Education is the most important thing for a country's future prosperity. I'd add data to back myself up, but prefer to take the Malcolm Gladwell anecdotal approach. I heard an interesting point made recently that after WWII, Germany was bombed flat but in less than 15 years it was running pretty smoothly again. Meanwhile, a host of other countries just can't seem to progress. The key difference? Education.

I was struck when the other day I was reading a Chinese blog. It had a typical New Year toast that reminded me of Kazakhstan. Happy New Year! Good wishes for your whole family! Good health! Lots of prosperity! I caught myself thinking that perhaps the author was Kazakh. Then I got to the last point. And most importantly, may you be successful in your education!

Although Kazakhstan also has some tough sayings about education (Оқусыз білім жоқ, білімсіз күнің жок - without study, there is no education, without education, you have no life) they don't permeate the culture as they do in China. Of course many Kazakhs value education and I have some incredible students who work assiduously, but China is in a whole different ballpark.

Normally I don't enjoy giving or listening to toasts too much because everybody repeats the same frivolous fluff. So I'm planning to steal a good idea from the Chinese the next time I give a toast.

Адамға өмірдегі ең керекті нәрселер - мықты денсаулық, бақыт пен байлық! және де сіз осы айткандардын барлығына тек қана жақсы білімнің арқасында қол жеткізе аласыз! сондықтан да ең алдымен сізге жақсы ешқашан таусылмас білім тілегім келеді!

For all of us, the most important things are strong health, happiness and wealth! And you can only get these things through a good education. Therefore, I most want to wish you a good and never-ending education!

When I was a young lad learning how to swim, the program I was in gave me a certificate with the various skills I had to master to become a proficient swimmer. Breathe out underwater. Dead man's float. Doggy paddle. Front crawl. As I acquired each skill they gave me a gold sticker to mark my progress on the certificate. One day, I lost my certificate. It was devastating.

Thinking about how effective this was at motivating me to master swimming skills, I decided to try the same thing with my first year English classes. It was WILDLY successful. Toot. Toot.

My initial idea with the skills would be that once a student had demonstrated to me that she was capable with it, she would then get her sticker posted on the wall. This would in turn license her to be an instructor for the students who hadn't mastered it yet. In this manner, the students who quickly learned the skills would get the opportunity to continue practicing them, plus save me the trouble of actually doing any teaching!

Although there were a few lazy students who finished all ten skills and never came back, I had a few star teachers who during every break would work with other students to improve their skills. Normally when I walk by classrooms at the college, I see students texting on their phones, chatting with their friends, or generally vegging out. It was a joy instead to hear my students quizzing each other "Are you a student? Do you have friends? Does Gulzhan Adilkizi like teaching English?"

At first the students were wary of having their results on the wall for everybody to see, but it turned out to be a great motivator. After every lesson they would ask me when I was available to assess their progress. They came to school two hours before lessons started to practice and test. They quizzed each other in the hallways. They got angry and cried when I failed them. Then they came back the next day and passed. It was great.

Probably the greatest success was with one student who started out very near the bottom of the class. Conversations with her were impossible, and when I first tested her she didn't even know the alphabet. Luckily for her, she is good friends with the best student in the class who patiently coached her, observed her tests, worked on her weak points, and prepared her for the next skill. She started mastering a skill a week and when she only had Present Simple and Past Simple left, she came to me for the test. I knew she had been working with her private tutor on Present Simple and figured she would easily pass, which she did. When she finished, I congratulated her on only having one more. She immediately replied that she also wanted to take the Past Simple test. Her tutor gave her a shocked look.

"But we haven't worked on that yet!"

"I know. I taught myself."

I was a little concerned that she was setting herself up for failure, as her friend had been instrumental in working with her on all of the other skills. We started working and she successfully navigated affirmative past simple with regular and irregular verbs, negative past simple, and finally questions. Sure enough, she had successfully taught herself Past Simple, much to her tutor's surprise and my delight.

The following are some reasons that I think they responded so well to this.

1) Each skill was manageable. For the average student, a skill took about a week to really learn, so they were able to see their progress often.

2) It was individual. I'm convinced that they don't have a word for cheating in Kazakh, because every time a student describes an action that is blatant cheating, they use the English verb "to help." Hence, when I speak Kazakh I've started using the phrase "destroying society" to describe cheating. During my tests, the students were not allowed to cheat and they knew it. Any progress they made was something that they could take pride in.

3) I failed them. If a student didn't have the skills, I was unafraid to fail them. From what I hear, failing here is just an opportunity for a teacher to make some extra cash. Although it made them angry, it made the progress that much sweeter because they knew it actually depended on their ability.

