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Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Tick-tock

January 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Occasionally one of my students does something extraordinary. That happened this afternoon. I gave her an IELTS writing exercise, where she had to write a letter about sub-standard student accommodation. Twenty minutes, a minimum of 150 words. As always, I had a go at the task at the same time. Hmm, too much noise? Problems with the heating? Too far away? What should I write about? These questions posed no such problems for my student. With barely half the time gone, she gleefully said “Done!” and presented me with a letter easily good enough to get the grade she’ll need when she does the exam. If she’d actually used the last ten minutes it might have been just about perfect.

Dad recently acquired a 9-carat gold pocket watch that his great-grandfather (or to be specific, his dad’s dad’s dad) had received as a present from work. He showed it to me over Christmas. For some reason he was happy to throw it away, or get some money for the gold. It’s a double hunter, meaning it has a lid on both the front and back. The case (monogrammed on the back) has been battered a bit, and the glass is missing, as is the second hand. We couldn’t get it to work. I told Dad I would take it in to one of the watchmakers here in Timișoara; he might be able to do something. The shop, on Piața Libertății, was a delight to visit. Every type of clock and watch, and piece of clock and watch, and tool for mending clocks and watches, was on display. Old cuckoo clocks were going off, left right and centre. It was like visiting a clock museum. Fitting the theme perfectly, the pocket-sized man who dealt with my great-great-grandad’s watch was about seventy. Two hours after handing it to him, I went back to find he’d got the mechanism going. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It might have been the first time it had tick-tocked for half a century, perhaps more. Unfortunately he didn’t have a glass that fitted, nor a second hand, but that’s a start.

The Australian Open is back, with its crazy hours. Last night a match didn’t finish until nearly quarter past three in the morning. We’ve also got a new tie-break rule. There are (sadly) no more advantage final sets; instead there’s a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-6 in the decider. Even if it feels gimmicky to me, there’s nothing wrong with the new rule as such; I just think the old one was better. We’re now robbed of the kinds of drama-filled long final sets we’ve seen at the Aussie Open in recent years, such as in both the Djokovic–Wawrinka matches (2013 and 2014) and both marathons Simona Halep was involved in last year. If they wanted to change it, I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down the route Wimbledon has done: a normal (less gimmicky) tie-break to seven points at 12-12. But that’s not what they did, and we’re now in the slightly mad situation where all four grand slams have different systems for determining the winner of close matches. The French Open is the only one to retain a no-limit deciding set, although I can’t imagine that will be for long. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll eventually plump for the Aussie system.

Towards the end of last week I got hooked on the BDO world darts tournament. This isn’t the biggest and best tournament in terms of standard and prestige (that would be the PDC worlds) but it has that pleasant eighties feel about it. The story for me was really the women’s tournament, with Mikuru Suzuki of Japan steamrolling her British opponent in straight sets in the final, walking on (and off) to the strains of Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.

Eighteen games of Scrabble in 2019 so far, and I have a 50% record. Last weekend I got utterly taken apart, 574-313, in my biggest loss ever. That took my record for 2019 to 4-9, but to my surprise I followed that up with five straight wins, including (in my final game) a 557-336 victory where I out-bingoed my opponent 4-0, two of my bingos scoring in the 90s.

I’ll leave discussion of the Brexit shambles until next time.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Flipping heck

October 29, 2018 by 0 Comments

I wound up with 22½ hours last week, which isn’t a terrible total. This week I’ve got a total of 31½ hours booked – a fairly busy week in other words – and I hope I end up with something close to that. Saturday morning’s session (I hesitate to use the word lesson) with the 17-year-old girl was interesting. As is her wont, she asked me not to bother with the Cambridge reading test practice I’d prepared, saying she’d rather have a 90-minute chat instead. In this time she told me about her exploits in the swimming pool, and showed me the medals (including a national bronze in breaststroke) to prove it. Her description of her training regime sounded rather, er, Romanian. Three hours a day, seven days a week. She described her programme and coach in good English, but switched to Romanian to say, “He hit me.” What with? His hand? Did it hurt? She said, yes it absolutely did hurt, and it was some rubber implement. She rummaged around in a cupboard trying to find one without success, then she brought up a picture on her phone. It was a flipper. Her coach hit her with a flipper. “But it motivated me to go faster.” On her mother’s advice she gave up swimming when she was 14. This morning I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington and her family. Her eldest son is 16 and a very successful swimmer. I regaled them all of the flipper story.

