by Cengiz Dikme, FLE 2013
Hello to whomever this piece of text ever reaches out to,
Following lines are to share my experience as a 4-month teacher. Unfortunately, I have little to say about my classroom experiences; but much about my interaction with the town/city and MEB (*).
To my later regret, I deliberately opted for an outlying countryside, i.e. Kiziltepe/Mardin, to “rest in peace” for a while (**) ; but things went quite the opposite way for me due to two main reasons: first, as is the case with many other cities, Kiziltepe was neither rural nor urban enough. The town swings between rural social traits and urban blocks of flats, each of them suffocating enough. And the second reason is, of course, MEB per se! Let me share some bits of my story:
The day following my arrival (at Kiziltepe), I had all my documents signed by the local MEB authorities. Just one hour after I had the necessary signatures, I was seriously taken aback to hear that the school I was appointed to had not been there in fact! There was no such school. Yes, believe what you have just read! The ministry had appointed me to a school which hadn’t existed; and none of the local authorities who signed my documents didn’t even notice it. They said it was a mistake! Of course, it was a mistake! Mistakes are the norm in state affairs, aren’t they?Anyway, it took MEB authorities 15 days till they found me a new school and completed official paperwork; then I eventually started working.
Now, I work at a middle school with approximately 1100 students and 50 teachers. Unfortunately, students are poor in the academic/educational sense. Pick any class,and you will have no more than 5 or 6 (say 7, if you are truly lucky) students really interested in learning, studying, reading books etc. (Note that there are 25-30 students in each class.) Those 5 or 6 are doing quite good in my lessons as they do in the other lessons; but the rest are quite disappointing, hard-to-deal -with, and reluctant. I (and especially I – not the other teachers) am having difficult times in terms of classroom management. The reason is my students love me too much. Too much. And, too much is NOT good. They love me because I am always tender and kind to them. Yet they never hesitate to abuse my kindness. They think they have the right to speak loudly, sing songs and even dance in the classroom only because they love me and I do them. The root of the problem is students are taught both in their families and at school to get silent and respectful only and only when they are punished with some “traditional” methods which I have never –nor will ever- use. So, it seems that I will have a long-lasting classroom-management problem.
Yet, this is not the whole story. MEB, sure, likes wasting your time. Now, starts a series of 3-month-long seminars where some chief officers come and read aloud pages of regulations and legislations to teach you what rights you have as a teacher, and what rights they have as your chiefs! I think it is quite clear that they teach you what you should not do.
Cool story, huh? But why am I writing all these? Simple: to have you prepared for the worst. Yet, I never want to discourage you. Working at state schools is far less demanding than working at private schools. You feel far less burnt out than your colleagues in private schools do. I know it is too early for me to speak about burning out. This is, in fact, what I inferred from my observations.Additionally, you are relatively free in the classroom in terms of how and what you teach. Choose and implement whatever technique and/or method you would like to use –as long as the resources and potentials let you do so. And yes, we have holidays 
To dear friends/students at METU, all I can say is: feel confident! You will feel “the METU effect”. You will feel the difference ;)Even right on the first day of your job, you will feel that you are really competent and qualified to do your job. Do not forget that as a METU graduate you are/will be not only professionally qualified, but intellectually qualified as well.You’ll have your words to say on many things and topics. And this will even make you feel alone in the staff room (ogretmenler odasi) sometimes, if you are not really into talking about selling and buying cars, marriage, babies, bank debts, everyday politics etc. I hardly have things to speak about with other teachers since we are interested in almost totally different topics of life.
Notes:
(*) :Ministry of National Education (Turkey) [ A note to non-Turkish readers, if any.]
(**): I am planning to return to/ resume my MSc in Ankara after 1.5 years of working (as a teacher in Kiziltepe). That’s why I once ironically hoped to rest during the time I work.
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