4) It was fun. In order to elicit negative responses, I had to ask interesting questions like "Does Almas eat babies? Do Americans like kissing pigs? Am I drinking your blood?" Diverging from the well worn path of watching TV, playing basketball and listening to music to which they're so accustomed was very refreshing for them and me.

5) Bribery. When a student finished all 10 skills, they got a fancy sticker (thanks Jenny!) and a chocolate bar from me.

The English skills they have learned will be useful, but there is an added benefit of this system that is more important for their long term success as language learners and teachers. They are learning how to teach each other and themselves. When teaching one-on-one, it doesn't take much time to realize that repeatedly explaining something won't help the student's ability to do it. What a student needs is practice actually making the sentences. When they first started teaching each other, they would always start the way their teachers do: with a diagram of the grammatical structure and a lengthy explanation. They have learned that this is incredibly ineffective. Now, they jump right in and ask each other questions, forcing the student to practice forming sentences using the correct grammar. Intuitively grasping that learning comes from doing will make them much more effective teachers in the future.

With the semester drawing to a close, all but 5 of my students were at one point able to perform all 10 skills satisfactorily. I'm sure they'll forget a lot during the summer, but I'm already thinking of the next 10 skills they'll have to master and the first is going to be a review.

I want to feel more connected to my community, and thus have decided to try to read the local newspaper, Сарыарқа, which literally means "yellow back" but would be best translated as "The Steppe." The faculty at my college are required to subscribe. They are not, however, required to read, so there are always extras lying around.

My first challenge was that there isn't a very good Kazakh-English dictionary. The Peace Corps gave us the best one they could find, but it is riddled with British English and other errors. We knew this coming out of PST because Amantai often laughed in our faces when we used it to produce Kazakh. The final straw came last week when I trusted it and bet a local that the word for zebra was алай. You may think it's arrogant to bet a Kazakh person about words in their own language, but the Kazakhs have a habit of using Russian words for things that their nomadic forebears hadn't encountered, like cars and zebras. Well, actually just cars. I lost 50 tenge in that transaction.

Fortunately we live in the digital age and my friend Kairat recommended that I check out sozdik.kz, a Kazakh-Russian dictionary that is reasonably comprehensive and has example sentences. Stop! I don't know Russian. Well fear not, Google has gone to the trouble of learning Russian and English and can get a fair approximation in translation.

Armed with a decent dictionary, I started reading the headlines to choose an article that could be interesting. As far is I can tell, the first headline was Assigned Mandate Confirmed. That sounded pretty bland. The second headline on the front page was I Also Subscribed to The Steppe. Is this really front page worthy news? But I found an article just for me titled Honored Residents of Zhezkazgan. After half an hour of wrestling with the article and dictionary, trying to figure out where the root word ended and the suffixes began, I was able to ascertain that I'm living in a city that has price controls on bread. Specifically, I shouldn't be paying more than 38 tenge for a 600 gram loaf of bread made from grade A flour. Fascinating!

I can't wait to find out what other nuggets of information await me in the pages of The Steppe!

For the past month, my fourth year students have been preparing for the NOK. That's the capstone test that if they pass will certify them to teach English through 7th grade. You may think that they've been preparing for the test since they entered the college, as you make the assumption that the test will assess the knowledge they have gained over the past four years. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Studying for the NOK is done by memorizing as many questions and "correct" answers as possible from a bank of questions. The first problem with the test is that memorizing correct answers is not the same as learning. I'd like to say that only Kazakhstan thinks this way, but giving a subset of a bank of questions with publicly available correct answers is also how the FAA tests the people who fly our planes. I distinctly remember studying for the instrument pilot written exam and thinking, if I see this radar map, the answer is D thunderstorm. I had no idea what was happening on the map, but was able to remember the answer D and pass the exam. My students are similarly adept at this rote memorization, and also similarly incapable of understanding why the answer is what it is.

Where the FAA pilot exams and the NOK differ is in the quality of the questions, which brings us to the second problem with the NOK. Most questions have more than one right answer, no right answer, or test some esoteric knowledge that is completely useless for being a primary school English teacher.

Complete the following sentence: Almaty is ______ than Astana.

A. most big

B. biggest

C. big

D. bigger

E. the biggest

A legitimate question testing knowledge of comparative adjectives that has exactly one correct answer. Questions of this sort make up less than 25% of the English questions on the exam.

Complete the following sentence: Johnny likes _____ in the ocean.

A. swam

B. to swim

C. swim

D. swimming

E. swims

Ah, yes, the trick question where there are two acceptable answers and although one may be better than the other to grammar freaks, there aren't enough clues to correctly determine gerund or infinitive. To their credit, my students asked me about this question when they were studying.

In what year were schools made comprehensive?

