Days 41-43: The Final

I almost always write my blog entries while I’m having dinner out at a restaurant. It gives me something to do. I’m getting pretty good at ordering but the word for Coke is “cola” and I always get it mixed up with “soda,” which is soda water. So I’ve had to choke down soda water a couple of times to avoid embarrassment!

Yesterday, we administered the final exam. The earlier parts of the week were dedicated to review, which seemed to be largely useless given the exam scores. The students had about an hour and a half to take the written portion of the exam, and I proctored the advanced class.

Unfortunately, I had to take the exam away from one of them for “cheating.” I asked a question about the dominant geographic axis of each continent and one of the worst students asked me if by axis I meant east-west, north-south. As far as I was concerned that was answering the question for him, so I told him I wasn’t going to say. Then he said, “Can I ask someone else in the class?” Um, no. Like, how is that different from asking me? So he goes back to his seat and not 5 seconds later I hear him whispering to one of the other students asking about the definition of “axis.”

I slammed my hand down on the desk and started yelling at him. I don’t know what part of “Don’t ask anyone else” was unclear. So I took the exam from him and told him to leave. You shouldn’t be talking during an exam anyway. Maybe I’m a hard ass of a teacher, but I don’t see where he gets off countermanding what I just told him.

Today we had an assessment with the students, which seemed more like a North Korean death panel to me. The students were herded into one room, and we (the American teachers) had to go one-by-one telling them what we thought of them as students. It was kind of awkward. When we got to The Cheater, he said he didn’t want to receive feedback from me and proceeded to tell everyone what happened. All the students swiveled their heads to listen to him and then they turned back to me to see what my response would be.

Well…I went off on him. First, he has the audacity to try to weasel an answer out of me. Then he does exactly what I told him not to do. Also, we had reviewed the same concepts (including axis) EVERY SINGLE DAY for 2 weeks. And finally he wants to try to out me in front of the whole student body? Oh hell no. Both Jack and I had a lot of problems with him over the semester (he had a seriously bad attitude), and so I took advantage of the opportunity being offered to me. I explained to him in no uncertain terms why I took the exam from him, that we had reviewed the definition of “axis” every day for 10 days and that he deserved having his exam taken away from him for not paying attention in class in the first place and then doing exactly what I told him not to do. Dr. B’s eyes got big and I guess he felt the situation was going to get out of control, so he muttered something about this being an assessment of a student’s abilities and quickly moved on to the next student (which was a shame because I had plenty to say about his abilities, too).

Back to the exam – the second portion was speaking. We called them into the teacher’s lounge one-by-one and asked them to pick a piece of paper that had a topic on it. Many of them performed admirably, many of them acted like they didn’t speak a word of English! Eventually we had to split into two groups of interviewers or we’d have never finished.

After administering the speaking portion of the exam, we huddled together and went through the ordeal of trying to grade the exams. Thankfully one of the Turkish co-teachers took the initiative in figuring out how points should be distributed in the exams but then we had to assign weight to various things like their mid-term and homework in order to get their final grade. Enter the reason why I hate group work: three out of four people can be on the same page but they have to spend an hour trying to explain their reasoning to the fourth person and then another hour convincing them of the validity of the approach. We finally got fed up with it, so I put the data into Excel and e-mailed the spreadsheet to Dr. B for him to figure out what he wanted to do about the final grades.

Our brilliant quantitative approach required some subjective tinkering this morning, but we finally got the ranking worked out for each of the three classes. I think we’re all pretty satisfied about the outcomes and hopefully most of the students will be, too.

Tomorrow, I’m going to “the village” with Jack and one of the students to attend her uncle’s wedding. She’s one of our best students and she gave us official invitations and everything, so how could we refuse? The wedding begins at 1:00 PM and then we have to be back at the school for the graduation ceremony at 6:00 PM. I saw the preliminary schedule for the graduation a couple of days ago, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty long. The governor, mayor, members of Parliament and school superintendent are going to be in attendance so that in and of itself is going to ridiculously prolong things, especially since I know they’re going to be late.

Today I went to the otogar (bus station) to buy my ticket to Diyarbakir on Saturday. I discovered that the only bus going to Diyarbakir from Gümüşhane is a night bus that arrives from Trabzon at 5:00 PM and gets to Diyarbakir at 7:30 AM the next morning. I think it takes so long because it runs an awkwardly circuitous route to the city. In hindsight it was ridiculous to think that I could actually show up at the bus station and expect to find a 6:00 AM bus going to exactly where I wanted in exactly the route I wanted. It was also more expensive than I thought – 50 TL ()!

And so my adventures will begin with a 14-hour bus journey. Hoorah!