It’s a shame I can’t watch the World Series. Well I could, but my sleep is too important to me. This morning I wanted to get up early, taking advantage of the clocks going back, and go fishing. I only spent an hour there and didn’t catch anything, obviously. But yesterday the third game went on so long that I was able to catch a fair chunk of it, including the wild 13th inning in which both teams scored. But I missed the end of it because I had go to Strada Timiș for my lessons with flipper girl and her little brother. (The game went for seven hours and 20 minutes, breaking all kinds of records. The Dodgers walked it off in the 18th.) The Red Sox bounced back last night in the fourth game to lead 3-1, and could wrap it up tonight. It’ll be party time, no doubt, in Boston if they do so. I don’t know if there’s another city on the planet as passionate about its sports teams.

Scrabble. I’ve now won eleven of my last twelve games and my rating has been gradually edging up. A bit more solidity on the three-letter words is helping me. My most memorable game among that dozen was one against a higher-rated player where I held a three-figure lead, only for my opponent to play a bingo on the triple lane while I was swamped with vowels. I made a clear blunder on one of my final plays, but got away with it, sneaking a confidence-boosting four-point win. And the very next game I lost by just three. That game illustrated the importance of the letter E in Scrabble, and indeed in English in general, as I only saw one E all game. I had a couple of milestone games: my first with four bingos, and my first 400-point game without a bingo at all. In my last game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-0 thanks to both blanks, but my opponent scored heavily on just about every turn, while I struggled with my post-bingo racks, and I had to sweat a bit on the way to a 49-point win.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The (ever so slightly sad) end of ultramarathons

October 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Timișoara is beautiful in autumn, don’t you think? I took these pictures on Saturday in one of the many parks. I even sent them to S, who was in Prague and will be until Friday.

This week has the makings of my busiest week of work since May. It’s telling that even when things aren’t plain sailing, they’re still miles better than they ever were in insurance. I’ve just finished a business English lesson with a married couple. Business English isn’t my favourite discipline, because it often involves industry-specific vocabulary that I might be a bit shaky on (as was the case tonight when the focus was on logistics), and that whole world of Powerpoint and organisational charts is no longer one I inhabit. Yesterday evening I had my second lesson with the two sisters, this time in their sixth-floor apartment not far from the main hospital, instead of at my place. As usual, finding the specific apartment block was no simple task. But things really got problematic at the end of the lesson. We overran, and then I managed to get lost in Block City, which by now was pitch black. I ended up being late for my next lesson back home, even though I jogged some of the way. I called my student to warn him, and he seemed to be OK with it.

Two pieces of tennis-related news. First, Djokovic and Nadal are due to play each other in an exhibition in Saudi Arabia on 22nd December. The match is even named after the Saudi Arabian king. After the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, they should take a stand and pull out of this obscene spectacle now.

Second, Wimbledon have announced a final-set tie-break, starting in next year’s championships. It’s the first change to the scoring system there in 40 years. I’m glad the shoot-out will come in at 12-12, as I suggested it might, rather than 6-6. That seems a reasonable compromise, although it’s a shame they haven’t made the final exempt from the new rule. Wimbledon got a ton of negative press after the 6½-hour Anderson–Isner semi wreaked havoc with the schedule, and I don’t blame them for making this move. Part of me, on the other hand, will miss these occasional ultramarathons. Isner–Mahut was simply mindblowing. Neither the Australian Open nor Roland-Garros have made a similar announcement yet, but I fully expect tie-breaks to feature in deciding sets there in the very near future, either at 6-6 or 12-12.

