Out With the Old Job...

As some of you may or may not know, I have left the school where I was first employed in September and gone to work at the school where Mark works (though not the same branch - we are not that ridiculous). The switch happened over the course of the month of December, as my contract with my old schoo l required that I give full months notice before quitting. I left for a lot of reasons. The hours weren't very good (8am-7pm on Saturday and Sunday - not including the hour commute either way - and some weekdays, with lots of unpaid lesson planning and grading on top of it all). Also, I have found that, while I love being in a classroom to learn, there is something about facing 15 people who don't really want to be there and being forced to entertain them for four hours at a time and also to make them learn something when you're bored and they are bored. And all this was true even before the administration of this school implemented its "revolutionary" and horrible new pedagogical system.
Let me emphasize that this is definitely a profit-driven company that has very little of it's students' interests at heart. It is really like the Wal-Mart of Istanbul English "schools" - they have an incredibly high turn-over of employees, both teachers and management, as well as a huge turnover in customers/students. However, their advertising budget and familiarity around the city manage to keep enough new victims coming in. That said, I would also like to emphasize that the teachers, for the most part, really do have great consideration for the students' needs, and I feel particular sympathy for the head teachers who must liaise between the well-meaning teachers and the tight-fisted management (including the Director of Studies, who we will come back to).
So in an effort to drive up profits as this school begins to fall from grace in the Istanbul language school market, "Head Office" (the term for the rather unscrupulous entity that runs the institution, much like the Head Quarters of some malignant organization on some 70s action/spy show) demanded that all of its head teachers be removed from their classes and put to work writing a New Book and creating a New System which would set this school apart from the probably 15 other schools (it's a big market, as you can see). However, due to the top-down nature of this project and the lack of a real need for new materials when there are so many tried and true English teaching resources available which, in my opinion, the Director of Studies was too stubborn to give a chance, the thing was doomed from the start.
Innovative as it might be, being original alone doesn't make something better. The system is quite radical. In an 8 week course, the students study their level's worth of English in four blocks: grammar, reading, writing, and (finally) listening & speaking. The idea is that they will be introduced to all of the grammar topics on some cursory level, and then will review them four more times while looking at different skills and different vocabulary. An interesting idea, but, as we all could guess and then found with certainty upon practice, it was utterly non-functional. For the two week grammar block, students and teachers are dangerously bored while grammar is forced down throats at a break-neck pace with no time for games, conversation, or even really any sort of practice, other than the weekly examinations - now there is a HUGE flaw. I felt it was something out of Dickens - students either silently writing notes or chatting ceaselessly in Turkish while I stood with my back to them writing rules on the board for hours and telling them they simply had to memorize it all because it would be on the test. Talk about demoralizing. It may not be surprising that I was the first of no less than 6 teachers (out of a staff of 15 total) to quit in December.
My favorite part of the story I just learned last night when hanging out with some teachers who are still at this school. There is a website for ESL teaching called Dave's ESL Cafe, where teachers and students can go for information and there are lots of forums and everything. There is much discussion there of this whole kerfuffle, and I heard (second hand) of a post from the Director of Studies that said something along these lines: "The new system is not the problem, it is the people who like the old system. Once we get rid of all the old teachers and all the old students, everything will start to work smoothly." This frightens me slightly, and I find it vague remeniscent or something that I can't quite put my finger on...perhaps Animal Farm or something similar?
But, this is not to say that the whole experience at the school who must not be named was a total wash. I definitely discovered that I do not want to be a classroom teacher (an idea I was entertaining upon embarking on this journey), and I gained tons of empathy for those in the world who do. I also did get a lot of teaching practice which has helped me immensely in my new job at the Much Better Institute (I am attempting to keep my nose clean, should anybody google search these schools). I was moved enough to take some pictures of the school on my last night.

My glorious classroom, "New Jersey"

My level 4 class that I battled partly through the new book with. Some of them were in my very first class four months ago. They're troopers.

My friend Michelle. She's from Salt Lake, though not a Mormon. She also just graduated this spring and wanted to just go somewhere exciting where she could find a job (this, of course, is not the stock explanation we give to students when facing the inevitable "Why to Turkey did came you?" - we all have a szpiel about fascination with historical and cultural crossroads and all that jazz).

And this is the teacher's room. I almost miss it...almost...

Also I made some very enjoyable acquaintances, and a few that I would venture to call good friends at this point. On what happened to be my last night at the school, we had a Christmas party at the opening of a bar owned by the boyfriend of one of the teachers. It was wonderfully fun. Here are some of the pictures.


This is Helen and Marty (and our buddy, Efes). Well, it's Marty's Christmas hat, anyway...

This is Helen and Michelle (and Elton John). These three kids - commonly referred to as the Marty, the Michelle, and the Helen, (all roommates, rather by chance and rather conveniently) have become quite dear to me. Martin/Marty is Irish and comes to us from a year of teaching in North Korea. Martin means "seagull" in Turkish, which is far from fitting and yet totally appropriate. Helen's a New Zealander with a sarcasm so deep that I sometimes wonder if it is really just genuine disdain for the world. And Michelle you already met. They're crazy and fabulous.

Here are some of the other teachers. Joan, the foxy blonde, is originally Irish but has been here for about 25 years (she doesn't look her age in the picture). Between Michelle and Helen is Natalie. She's from Trinidad and totally hilarious. The party is at her boyfriend's bar, so she was completely stressed out because of the huge crowds, but stopped running around for a photo opportunity, nevertheless.

The guy to my right here you may recognize, though his hair is pretty short and the hat makes for a good disguise. The guy on my left is Jim, from Brisbon, Australia. He is absolutely the most talkative person I have ever met. Sometimes it...gets old, but you can't help but love him anyway.

This is Josh, your typical ex-army whiteboy thug from Hawaii. He is self-dubbed "the asshole", and lives up to it, though somehow I can't manage to hate him.

And that was my last night, so really that's about all to say about the old job in Kadikoy.