school and.. well.. school - Istanbul, Turkey
4 Stars This place was Great visited Oct 28, 2005
After a few weeks of working 35 or more contact hours a week, my hours have finally dropped to something reasonable, and I might even have time to write more often! I'm now working full weekends - at school from 9 til 7 saturday and sunday, but during the week I only have 3 evening classes - each three hours long, so I practically feel like I'm on holiday during the week. The classes are mostly allright though - each three or 4 hours long and all beginner, elementary or pre-intermediate. I prefer the beginner and elementary classes - it's nice to know exactly what your students know and don't know, pretty much, because you've taught them everything they do know! I've also started turkish lessons, just for fun. My colleague Suzanne and I thought it would be interesting to be on the other side of a beginners immersion language lesson for a change. And of course, turkish might be useful in the next few months. Unfortunately we started with a completely crap teacher, and pretty much failed to learn anything useful for the first week (8 hours) of classes. I don't know where they found this teacher, but she didn't seem to have any discernible teaching skills at all. She arrived over an hour late for our first lesson, and 40 minutes late for the second. On the third she brought a friend who sat next to her at the front of the classroom, and they conversed in turkish occasinally during the lesson. In front of us. The lesson content consisted of random lists of words - apparently whatever came into her head at the time. In the second lesson (that's after about 4 hours of class) she decided to teach us every verb tense that exists in turkish - all the suffixes that is. Of course, she didn't speak any english, so she was explaining entirely in turkish, which of course we didn't understand a word of, and we didn't actually know any verbs to add the suffixes to anyway. Mercifully, that teacher couldn't come at all for the 1st lesson in the second week of our course, so it was taken by the school director - the woman we had arranged to take the course with. And in those 4 hours, we actually learnt to say things! Whole sentences! And questions! We (the three of us in the class) had pretty much determined to ask her for a different teacher that day anyway, so it was a nice surprise. We begged her to continue teaching us, and, by changing the days of our classes, it was possible. It just means I have to go in to Taksim on my 2 days off as well every day that I work. But that's worth it if I'm actually learning something. The course will run about 8 weeks in total, so it won't be forever anyway. I'd better go get ready for today's lesson. I'm sure there was some homework I had to do... Kat