Best Regards to Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

Alice looking at the White Rabbit running away

Before I came to Yeditepe University, I was quite prejudiced. Is the education good? Is it as successful as advertised? What can this school do for me?! Some hearsay information would almost prevent me from coming to this school and this department, and maybe my whole life would be spent with regrets.

“English Language and Literature” was truly Alice in Wonderland for me. At first, I followed a white rabbit and fell through that hole. The keyhole opened to a completely different world; I found myself in the middle of the Normandy War, and not knowing the spoken language, I tried to understand the names of that country, its history, its language, and its heroes such as Beowulf. With a glass of honey-based beer, I found myself one of the travelers in Canterbury in the pristine greens of Medieval England.

I read, I read a lot, the more I read, the more I plunged into the world of dreams. Whatever Shakespeare has is now mine, I've assimilated it. At night Lady Macbeth takes me to bed, I am so impressed. Even though I couldn't lift Milton's weight, I tried to understand his unique mythology. With Dickens' reality, I learned the difference between two cities, the mountains between two classes, how painful inequality can be. I lingered with Keats to rest my soul, then I reached into Wordsworth's nature, closed my eyes, and ran through Coleridge's clouds. Oh Jane Austen, I fell in love with marriage because of her, I saw everything in pink. Then I was poisoned by Sylvia Plath's gas, so I never mind the marriage and all that melancholy. I entered the Victorian Era and closed myself to society, I became individualized.

You think I was only in England, but the whole world was at our feet. Spanish literature, Italian literature, Greek mythology, centuries-old dramas, in short, whatever you've been dreaming of or wondering about, all of them are now deeply rooted in us.

My department, which I graduated from, has very valuable teachers who help me learn these and make me who I am. Friendship, on the other hand, doesn't just include silly conversations after a while. I will say that after a while, you see yourself as one of the characters and writers that I have compared above, and when you wake up one morning, you can find yourself as a cockroach or you dream of an "Utopia". You say 'why not'. You don't call it imaginary, you persist, you believe and you succeed. I graduated from that university as More's ambassador, and now it's time to create the utopia I believe in with people who think like me.

Teacher from Coal...

From my internship at Denizatı College

I've always been of the mindset that "you don't become a teacher, you are born a teacher". However, with the pedagogical education received, the coal that comes out of the mine is processed, turned into a unique diamond and valued. It is with this ideology that I wanted to deserve the qualification of an English Teacher, on top of the English Language and Literature Department, which I had mastered in 2015. I wanted to refuse to take the seven-week accelerated pedagogical formation, which in my opinion is of no importance and weight, to read it from beginning to end and not be deprived of any lessons.

Life can open many different doors for you when you least expect it. The important thing is not to close that door back without opening it and seeing what is behind it. Dare to take that step inside. The most beautiful of those doors was Yeditepe English Language Teaching Department for me. When I opened that door, the first person I met was Ayşe Semra Akyel, Dean of Yeditepe Education Faculty, and I never knew that my relationship with Ayşe teacher would bring me to the Education Leadership Program in Finland.

It is quite interesting that the education faculty of Yeditepe University, which is claimed to have a capitalist approach, consisted of idealist teachers. If you were to see this, you had to chat with them, open up and show how you know yourself and fight for your ideals. As a matter of fact, it talks out of both sides of the mouth. Of course, I know many people who have the aim of "I was going to get a diploma and leave" or study in the department with the understanding of "if I do nothing, I will become a teacher".

In addition to the field courses taken jointly with the Department of English Language and Literature and pedagogical courses taken jointly with other teaching departments, the program also included wonderful courses such as English as a Foreign Language, Early English Education, or Material Development in the English Language. The teaching of the lessons varied according to the dynamics of that class, and since we were in a free environment most of the time, when we came with a logical idea, that idea was evaluated and the lesson was taught accordingly. In the last year, your faith was suffering from planning lessons, so much so that there were nights when teacher candidates would compete with our friends and find out who would prepare the best lesson plan.

Of course, there is also the indispensable internship issue. At the end of the third year, the school names given by the students as suggestions were evaluated and if an agreement was reached with the schools - mostly private schools - we were assigned to those schools as interns according to our preferences. Your first semester was spent making observations and preparing a report as a result of the observation, and your last semester was spent preparing a lesson plan suitable for the class of the teacher you were observing and giving lessons in accordance with that lesson plan. I think it was up to the pre-service teacher to make the internship effective. Whether we spend all our time chatting with students, snuggling, or "how would I do it?" We could say and spend it by making a self-evaluation. Of course, the results of these actions were reflected to us as grades and feedback by our assistant professor and university teacher.

As I said, Yeditepe University often gives pedagogical formation. It is possible to get a diploma with the money printed and skipped with compressed courses. Of course, I am not the authority to criticize its quality, but the decision is yours; Is it the field that you want to take pedagogy and education lessons that are digested in four years, or the pedagogy lessons taken in seven weeks at once?

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