To school again

I went to an ELT (English Language Teaching) seminar on Saturday. The venue was a private primary school. It felt good to be in a school again — as teacher :-). In Turkey, I rather avoid schools as state-owned schools are not very appealing to me. But this school is private and has a very friendly atmosphere, the Nilüfer Özel Ilkbahar Ilköğretim Okulu. There are several private schools, or kolej as they are called here, in Bursa. The next two Saturdays, I will have the opportunity to see two other ones who also host ELT seminars. Private schools in Turkey are extremely expensive but there seem to be enough parents who can afford to send their children there.

On my way to the seminar, I thought it's a weekday, because the bus was full with school children. Then I remembered that in Turkey children have to go to dershanes. These are a kind of preparatory schools who prepare children for the many entry or transitional exams they have to take about three times in their lives as students, the last one being the university entry exam. They only exist because the state schools seem not to be able to prepare the kids for these exams. Everybody seems to believe that the kids cannot pass those exams without the help of the derhanes. Which means two things: either the kids go to school twice a day, first to their normal school and in the afternoon to the prep school and do homework for both in the evenings and on weekends. Or they can attend regular school on weekdays and go to the dershane on the weekends, which means they go to school seven days a week!! There are so many chains of dershanes now, that it has become a huge economy. 

I attended the last two years of lise in Turkey. In the second year, I registered at a dershane because everybody else did. I had opted for the 7-day version but after about two months I gave up. It was too much for me. I bought a couple of prep books and studied at home, which was a good decision. I could concentrate on what I had problems with most, had a good time and I passed the university exams with a very good result.

Here is a picture of a state-owned and the private school I went to, guess which is which.