A. 1965

B. 1967

C. 1966

D. 1968

E. 1969

Is this question about Kazakhstan? The United Kingdom of Great Britain? The Romulan Empire? Even if we specify where, how is knowing the answer going to help the student be an effective English teacher?

Under whose reign did Shakespeare write?

A. Kind Edward II

B. King James I

C. Queen Elizabeth I

D. Queen Elizabeth II

E. King Charles

If your goal is to beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, then this is a legitimate question. If you're going to be an English teacher in a Kazakh primary school, you don't need to know that Shakespeare wrote under BOTH James I and Elizabeth I.

Complete the following sentence: Rachel went to the city _______

A. two weeks later

B. four weeks later

C. six weeks later

D. eight weeks later

E. ten weeks later

I cannot fathom an explanation that would excuse the test writer for vomiting up this asinine question.

In addition to the terrible questions, or more hopefully because of them, cheating on the NOK was rampant. Although the ministry of education sent a proctor to the test, she was conveniently taken out to lunch while it was being administered. It's not an exaggeration to say that in her absence, it was a Charlie Foxtrot of cheat sheets, teachers, students and administrators all scurrying about trying to answer as many questions correctly on as many computers as they could. Technically, I wasn't supposed to see how the sausage is made, and the teachers gave my counterpart some flak because I dropped by and made a little bit of fun, but as I explained to the students I actually love the current system.

First, I had to explain to them that passing the NOK, especially by cheating, but even legitimately, had zero correlation with knowing English or being a good teacher (except that presumably students willing to work hard to memorize all the answers are also willing to work hard and actually learn English and teaching skills). I explained that given a few months, I could memorize enough question/answer pairs in any language that uses the latin alphabet to pass such an exam. So in their system, after two months of memorizing, I could be a certified Vietnamese teacher. They retorted "but you wouldn't even be able to speak Vietnamese!" Connect the dots, connect the dots...

Sadly, most of the students who actually can speak English and understand how to teach it will pursue careers in other, more highly paid fields, leaving those whom they helped to pass the NOK behind to teach be present in the classroom with future generations. The Kazakhstan teacher mill is thus churning out very poorly educated teachers, and ranks last in an English skills test. As a result, Kazakhstan is forced to invite foreign people like me to help out. Since I love my job, and I want future generations of Americans to have the same opportunity, it serves my interests for the quality of English teachers in Kazakhstan to remain poor.

At least that's what I told the students, because getting them angry that their system is holding their country back is more moving than just telling them it's a ridiculous system. In reality, I'd very much like for the quality of education here to be much better and feel completely hamstrung in my efforts by a certification system that doesn't reward good students and punish poor students.

I've asked my regional manager why we still have this ridiculous test, and she said that despite extensive lobbying by the National Association of English Teachers in Kazakhstan, the Ministry of Education decided to keep the test. I doubt anybody from the Ministry reads my blog, but here's one more voice. If you want to remain dependent on the generosity of the American taxpayers for good English instruction, keep the NOK and keep failing future generations. If not, here are some recommendations:

1. Use new test questions for every test and keep them a secret. Your students are excellent at memorizing, that ability will not help them be good teachers.
2. For each question, ask "Does this question have exactly one correct answer?" and "Will knowing that answer make the taker a more effective English teacher?" If the answer to both is not yes, throw out the question.
3. Stamp out cheating. Fire teachers caught helping students during the test. Fail students who give answers. The reason for the test is to assess if the person taking it will be a competent teacher. It is not a team building exercise.

A question that people love to ask learners of other languages is "are you fluent?" My roommate in Nashville would reply "I don't like the term fluent" and I must say that I agree with him. A person's language ability cannot be boiled down to a single bit of data, fluent or not fluent. For that matter, it also cannot be captured very well as a number between 1 and 10 according to the ACTFL guidelines that Peace Corps volunteers are assessed with. Acquiring another language is very similar to building a mountain from thousands and thousands of small stones. We can administer the binary test of whether the mountain is higher than the arbitrary line dividing hills and mountains, and we can assess the size of the mountain by measuring its height in some agreed upon units, but there is no simple way to characterize the entire mountain.

One of the very best English speakers in Zhezkazgan is Kairat. I recall a discussion that we had that was sparked when he described a person as "swarthy" and I didn't know what it meant. He asserted that I should know the word, because it isn't a technical word. I countered that there are at least 500,000 English words that I don't know and I'd imagine that there are some in Russian that he doesn't know either. He was adamant that he knew every Russian word that wasn't technical. Admittedly he's a sharp tack, but my understanding of Russian is that it's also a rich language that would be nearly impossible for a single person to learn completely. And so, for better or worse, native speakers still have stones that they can add to their mountains.

