End of Year Video Daze

Exactly 3 weeks until I fly home. It's gonna go by quick.


Over the course of these last two weeks, every day has felt like the last day of school. Final grades had to be submitted 10 days ago, with 10 school days left in the year. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, you’re not alone. I think a lot of the kids, especially the middles-schoolers, realized that deadline existed for us faculty, and therefore there has been little academic activity at lssikent recently. Teachers have been jockeying for the video rooms and DVD players like mad, and if they can’t show a movie, teachers will just let their students go play basketball and volleyball outside or let them go to the library to read a book, use the internet, or make a lot of unnecessary noise and aggravate the librarian to her wit’s end.

I tried showing a movie to my 7th grade integrated arts class today, but the DVD player in the video room had been so overworked that it couldn’t even work properly. It was all hot and on its last legs. At first I thought all the skipping was being caused by some dirt or a scratch on the disk, but the player just couldn’t hack it any longer. Imagine that!
I brought School of Rock with me here and I had been saving it to show to my students at the end of the year. I showed it to my 6th graders, and they flipped for it. They loved it- it was satisfying to see them sit down, behave, and not talk during a class for once. I didn’t even have to scold anyone for talking or creating a distraction! Well, word got out on School of Rock, and soon every teacher and all the students from grades 4-8 wanted to borrow it.

I feel like a one-man video store sometimes. I have kids coming into the English office a couple times a day asking to borrow movies now, because I not only have School of Rock, but a bunch of others as well. I teach integrated arts classes and a journalism class, and usually if I showed a movie it had something to do with the subject matter we were learning in class. For instance, in journalism the last two weeks, we watched Live From Baghdad, a really good HBO movie with Michael Keaton about a group of CNN reporters who got stuck in Baghdad during the outbreak of Operation Desert Storm. Consequently, they got to be the only journalists reporting live from Iraq when the short-lived war started. That justifiably seemed like an applicable movie to show a group of 8th graders learning about journalism and good reporting. But the French class teachers showing their kids Fight Club and Aliens??? I don’t know…

The most interesting school development in the past month has been the 8th graders’ attendance records. In two weeks, all 8th graders in Turkey will take a required high school entrance exam called the LGS (lay-geh-say). It’s pretty much like an SAT exam, except it tests the kids in 4 or 5 subjects, and let’s not forget that it’s 8th graders and not 11th and 12th graders taking the exam.

Apparently, getting into a good, reputable high school is gravely important for the private school kids of Turkey. If you don’t score high enough on the LGS to get into a top high school, there’s little chance of getting into one of the top colleges- in Turkey or abroad. It’s an awfully heavy load that that Turkish educational system and the parents ask their kids to shoulder at such a young age. They’re only 13, and already they’re preparing for an exam that will, according to parents and school administrators, practically determine the course of the rest of their lives.

With so much importance stressed on this high school entrance exam, the parents enroll their 8th grade kids into private lessons (called dershanes) after school and on the weekends. Some of my kids have been going to these extra classes all year!

With the impending exam getting closer and closer, things were turned up a few notches, prep-work got kicked into a higher gear, and parents actually started pulling their kids out of school during the day so they could go to extra private LGS prep courses. I had one kid who missed my Journalism class for the last 5 weeks, and I had to end u[ failing him because he never came to class and he never contributed anything to the class paper. I know this test is important, but what does that say about the school if they have to be pulled out of class for more study time? I knew one or two kids who stayed home from school on the Friday before the SAT back home, but that was only one day!

With a month to go, more and more 8th graders started getting dismissed from school during the day, and others just stopped coming altogether unless they had a quiz scheduled in class. In that case, they'd come into school for the test, promptly get dismissed, and go back home or to a LGS prep course. For an outsider like me, this seemed like madness! And the school would just allow these kids to miss all these classes and school days because of this freakin’ LGS exam. Something like this would NEVER fly in America.

For the last two weeks, the 8th grade has shrunk from 30 students to 10. I’m amazed the 10 who come to school even bother showing up. They’re not being taught anything now- they just watch movies (to the point that they can barely stand to watch them any more), sit in the garden, or aimlessly wander around the school looking for things to occupy their time.

It’s all part of the lssikent way, I guess.