Week 6: Stormy weather and Turkey

This week started with a shot of stress. Gokcen and I were to present our assignment on Dewey during ‘The concept of education’.

Dewey’s theory is very interesting although there are some things Gokcen and I didn’t agree on. If you want to know more about our opinion on Dewey and the others of the concept of education, you can check our 5 page essay.

On Tuesday I went to the Calvijn school. This is a Christian school which has a few campuses spread over the city of Rotterdam. This day I visited Vreewijk and Fichte.
The things I will remember, is the behaviour of a few pupils during the afternoon sessions on relationships and sex. Of course, this behaviour doesn’t represent the behaviour of all the pupils. At this school, most of the pupils were silent and respectful towards their teachers and each other.
But these few pupils really scraped the barrel. During a presentation by a woman who suffered from HIV, the pupils hardly listened to her. They shouted at each other, repeated questions because they didn’t hear them or asked questions which had nothing to do with what the woman was telling about.
I didn’t really like this, but, being a stranger to the pupils and a foreigner with a ‘funny accent’, I decided to keep a low profile. There were two other teachers in training present in the room and I thought they should make sure the pupils would behave. Unfortunately, they didn’t really manage.
One of the pupils was sent to the headmaster. As soon as he left the office, he started acting in a wrong way again.
Of course, as I stated before, this bad behaviour doesn’t apply to all the pupils. It also depended on which teacher they had. Just like in Belgium, not every teacher has the same ‘amount’ of authority.

Wednesday morning we almost risked our lives by going out for a walk in the Scheepsmakerkwartier. This neighbourhood, very close to the school, lodges the houses of the old directors of harbour companies (e.g. shipbuilders). Their richness is reflected in their houses as they are big and expensive.
Most of the houses are now restaurants, hotels, art galleries, bank offices or lawyers’ agencies.
Mrs. de Wit-Storimans told us the story about a house with a private park (private, but it is accessible for everybody). This park was asked and paid for by the owner of the house as a tribute to his dead son. We couldn’t go into the park because of the stormy weather. I found this a pity because I really love walking in nature.

The park of Rotterdam, simply called ‘Het Park’, was also off limits today. We decided to take a quick look at a small harbour where one of the boats was used as a men’s club. Now this men’s club is also open to women but you have to be introduced by a certain number of members and you have to pay a large sum of money to get in. Clubs like these don’t really grip me because they remind me of the days when the border between rich and poor was synonym for good and evil (when it came to the rich of course). On the other hand, I like the idea of eaten of golden plates, using silverware, followed by smoking cigars and drinking cognac in a room dressed with brown leather chairs and paintings of all the chairman of the club.

At the end we went to a café where we had a coffee, tea or hot chocolate (Silvia had tomato juice, although she wanted tomato soup).

Thursday was Turkey day. In the morning we had a guest lecture by Mrs. Esin Pekmez, a lecturer of the University of Ege. She gave us a presentation on “The place of scientific process skills in the Turkish Primary Science Curriculum”.
The main thing I remembered was that the pupils seemed to loose interest in science when they grow older. In Turkey the pupils get science in primary school.
Because I am not a primary school teacher and because sciences don’t really interest me, it wasn’t really an interesting morning.
It was nice to hear something about the way in which sciences are approached in Turkey but that was it.
In the afternoon we watched the film ‘Across the bridge’, by the maker of ‘Gegen die Wand’ (I can’t remember his name right now). This film discussed the huge variety of music that can be found in the Turkish capital, Istanbul. We saw rappers, rock musicians, pop artists, street musicians, etc.
To read a reflection on this film, please read the separate document I’ve written about it.
After this film I had enough Turkey for one week, so I was actually kind of glad to go home. This doesn’t mean I didn’t find it interesting but at times it was annoying that the Turkish spoke Turkish amongst each other and their teacher, and the Spanish girls and me were left by ourselves. Especially during the film this was difficult because the film was in French and Turkish.

On Friday we went climbing. Climbing in the Netherlands, the most flattest country of the world, I can hear you think. Well, it’s possible. Just go to an indoor climbing wall!
Mrs. Verloop took us to the wall on which we could test our muscles and body. I decided to stop at a height I was still able to come down, as I am afraid of heights. It appeared that most of us were born climbers as most of us reached the top.
For me this wasn’t really the goal, I just wanted to get higher on one wall than on another so that I overcome my fear.
Despite my painful knees, shoulders and fingers, I found a very pleasant way to end the week.