Friday, November 11, 2011

The Schedule

I was tempted to name this post "The Schedule that Laurie would Hate" but not quite everyone knows who Laurie is and I didn't want to turn anyone off from even starting to read by finding someone they didn't know alluded to in the title of the blog.  Now, of course, you have started reading, so I can talk about Laurie all I want and you are already hooked, aren't you?

Laurie is a teacher at Gunn who knows how many minutes each class has, and more importantly which class is mising how many minutes.  For those of you who are reading this, but who are not teachers, you might not think this is that important, but it is.  Lets say you have 180 hours worth of material to teach a class over the course of the year, you lose a bunch to testing (for your own assesment and for the government).  Then you lose some to field trips the students are on for other classes and of course when a student is ill you lose some more, but these tend to hit each class roughly equally.  If you teach at a school were each teacher doesnt see each student every day, holidays can start to make things uneven.  For instance, at Gunn, every time you have a Monday holiday, E period gets an extra class.  Some times this can happen several times in a month and then E period is way ahead.  This is particularly bad in a very short week, like the week of Thanksgiving, which only has two school days.  ABCG meet twice, but EDF meet only once.  Unless you are lucky enough to teach diffrent classes along that split, you can really only teach one day and the other becomes a free day, or wasted day. 

What does this have to do with Robert College, or my time in Istanbul?  I am getting to that, and to explain why Laurie would hate this schedule I have to tell you what this schedule looks like.
I have an average schedule, with 20 contact 'hours' per week.  I have four classes, so four sets of students, two advanced chemistry, two intro chemistry.  There are two things I like about this schedule.  First, all of the students in any one class are in the same grade, and second, each class has one double period once a week.  Since a regular period is only 40 minutes, having a lab period of an hour twenty is very helpful and having all the same grade in each class is also helpful for gaging their English level, knowing what other classes they are taking, and for other grade specific issues which come up, and there are quite a few. 

The first period of every day except Monday is homeroom, which is a 10 minute time of announcements and attendance.  New teachers are not given homeroom, instead we have a duty (more on that later).  The homeroom groups often follow each other around all day.  For instance, lise 9 section 9 might have English, Turkish, History, math and PE together.  Some might be taking drama and others art, some French and others German, some chemistry and others biology, so there will be some periods when they are together and others where they are mixed with other homerooms.  I happen to teach no homeroom sections so I can't comment on that, but I hear it has it's ups and downs. 

If you look carefully at the schedule above, and follow one section, for instance AC5, my advanced chemistry 10th graders, you can see that we meet every day, with a double on Tuesdays.  We start at three different times in two different rooms.  The AC2s, my advanced 11th graders, also meet every day, but their double is Thursday, and they meet during 4 diferent periods (5 if you count the double) also in two different rooms. The intros are even more confusing, since I see them only three times a week: IC3 (24 lise 9s) on Tuesday (double), Wednesday and Friday and IC4 (12 lise 10s) on Monday (double), Thursday and Friday.  There are some saving graces to this schedule.  I see both of my IC lab periods before I see any of their single (or theory) periods and the AC labs are symmetric in time, if not in location. 

Two of the rooms are mirror images of each other and are almost large enough for what we do.  (Oddly they are designed to seat 21 students in desks and 24 students in the lab, so for a full class there are always three students sitting at the lab tables instead of in desks.)  The third lab (101) has no desks, only lab spaces and it is awkward for labs and very awkward for lecture.  Unfortunately there are four chemistry teachers and only two good labs, so each of us takes our turn in the bad lab, and some teachers even need to go up stairs to a bio classroom for some lecture periods. 

(A side note on switching rooms:  After having my own room for many of the years I taught at Evergreen and then at Gunn, and even in the years I shared, I didnt travel, switching between three rooms seems like a hard ship.  As far as I know, however, there is only one teacher on campus who teaches in the same room all week and some of the English and math teachers (those without a specialized classroom) teach in up to 10 rooms during the week.  There is no such thing as personalizing your classroom.  Almost no one puts up student work.  Forget about having a seating chart.  And good luck remembering everything you needed to bring to each class.)

A few more notes about the schedule before I launch into why Laurie would hate it so much...

- There are three lunch periods depending on your class.  The lise prep kids (a year between 8th and 9th grade with intensive English and socializing) eat during 6th period.  L9 and L10 eat during 7th, L11 and L12 eat during 8th period.  Every teacher has at least one of these periods off each day in which to eat.  Of course this only works because the periods are the same length as lunch, 40 minutes.  (A side note about lunch: lunch is provided for all staff and teachers as well as the students who elect to have a meal card.  Every day there are at least two meat options, usually there is a vegitarian entree, and as many as two starches.  There is always soup, a salad bar, whole fruit and some kind of dessert.  The food is in general very good and lunch is my main meal of the day.) 
- On Wednesdays during 9th and 10th it is club time.  Every student is required to have a club time club (except the L12) and may have up to three after school clubs in addition.  Clubs are so important at this school they are called co-curricular instead of extra curricular.  I could write a whole blog about that some day, but it is best if I dont get started.
- On Monday instead of homeroom and on Friday's after school there is flag ceremony, which I have already written about.
- Most non-residential students take service busses home after school.  School is out at 3:15 and the bus leaves at 3:30 if you are on bus #1, or 3:35 if you are on bus #50.  You can sign up for the late bus, if you have a club or something and this leaves at 5:40.  Some students have a long trip home and in afternoon Istanbul traffic this means that some of them aren't home until 8pm if they take the late bus.  This system discourages students from getting help after school, and since you may not have the same lunch as your students there is not much time there either. 

Now that you have the basic picture of how it is supposed to work, let me tell you a little about a few things that have cropped up in the last few weeks or are coming up.

Thursday October 6th was a holiday - Istanbul Liberation so no lab for AC2
Friday October 21st, all the L11s need to go to a Turkish literature assembly 9th and 10th, so they will miss class
Friday October 28th we celebrate Republic day (10.29) with a half day, so no 9th and 10th again, my AC2 misses two Fridays in a row.
November 7-9 is a holiday, so we are left with a two day week.  IC 4 meets twice, but dont need it, IC 3 meets only once but could use the extra time.  AC2 has a lab we cant use since AC5 doesnt.
Thursday November 10th - Attaturk day - 3rd period is 55 minutes long, but all the rest are 30 minutes for an assembly.
Monday November 14th - Elective Assembly for L9/10 during 3rd period, L11 during 8th period, who cares what you had scheduled for that day, bring your students to the theater for an assmbly
Thrusday November 24th - Teachers day, all classes are 35 minutes, except 9 and 10 which are canceled outright. 

And yet every student in each section of each class takes the same test and there are already not enough days to cover the material, so we can be giving free days to keep things even.  All of the veteran teachers here grumble about it, but they are very passive about it, resigned I guess to pushing one class faster to catch up, or giving the other class more time for book work that would otherwise be assigned as homework.  No one high up seems to care, or even really sympathize when they take our classes away.  We need a Laurie to do the math and speak loudly about it.  

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