Got some Easter at a Monastary

At 6:00 p.m. tonight I meet Pasha and several other bikers for an evening ride up Vank Hill. I'd been wanting to try this ride but I'd been afraid to try it on my own because there are just some places where I get too many unfriendly stares and this was one of them.

But what a different a group of male cyclists makes

in Malatya. Tonight we were celebrities like Vance Armstrong and his team winding through the crumbling down hill-side neighborhoods while bringing out small cheering crowds cheering, and offering tea of course, on our ascent to the top.

The entire ride was good but the destination was great. We ended at a very old Armenian church/monastery just as the sun was setting. Although the church is crumbling down, the four walls and roof still remain in tack and the crosses carved in the stone walls are still very visible. In front of the church is what looks like a blue army bunker but is actually a small room built over the top of a grave. The floor of the room is covered in Turkish carpets and pillows and appears to be used on occasion. Pasha,

my tour guide, said that some people in Turkey think it's spiritual to sleep near/on/by graves and that it's very possible that

people stay there, especially in the summer. He also thinks that this church is slated for restoration which would be interesting to see.

A quick Google search only provided me the name Vank church and no other details. It might be 600 years old or it could be 200 years old and modern construction techniques had not yet arrived. Whatever the age however, I could see how the location was chosen for it's solitude and peacefulness.

Standing there with my bike riding buddies photographying the beauty of being on a hill, by a church overlooking a valley at sunset, it occurred to me this is probably the only church I'll see this Easter, so I made it count.

Testing in Turkey

Turkey does a lot of testing. Students buy packets of test booklets to practice taking even more tests. Teachers write tests or copy questions from workbooks and paste them together to make extra tests. I liken it to taking SAT prep classes for 10 years and attending class 7 days per week. Not only do they take tests at school, they take lots of test-taking classes on the weekends so they can take more tests.

When the students get a question or two wrong, they bring them to me and ask me to explain why. Sometimes I am tricked by the questions because they are worded so poorly e.g. Google translate from Turkish to English, that even I have difficulty, or they are about a topic that is so foreign to a Turkish student (I guess you'd call this test bias in America) that I can see why they would have trouble. Take, for example, the multiple choice question a student had yesterday. It was about cats. Now, I don't know a single person here in Turkey who has a pet cat. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of wild cats and I think they are allowed to roam freely because they clean the dumpsters of leftover fish and chicken and keep the restaurant floors crumb-free. But, getting back to the test question. It used a sentence structure like this.... "Cats can _____ but they can't _____." The student chose (sleep/swim) and at first reading that seemed like a logical answer. Seriously, are we ever taught that cats can swim? The only reason I know they can swim (even though they don't like it) is because we tried giving our pet cat a bath and he definitely figured out how to swim when he realized he couldn't dig his claws into the poreceline. But how is a Turkish student going to know that? And the answer they chose was letter B and it's a timed test and, actually I thought it was a pretty good answer. But, the correct answer was really D, (swim/cook) and of course that's the better answer because the only cat who can cook is Garfield and he only makes lasagna, or does Jon cook that for him?... But seriously, I wasn't helping her with English, I was helping her with test-taking skills and the fine intricacies of a cat of which I can't ever see as being really that important.

And now let me jump ahead to today. An 8th grade English teacher brought me a test booklet from a last year's 7th grade practice test and asked if I would write 5 test questions from the reading passage so he could recycle the test again this year. I said, "Sure." The 6 or 7 line reading passage was about Ghandi. In the middle of the passage there was such an abrupt transition, that I'm pretty sure the original test writer was "cutting" and "pasting" on his computer and put his cursor in the middle of the sentence and deleted a couple of key words like "South Africa", "returned", "left", etc. I, for the life of me, could not tell when Ghandi left London, where he held some of his non-violent demonstrations, and when he returned to India. So I opened Safari on my phone and read some background information. I ended up rewriting the passage and five questions and handing it back to the teacher who was enjoying some tea and resting time. I threw in a couple of the "Ghandi did all of the following except:" types of test questions to be tricky, and I added my own sense of humor in "Ghandi married at age 13 because he fell in love." The correct answer was "It was common practice at the time" as in, it's still common practice here in Malatya to become engaged at a young age and marry early. (14, 15, 16..etc. with parent's consent.) There's an entire essay on why I think I was funny with my options for answers but this is not time or place for my humor so I'll get back to the topic at hand. Testing..Aaah, I also kept the teacher's day stress free by giving him the answers to the questions.

On a positive note, I asked the 5th graders to bring in baby pictures and write using past tense (which they just started) and present tense comparing themselves from babies to now. They loved this assignment and did some of the best work I've seen all year! Their grammar would not pass a test but their meaning, intent, and communication is beautiful!

Weekend in Izmir

I have a new favorite city... Izmir...It's clean. It's green. It's on the water. It's got nice weather. It's got good food. It's got some nice places to sip beverages. It's got bike paths, jogging paths, and tennis courts. It's got nice people. It's got a metro and a good bus system. It's got good shopping. It's got ferries and a nice airport. I think I might like living there.....