkey's most amazing places: Troy, Ephesus, Pergamum, and Cappadocia. From preschool through Year 12, students are randomly assigned to houses. We had our first house day recently when students played games and competed for 'house points.' Teachers can also give out house points as motivation for class activities -- I gave house points to the winners of my mock trial in Grade 8.
Teachers have houses, too. I am in Pergamum, and our color is green. I had fun competing with the kids in several events and winning points for our team. This is such a cool tool for motivation, I'm surprised schools back in the US haven't picked up on this. I remember seeing houses at a British-American school in Tbilisi during my visit several years ago -- there the houses were named after planets.
Some things I really like about teaching at MEF.
Teachers are respected in Turkey. I mean it. I had a parent call me "professor" tonight, which left me stammering. We can get full-year season passes to archaeological sites and museums in Turkey for 20 lira ($1.10), and we also qualify for reduced fares on bus and subway lines.
The school provides coffee and tea in the teacher workroom, and the janitorial staff restock the supplies, refill the water and tea, and keep the place clean. I know it's strange to say this, but I really appreciate a cup of tea. I realize that US school districts would see a 15-20% increase in productivity if they just stocked the staffrooms with Diet Coke! Simple perks yield big results.
Moreover, the school provides breakfast and lunch every day. For breakfast we have simit (Turkish, sesame-seed bagels), boiled eggs, and all the incredients for what is known in the States as a "Greek salad" -- sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, feta cheese, olives. I will blog about the Turkish kahvalti breakfasts at a later time.
Lunches are delicious: rice or pasta, soup, and a topping of vegetables/meat. I mentioned once that I was allergic to beef, and the staff always have a vegetarian alternative ready if there is et (beef) in the food. Wow!
I never was a big fan of cooked vegetables, but the Turks have a secret. They serve yoghurt with lunch, and a bit of yoghurt mixed with veggies tastes delicious. I haven't turned down a single meal since I've been in Turkey, the food is all so good.
I have really caring colleagues here. I don't write this to cast aspersions on colleagues at my last school, but we were professional and all had families/lives to go home to at the end of the school day. I think that my MEF colleagues and I are bonded by the "strangers in a strange land" factor, so we're more attuned to one another.
Two examples:
Ten days ago, the Spanish teacher came to talk to me before school. The previous night, most of the teachers had been in Izmir for Trivia Night at a bar. I hadn't gone--I had done some stuff at my home and would have had a 20-minute subway ride. My colleague was concerned. "You need to come to these events," she told me. "We missed you."
She was right. The next day, a Lebanese colleague took us to a restaurant in Bornova (a nice suburb of Izmir) to test the authenticity of the Lebanese cooking there. I didn't miss out. I had a blast, especially since the Lebanese teacher (there are 3 on my floor) ordered all the dishes for us and told us how they were prepared.
Last Friday, the Spanish teacher, the biology teacher (a Philippina) and a preschool teacher (South African) went to the seaside for a day trip. I tagged along. Total blast. That trip will have its own blog, too, at some point. Here's a photo of us under one of many bouganvillea arbors in the town of Alaçati.
Bottom line: it's nice to have colleagues looking out for me here. I'm really grateful.
Things I Miss
Plugs. My classroom has three plugs, all along the front wall, and they're the big, round plugs that the rest of the world uses. I moved my desk to the back of the room to let students get closer to the smart board, but I will need an extension cord to plug in my laptop for recharging.
Mail. I cannot figure out the Turkish mail system. As far as I can tell, there are no public mailboxes. Today I mailed my absentee ballot for the November elections in Tennessee, and I had to walk two miles to the post office in downtown Gaziemir. I didn't receive a stamp. I paid the cashier, and they took it to the back to mail it. I get out of school at 4:30, and the post office closes at 5:00, so I usually have to call a taxi to get me there on time. I have yet to receive a postal delivery here. I mailed myself two packages from the States before I left. One I had to go to customs in Izmir to pick up, the other was--apparently--sent home. (It hasn't been delivered as far as I can tell two months later.) Neither was delivered to the address of my school, which had been the intention when I mailed them.
Final Thoughts: A World-class Teacher
A few years ago, I got really ambitious and started applying for state- and national-level programs and fellowships. I got a lot of them, the best of which was the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellowship, which took me to the Republic of Georgia in 2015 and led to a GAPP exchange program with Germany at my school from 2018-2022.
Over the past seven years, I have thought a lot about becomeing a "world-class teacher," thinking of what a globally focused school would look like, what criteria I still needed to meet to reach that level. One of my first blogs here was about the challenge of learning global standards like the Cambridge IGCSE and International Baccalaureate, and that is still a work in progress for me.
I think I understand better what a world-class educator is, now that I'm in Turkey. It's someone who opens his arms to the world, begging Turkish kids for lessons in their language an hour before admitting to an Iranian that Farsi words sound like completed poems, or checking the translation of "quad bike" with a girl from Yorkshire, England (it's not something four people pedal, by the way, it's what I called an "ATV").
Can, today after a lesson on MLA citation, asked me if I would cite the Qu'uran as a book or as a bible (Grammarly has an option for both). I could have taught in Tennessee 10,000 years and never encountered that question.
So I feel at this point, two months into my time at MEF, that the move got me closer to what I wanted in my career. I had accomplished a lot at my last school, but I needed to learn to practice world-class teaching standards, instead of just reading about them.
I really miss the Year-10 German students I had last year, and I often hope they're doing great in Year 11 this year. But I also look at these talented 8th and 9th-grade students, and I relish the thought of the next 4-5 years as their teacher.
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