Opening day ceremonies at school: proud parents with cameras, kids with flags, loudspeakers with polka and the Red Baron

Today was the first official day of school, and there was plenty of pomp and ceremony to mark the occasion. Maybe it's the same the world all over, what with proud parents taking snaps of their daughters and sons walking with their new classmates, the various, obligatory speeches from school administration (in Turkish and English: double your fun!), the playing of the national anthem and obligatory raising of the flag, and of course the obligatory polka music blaring over the loudspeakers. Polka? Well, yes, or something that pretty well resembles Lawrence Welk's band.

Then after about 30 or 40 minutes everyone had just about enough fun, and after the middle and high school students were well on their way back to their classrooms, and the primary school students were about to follow, over the loudspeakers came an eerily-familiar tune... ah yes, and then the lyrics became audible, confirming that this was indeed a cover version of the old 1960s hit song "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" by The Royal Guardsmen:

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more
The Bloody Red Baron was rollin' out the score
Eighty men died tryin' to end that spree
Of the Bloody Red Baron of Germany

Not that anyone was paying any attention to it. Just a few of us, apparently, and at least one of us trying to rid the tune from going around and around in our heads all morning. Not too bad a price, I suppose, for an otherwise colorful, interesting break from teaching!

[wow, that's loud!]

1st day of (1st grade) class: 1st impressions

Well, today was my first day of class, for 1st graders. It was actually more of an initial getting-to-know you session (Hello, I'm _____. How are you? What's your name?), plus a review of numbers and colors. (Classes really start up next week.)

Anyway, it was pretty funny. I knew going in that, obviously, a first grade class would be somewhat different than the university-level classes I've been teaching for the last 10 years (duh!), but still it was something of an eye-opener. Let's just call the atmosphere, at least for one of the classes, was, er, lively.

Of course, the students don't really speak or understand that much English at this point, so any of my requests for them to "please sit down" or to "please be quiet now" weren't understood, and so weren't done!

İpek to the rescue! İpek is Turkish, and she'll also be teaching these same 1st graders. It turns out that Turkish teachers have been assigned to come into expats' classes for the first day, just to help out and offer a bit of crowd control! Well, I have to say that she was a life-saver, who was able to (finally) somehow encourage (most) of the students to sit back down and be relatively quiet.

But for the 10 minutes before she arrived, I had an interesting experience: I wrote my name up on the board (a chalk board, mind you, none of that fancy white board stuff) and introduced myself in the simplest way possible. Almost immediately about half the class jumped to their feet and proceeded to run up to the board and write out their first names, too. You can't fault their enthusiasm, that's for sure.

Still, it was a relief to have İpek come to remind students what's expected of them in school (some were here at ISTEK last year, in kindergarten, while a number of others are new to the school). And the two of us had fun reviewing the numbers from 1-10 and various colors—I think I've just about got all those mastered, no problem! :-)

Apologies to any of you who aren't teachers or not specifically interested in what goes on in a Turkish elementary school, but hopefully some of you are. Looking forward to next week, with surely some more eye-openers.

...and yes, there is a gumball/candy machine in one of the hallways at school!