Just as a native speaker's mountain can be missing some stones above the tree line, a non-native speaker's mountain can appear impressive but be missing some stones that would be expected at the base. I was having a conversation with an advanced speaker who works as a translator for KazakhMys about the lack of a science and math school for girls in Zhezkazgan. She was able to correctly use "discriminate" and "IQ" but had to ask me what the meaning of the word "dumb" was. You'd be hard-pressed to find a first grader in America who didn't know that word, but it probably doesn't appear much in the copper mining giant's annual reports. I definitely consider her fluent and guess she'd score a 9 or 10 on the ACTFL test, but because she didn't know that one simple word, she couldn't understand me.

Now when people ask me if I'm fluent, I respond that I'm fluent at introducing myself, talking about my family, and what I ate yesterday, but if you want to talk to me about the relative merits of using HDI versus GDP per capita as an indicator of a country's development, I'd be about as fluent as a turd. My language mountain just doesn't have the necessary stones yet.

My host mother absolutely loves to worry about how much I am embarrassing myself in the community. Sometimes, her concern is beneficial, like when I'm about to go out in a wrinkled dress shirt and she insists that I allow her to iron it first. Other times, it's somewhat frustrating because I don't care if people think I'm crazy for wearing shorts in 25°C weather. This past weekend, it was just hilarious.

I have two pairs of tennis shoes that are the same model, but in different states of wear. Since I only ever clean my shoes if I've stepped in dog poop, they've lost some of that new shoe shine over the years. My mother has thoroughly cleaned each pair, but I can't be bothered to relace the one clean pair, and continue to wear the dirty pair. In addition to being a little dirty, they've grown small holes near my pinky toe.

"Your shoes have holes in them again. It's ұят. You should wear the pair I cleaned."

"I know, but the dirty pair is still good."

"Your feet will get cold and you will get sick."

"Au contraire, the holes help my sweaty feet get fresh air. In fact, maybe we should cut a big hole, then lots of air can go by my feet and they will stay dry. It will be great!"

My host mom is generally pretty good at picking up sarcasm, and I truly thought she understood it this time. But the next morning when I went to the bathroom to get my shoes (I'm not allowed to sleep in the same room as my shoes lest I get sick) I couldn't help but smile when I saw this:

I fail to understand how the two large holes she gouged out are less ұят than the barely noticeable holes from before, so I believe she is trying to shame me into wearing the clean pair. I'm just enjoying how much ventilation I get when I run.

Kazakhs are cold-blooded. That is the only conclusion I can draw from my interactions with them regarding the weather and the way they dress.

During the winter my host mom was constantly admonishing me to wear my hat, put on my jacket, and don my warm winter boots. I endeavored to politely tell her that although I'm willfully ignorant of the aesthetics of how I dress, I am aware enough to dress comfortably for current meteorological conditions. When she insisted, I would put on my coat, walk outside, close the door, and immediately take it off again.

My host mom was not the only person trying to advise me about how cold I was. One time while walking to school in February, I took off my jacket because I was too hot. A nearby grandma promptly berated me in Russian. I don't understand Russian, but I assume she said "You are insane. You are going to catch a cold and die." Even without my jacket, I was still a bit warm.

We had an anthropology major in my training group who once mentioned a class she had taken where they study how the body develops differently depending on the culture. It was something I hadn't considered before, but makes perfect sense. Here, children cannot leave the house without a hat and thick winter jacket from early November until the end of March. Even if it's not cold outside and they are just going for a 10-second jaunt to the neighbor's. So you can imagine that never having been exposed to the cold, their bodies never learn to generate much heat. At least that's my amateur assessment of the situation, not having taken said class.

What really fascinates me though, is the response I got when I showed up at the college today to lesson plan wearing tennis shoes and a short sleeve shirt. (Sorry Peace Corps, I still wear a button-down and a tie when I'm teaching) My teachers looked me up and down and said "you came like that? You're crazy!" Since I'd had a stranger ask me on the street, "aren't you cold?" I figured they were surprised by the quantity rather than the quality of my clothes. I told them I was actually a little too hot, and wiped some sweat off my brow to prove it. At this point one bravely admitted that she was also uncomfortably hot in her winter boots. How does this happen? Is the societal pressure to conform to dressing norms so great that the people don't dress for summer until weeks after it has arrived? Is the fear of catching a cold from feeling the least bit chilly causing people to endure stifling heat? Does fashion dictate that women must always wear knee high leather boots?

Although they don't seem to generate as much heat as I do, I know that their annoying tendency to doubt my ability to dress warmly enough comes from a deep seated concern for my well-being, so I can say that although they may be cold-blooded, they are warm-hearted.