You do what you can....
My weekend class is almost over -- "they" take the test today. Which means one student. Two of the four who have been attending have not done so in weeks, which I take to mean that they've dropped out, and the other one is on holiday this weekend. *facepalm*
Anyway. So Fadime's taking the test. She's repeating Elementary already (she took it before with Daniel and then, when he left, Lee) so she and I are both really keen she scrape a passing mark. And scrape it will be -- she seems to have forgotten a lot of vocab and extraneous grammar from the early parts of the course, and has missed a few classes -- last weekend she had to go to Malatya because her grandfather had a heart attack (he's resting at home now, apparently, but will need surgery) and a few weekends before that she had to go to Ankara to sit her university entrance exams.
Yesterday -- and I'll be repeating the process for the first hour of today's class -- I basically spoon-fed her revision activities that mimic almost exactly what's going to be on the test. *sigh* It feels a bit dishonest, but I do think she's ready for Pre-Intermediate as the first five units or so of it are just revision and expansion of Elementary material.
Funny/interesting/enraging (to me) anecdote. For context, Fadime is a hijabi. She wears a fairly traditional headscarf with a band underneath to keep stray hairs out of sight, and her neck properly covered as well. (Amusingly, she calls it a "headskirt" because she can't get scarf and skirt straight in general.) Yesterday, as I was drawing a very bad chalk-man on the board so we could review body parts, she suddenly became quite excited to show me something. It was a picture of an uncovered young woman, and she asked coyly, "Who's this?" I didn't have to look hard to say "It's you," even though the face had been so severely air-brushed that not only her patchy skin, but also her three dark beauty marks had been removed!
I was a bit curious as to why she'd had an uncovered photograph made, and I must have looked it, because she said "Only for photograph." I knew it wasn't an old photograph because she said she'd had it made a month ago, and I've known her covered for two (as it turns out, she took hijab a year ago). I said, "Is it for your family?" "Yes, my family, yes." "Who can see this?" I asked. "Can men see this?" "No, for my family," she said. "And women," I added, "it's OK for women." "Yes," she said. "But not men." "No."
Well, I didn't really get it, but it was interesting, which satisfied me, and she tucked the photo back into her book and we continued with our review class.
Then, partway through the third hour, she suddenly started chattering about her university entrance exam, and about being able to get the results online. It took me a minute to cotton on that she was asking to go and check the results at that moment. She obviously wasn't going to concentrate on how to write a thank-you letter until she'd done so, so I took her off to the teacher's room to look them up.
When we got there, she pulled out the identification card she'd had made up at the university to get her student number off it -- she needed to type that in to get her results. On the card was the very same picture she'd shown me, only shrunk and cropped.
It's naive of me, considering how much I've read, studied and written about the form of "secularism" in Turkey that forbids devout women from wearing their headscarves in public buildings such as universities, but it hadn't hit me until that point that Fadime would have had to uncover in order to take her university entrance exam. Corina showed up in the teacher's room and we showed her the picture, and she and I tried to find out how Fadime had felt about it all... but it's hard to communicate "Did you have to?" to someone who hasn't learned modals of obligation and "were you uncomfortable?" to someone whose adjectives of feeling are limited to "happy excited bored."
Anyway, I took her down to the canteen for our break and talked to Aytikin, the sweet man who works there, about the situation, and he and I had a fury fest about it. "Was she unhappy about this?" I wanted to know. He made a face that said, well, they all are, aren't they? I said, "I don't understand this rule. Well, I mean, I understand it, but...." He said the word "laiçism" (secularism) with some vengeance, and I told him about the situation in France and about how I thought secularism should mean freedom of religion. They asked if women are allowed to wear the headscarf in universities and schools in Canada. I said yes. Fadime looked both exasperated and bemused. How could a non-Muslim country like Canada allow more freedoms of this kind than Turkey does?
Anyway. So Fadime's taking the test. She's repeating Elementary already (she took it before with Daniel and then, when he left, Lee) so she and I are both really keen she scrape a passing mark. And scrape it will be -- she seems to have forgotten a lot of vocab and extraneous grammar from the early parts of the course, and has missed a few classes -- last weekend she had to go to Malatya because her grandfather had a heart attack (he's resting at home now, apparently, but will need surgery) and a few weekends before that she had to go to Ankara to sit her university entrance exams.
Yesterday -- and I'll be repeating the process for the first hour of today's class -- I basically spoon-fed her revision activities that mimic almost exactly what's going to be on the test. *sigh* It feels a bit dishonest, but I do think she's ready for Pre-Intermediate as the first five units or so of it are just revision and expansion of Elementary material.
Funny/interesting/enraging (to me) anecdote. For context, Fadime is a hijabi. She wears a fairly traditional headscarf with a band underneath to keep stray hairs out of sight, and her neck properly covered as well. (Amusingly, she calls it a "headskirt" because she can't get scarf and skirt straight in general.) Yesterday, as I was drawing a very bad chalk-man on the board so we could review body parts, she suddenly became quite excited to show me something. It was a picture of an uncovered young woman, and she asked coyly, "Who's this?" I didn't have to look hard to say "It's you," even though the face had been so severely air-brushed that not only her patchy skin, but also her three dark beauty marks had been removed!
I was a bit curious as to why she'd had an uncovered photograph made, and I must have looked it, because she said "Only for photograph." I knew it wasn't an old photograph because she said she'd had it made a month ago, and I've known her covered for two (as it turns out, she took hijab a year ago). I said, "Is it for your family?" "Yes, my family, yes." "Who can see this?" I asked. "Can men see this?" "No, for my family," she said. "And women," I added, "it's OK for women." "Yes," she said. "But not men." "No."
Well, I didn't really get it, but it was interesting, which satisfied me, and she tucked the photo back into her book and we continued with our review class.
Then, partway through the third hour, she suddenly started chattering about her university entrance exam, and about being able to get the results online. It took me a minute to cotton on that she was asking to go and check the results at that moment. She obviously wasn't going to concentrate on how to write a thank-you letter until she'd done so, so I took her off to the teacher's room to look them up.
When we got there, she pulled out the identification card she'd had made up at the university to get her student number off it -- she needed to type that in to get her results. On the card was the very same picture she'd shown me, only shrunk and cropped.
It's naive of me, considering how much I've read, studied and written about the form of "secularism" in Turkey that forbids devout women from wearing their headscarves in public buildings such as universities, but it hadn't hit me until that point that Fadime would have had to uncover in order to take her university entrance exam. Corina showed up in the teacher's room and we showed her the picture, and she and I tried to find out how Fadime had felt about it all... but it's hard to communicate "Did you have to?" to someone who hasn't learned modals of obligation and "were you uncomfortable?" to someone whose adjectives of feeling are limited to "happy excited bored."
Anyway, I took her down to the canteen for our break and talked to Aytikin, the sweet man who works there, about the situation, and he and I had a fury fest about it. "Was she unhappy about this?" I wanted to know. He made a face that said, well, they all are, aren't they? I said, "I don't understand this rule. Well, I mean, I understand it, but...." He said the word "laiçism" (secularism) with some vengeance, and I told him about the situation in France and about how I thought secularism should mean freedom of religion. They asked if women are allowed to wear the headscarf in universities and schools in Canada. I said yes. Fadime looked both exasperated and bemused. How could a non-Muslim country like Canada allow more freedoms of this kind than Turkey does?