ABC and ÇĞÜ

“Six AAAA!!! Six AAA! I. Said. Form. A. Line!! On the RIGHT SIDE OF THE YAARD! RIGHT SIDE OF THE YARD!!!!! HEEEY, SIX AA!” shouted a raspy-voiced woman this morning in the middle of my jet-lag suffering sleep. I could hear the frustration in her voice as she shrieked into the microphone: “six aaaAA!”. Whether she hoped shouting louder meant more authority, I do not know, but she certainly got me out of bed bolting into the living room with my camera in hand. I knew why she was yelling and I knew why she was agitated. It sounded so familiar…

Atacan Lisesi

It is the beginning of fall semester for primary and secondary schools (ilköğretim and lise) today. The students are back from a long four-month summer break, and hurdle into the yard to find their classmates and show off their new looks. Our apartment building is right across from ATACAN LİSESİ, where you can have a full view of 100+ students wearing their uniforms with the school logo patched either on their ties or on their sweaters. The students need to quickly form a line according to their height, but the problem is that they lack the line-making gene (which only exists in the Far-East and Germanic populations) and have overwhelming amount of growth hormone running in their blood. Hence, the confusion and hence, the cacophony of deafening yells.

These guys can form a line!

At Atacan Lisesi, the back-to-school ceremony started with İstiklal Marşı, and ended with the senior folk dance group performing a really good, ass-kicking Black Sea number.  It was pretty sad and funny to see the energy to die off when the students were told to move in to the classrooms, forming lines according to their class combination. 

On your first year of school, you are randomly assigned a letter and end up in a fixed classroom with students given the same letter as yours; like 1A, 1B or 1C. You sit in this assigned classroom with your 30+ classmates throughout the year as the teachers enter and leave. Next year, your classroom will move up a floor, but your classmates will stay the same throughout 5 years of education. Students of 6A in this incidence have been sharing the same classrooms since they were 1A.   On your 6^th year though, your classmates may change as you choose a major, which is either Literature (for Liberal Arts), Math (for Social Sciences) or Science (for Engineering and Natural Sciences). What you choose in your 6^th year is important, because it will (irreversibly) determine what you study when you are in college.  At least, this is how it was when I was in school… School system changes very often in Turkey and unfortunately, it reflects the current government’s political needs that are often unorganized and formed in a rush.
 

School Shuttles

Despite generations and generations of students, one thing never changes though... The joy of finishing the eight-hour long day; I don’t know how we did it, I mean, sit through blocks of two-hours-long lectures when we can’t even sit through two-minute Facebook video-posts. I watched the students as they walked to their shuttles, girls arm-in-arm and guys chasing girls-arm-in-arm… All mindlessly happy for at least not having to form lines for another day! 


p.s.: 6A, get it together! I will check your line tomorrow.