Weekend Update

Saturday night was the big teacher’s day dinner at a teacher’s hotel type facility.  I hope we will get some pictures from some of our teachers to send you because Jerry was dancing!!  What a concept.  He actually asked the headmaster to come to the dance floor and he did.  In Turkey everyone sort of dances together for the upbeat songs so you don’t really need a partner.  I danced also for the second time since we’ve been in Turkey.  I had a very nice compliment from one of the school administrators who said “ You danced like a Turkish woman”.   It was fun. 

Sunday was the parent teacher conferences from 12-5 at the school.  Of course, most of the parents who came had good kids and the parents of the problem kids didn’t show up.  I imagine that happens everywhere.  It was interesting because as I have said previously I have over 100 students.  I see my 38 6th graders 3 classes a week but everyone else is one 40 minute class a week and I still haven’t learned all the names.  Most of the parents had pictures on their phones so I was able to remember their children when I saw their faces.   Some easy names we have to learn are Toygen, Tuna, Caan, Efisu, Bengisu, Deniz , Alta, Dalara, Mert, Can (pronounced John) Soycan, Nil, Yunnis, Cem (pronounced Jim),Ennis,  Berkin, and the list goes on.  (Notice I said those were the easy ones)  I’ll write down some of the more difficult names one of these days and post them.  Except for the fact that their children talk Turkish a lot in the class the kids are all doing pretty well.  I was totally impressed with my second grade today.  We played “hangman” with their vocabulary words and they did great.  I had to really work to keep up with them.  I was shocked at how well they did with the alphabet.

The teachers had a meeting tonight after classes from 4:30-7:30 to discuss the parent teachers meeting.  Jerry and I weren’t included in the meeting because it was all in Turkish but because we had to wait on the service to get home we stayed until 7:30 as well.  Would you believe we decided on a quick dinner of a bean burger and fries at Burger King which is just a few steps from our door.  Hate to say this but it was pretty good.