Back last week, I took two AP tests. We needed a school to administer them. Hisar Eğitim offered that. So I took the tests. But the school let us come and try a day of school there. That was today.
Understand that this school is an English school. Most of the things are done in English.
We started out with Computers. We made an interesting video of three interesting places and Göktürk, where the school is. We would use the Street View on Google Maps. I didn't finish because class ended. But my first was Lancaster and my second was Lagonisi (or in the Greek alphabet, Λαγονησι) and I never got to my third. This was in Turkish. But there was someone assigned to help me and she explained what was going on.
After Computers was English. Everyone had read three books. They were Holes, Diary of Anne Frank, and The Outsiders. Then people made orange posters of the Essential Questions in the books. I have only read Holes although I know the basics of Diary of Anne Frank. Then the teams shared their posters. But during that, there was a planned fire drill. It got rid of the end of that part of English and took seven minutes out of the ten minute break. After that we finished sharing posters and then did work to get ready for the end of year English test. This was all obviously in English.
I was told that fire drills are either planned or when something explodes in the High School Chemistry Labs.
After English was Physical Education. This was again in Turkish and we had known it would be. We played Handball. I have played Handball before but this was a completely different game. I can explain the rules in a different post. They separate boys and girls which is different from the US. While we waited to go onto the field (there were three teams and only two played at a time), the boys wanted to ask me questions and literally wrestled for it. I left them and went somewhere else while they fought.
Then was lunch. They had fried churro like things that were very sweet and full of honey but were so hard to cut. It was as if I was cutting stone with a bread knife, which the second part of is true. But they were so good. And then I left.
Some of the things I noticed are that at school, everyone has iPads which they don't use during class but do during break. It also seems like they aren't as worried about kids talking. In Pennsylvania, when you waited in a hallway for your bus to come, you couldn't talk. And you couldn't talk going through the hallways either. This always seemed ridiculous. Why? And here it seems much more reasonable. And the atmosphere at Hisar seems more fun and less strict. So I thought Hisar was a nice school to visit. I think it was better than the schools in Lancaster and the school in Cape Town.
Carver, why do you think they don't have co-ed P.E. classes? Isn't it possible different schools both U.S. and Turkish have different discipline rules in regard to talking in hallways, class, etc... What did you think of the noise level? How large was the class size? I enjoyed your post. I wasn't quite sure why you left. Can you expound on that a bit?
ReplyDeleteI don't really know why they don't have co-Ed P.E. It might have something to with size (if one group is bigger) or the groups don't want to be together. Perhaps the girls don't fight over the teams (if they do sport as well.) There were two people who refused to be on the same team and because of this, the teacher who had made it our job to find teams had to come do it. It is possible it is just the difference between schools. I've only gone to one school in Turkey and one school district in the U.S. that I remember all that well. So I don't have much to compare. I didn't count the class sizes but we were told that the maximum class size is 22. I didn't have problems with the noise level on that day. During the first AP test however, there was Harry Potter music coming through an air vent. This distracted me. In the second, kids were talking in the hallway. This didn't really distract me.
ReplyDeleteHello Carver,
ReplyDeleteI'm a Hisar student and I know the answer to this question. Though I am new to the school, this system is not familiar to the older students too. You see, the system came to the school this year. And I asked the teachers about this the first P.E lesson to he teacher said something like "Because we have a lot of students we need to team them up, and to take turns teams need to wait a lot. And last year, because of that some teams didn't even get turns.". I was very surprised because in my old school (Eyüboğlu), we only had two classes of 17-20 students, in Hisar however, we have four classes of 20-21 students. I hope I that answers both of your questions!
-Lara Küçükyumuk