by Merve Yılmaz
As students of Middle East Technical University and the department of Foreign Language Education, we are very proud of our university and rightly so. However, we sometimes take this reputation a little too seriously.
We feel so proud, in fact, that we start looking down on certain jobs like teaching in a state school. However I believe it should be just the opposite because Turkey longs for transformative intellectuals that Giroux talked about. Our university’s motto is: “We can change the world” and our country needs a lot of change as we all know. So, METU taught us a lot: to love the nature and people, to respect others, to accept differences, to defend our rights as well as how to teach and now, our mission is to spread what we have learnt to all around “canım Türkiyem” as Tony Gurr would say. 
The only way to start a teaching career in a state school in Turkey is to pass the KPSS exam (in Turkish: Kamu Personeli Seçme Sınavı – Public Service Personnel Selection Examination) which scares most teacher candidates. However it is not so much scary when you decide on what you want to do in the future. If you really want something, nothing can and should prevent you from achieving it. We survived exams not so different from KPSS, did we not? So the starting point of studying for the KPSS exam is to decide on what you really want.
After deciding, the first question that often comes up to most candidates is whether they should go to a dershane or not since it is kind of an addiction for us. We do not feel like we are really studying without it. However, if you do go to a dershane as a graduate of a faculty of education, you might be underestimating the education you have taken until that time. What dershanes offer to you is not so different from what we have been studying all our lives. If you are not lucky enough to have had a good educational background, you might think that dershanes are there to help you. Still, as individuals who are to become teachers next year, we should be able to take the responsibility of our own learning.
You might think of excuses like “KPSS has a lot of different subjects” or “The medium of instruction is English at METU” or “I do not know how to cope with them all”. But there is nothing to worry about. As you study, you realize that you already know most of the concepts, so you can get through it by reading carefully and solving questions. Sometimes you do not even need to read the subject, just solving questions can be enough. You will get used to the style of KPSS in time without a dershane. You have to believe we are becoming teachers and we can achieve anything with good planning. I personally believe that dershanes took the self-confidence of our generation and we should put an end to this. As future teachers if we depend on an institution for our success in KPSS, how can we encourage our students to be independent and self-confident individuals? The answer to this question is never ever to go to a dershane at least for the sake of teaching profession and your future students.
Then you might start to think about where you should start studying for KPSS. At this point, I want to share my own experience with you. I started to study in the middle of October. Firstly, I grouped the lessons except Math according to my preference. I put two educational science subjects with one general knowledge subject. For example, I studied Developmental Psychology with Testing and Evaluation and Geography (plus Math which I will explain later) together. I determined my objectives like “I will have finished these three courses by reading this book and solving the problems from X book until the end of November (Sounds familiar? Just like we do in our lesson plans. ) . When I completed the first group, I started to study another group and followed the same procedure for each group. Most of the books of well-known publishing houses were helpful. Try to read carefully and if you have difficulty understanding, you can find related videos on YouTube.
At the beginning, especially courses related to educational sciences may not make a lot of sense and you might feel bored. However, you shouldn’t give up. My learning philosophy is to love whatever you do and be happy since you are learning something new. You may not believe it but after sometime, I started to like studying them because I was learning a lot of new things on education and I started getting to know a lot of important scholars, educationalists, philosophers etc. Even though it is for a stupid exam, it is good to learn something new.
You might think why I excluded Math. The reason is that it is a problematic area for most of FLE students. So, I studied it along with all of the groups I created. When I couldn’t solve a problem, I asked my questions to my friends from Math’s Education. If you do not have any friends from this department, don’t worry it is not difficult to find a person to solve your problems since METU is a technical university which has a lot of people who are good at math. (I am sure they will be really happy to solve your problems after the calculus courses they have taken!)
Lastly, I should talk about how I am studying for the ELT field which we will also be responsible for. Actually, I have just started to study our field but I was never scared of it. In this field, we are responsible for everything we have learned at university like Linguistics, Oral Communication Skills, English Literature, Advanced Reading and Writing Skills, Approaches in ELT, Teaching English to Young Learners etc. For this field, it is not easy to find a good book on the market however I was keeping the lecture notes and the books and I am using them now. ELT field is the easiest and the most enjoyable part of studying KPSS since I feel that we are well-equipped when I go over the lecture notes from the second year courses and I still remember most of them. So, I appreciate the job of my professors and extend my special thanks to all of them.
I love teaching and I am very enthusiastic about it. I am sure every teacher candidate has this love in their heart. I hope our love for teaching will live forever. I wish all teacher candidates good luck in the exam.
Öğretmenler! Yeni nesil sizlerin eseri olacaktır! (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk)
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