I teach in a private school which is part of a big organization of "Fatih schools. Turns out they are all over the world, though not always with "Fatih" (Conqueror" in the name. Teachers and especially administrators, can expect to be moved every 2-3 years at the whim of the organization. Preferences are requested but not often consulted. They particularly like the people who say they will go to a foreign country.
The schools have a good reputation but in a sort of underhanded way. The tuition is pretty high so we have all of these horrible, spoiled rich kids that have no interest in school. They take some of that money and recruit poor, deserving kids. They do very well and get into good universities and become walking advertisers for the school. This sounds a little sleazy but I guess it's good for the poor kids.
The majority of the kids are very rich and spoiled and atrociously behaved. They also have absolutely NO interest in learning English which makes one wonder why they are here. This is a big time language school. We teach English from Kindergarden and by 5th grade they have 6 hours of English a week -- two with a native speaker. At 5th grade they also start a 3rd language, usually German.
When they announced that I would be more worthwhile in the primary school, I was horrified but agreed to give it a try. I did that mostly because I was assured that their English level was quite high. This was a lie. It is appallingly low. Now that they have been streamed, the upper two classes of each grade are fair while the lower two are abysmal.
The other immediately noticeable differences between here and Taiwan are the attendance level which is pretty sporadic here as opposed to my Taiwanese students who had an excellent record (whether I wanted them to or not! The classes were so big there that we frequently dreamed of plague or pestilence). The other difference is the casualness about the uniform. A class with less than 3 out of uniform is unusual here whereas in Taiwan they even wore theirs to school on weekends if they went in.
The uniforms are pretty good looking: boys wear gray pants and navy polo shirts with maroon collars and cuffs. The girls wear blue and gray plaid pleated skirts with a shot of maroon in the plaid with maroon polo shirts with navy trim. Most of the girls wear tights either black or gray and the "uniform" shoes are anything black --- high top sneakers are the most popular
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Karen, are there any ethnic Greeks left in Istanbul? Or Constantinople, as they'd say? How are things going over with the Armenian vote in the house here? We've heard the Turks are pretty peeved about it, and are going to cut off our supply routes to Iraq.
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