One sport that can still, in theory, continue indefinitely is baseball. Game one of the World Series between the Red Sox and the Dodgers is tonight.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

They think it’s all over… but it isn’t

October 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

S has contacted me today from Prague, so that’s nice. She told me (in Romanian, yay!) about her technological woes and the wet weather there.

We’ve finally reached the end of the regular Major League Baseball season, only we haven’t, because not one but two of the divisions finished in a tie for first place, both in the National League. That’s after 162 games and roughly 500 hours of playing time for each team. Rather than use some sort of tie-breaker method, like head-to-head, run differential or number of ejections, the four teams involved will sort it out on the field. Two bonus 163rd games, that kick off (!) at 8pm and 11pm tonight, my time. The losers of these extra games don’t go home; instead they play each other in the wild card game tomorrow. For the loser of that game, it really is all over. This crazy turn of events is unprecedented, and productivity is likely to plummet in certain parts of the US. I’ll tune in to the first of the bonus games, between the Cubs and the Brewers at Wrigley Field, after my lesson. For the Red Sox over in the American League, things were much more clear cut. Maybe they eased off the gas just a fraction in September, but they still finished with 108 wins, or exactly two-thirds of their games. That’s the best record in the major leagues. Whether they’re the best team is another matter. Boston are very good and a heap of fun to watch, but I’d say the Yankees are about as good and Houston Astros (last season’s champions) are marginally better.

Only two lessons today. The first was on the verb “to get” and most (certainly not all) of its many, many uses. Tonight it’s likely to be either business English or an article on funky modern offices (the sort of places that I’d hate to work in). I’m getting a fair volume of phone calls now, so my hours should eventually increase from last week’s 22½.

Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Pigman

September 28, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday morning I got an email from one of the owners in my apartment block in Wellington. She asked me to tell my tenant to move his car from the car park, so that the cherry-picker could get access to the windows for the six-monthly clean. She knew I was in Romania, so I don’t know what she was thinking. I have no direct access to my tenant anyway. But we did get into a discussion about the earthquake shit, and it certainly is shit. I’m glad to be on the other side of the world.

Later on Tuesday I saw my eleven-year-old student in Dumbrăvița. He’s a lovely boy; it’s a pleasure to teach him. We now have two-hour sessions. Perhaps because he used to be the top-ranked chess player for his age in the county, he has no concentration issues in a stint of that length. Three or four sessions ago, I gave him a crossword that I’d created: it was one of a series of puzzles I’d made (and am still making) with a mixture of picture and definition clues. They’re mostly 11×11, but I sometimes use different grid shapes and sizes to liven things up a bit. This particular puzzle had “pigeon” in it, with a picture of the bird as the clue. He didn’t know the English word so I helped him fill it in. As soon as he saw “PIG” and the final N, he shouted “Pigman!” For some reason, the idea of a half-pig-half-man creature sent him into hysterics, and he said it would be awesome to find a puzzle where “pigman” actually was the right answer. So on Tuesday I surprised him with a “pigman” crossword, with a slightly grotesque hybrid beast sourced from Google Images as the clue. He didn’t see it right away, but when he eventually clapped his eyes on 12 Down and realised what it was, he got pretty damn excited and gave me a high-five. He even glued the completed puzzle to the cover of his English folder. After a few more sheets and games, we reached the end of the lesson, at which point I asked him (as I always do) if he enjoyed it. He said, yes, and the last one, and the one before that, and all of them! It’s a great feeling as a teacher to get that kind of response.

Baseball is weird, or to be more accurate, it’s very random. Last night I finished work at 10pm and then tuned in to the Red Sox game at home to the Orioles. The Orioles have had a terrible season, winning barely a quarter of their games, and are guaranteed to finish with the worst record in the Major Leagues. Boston, on the other hand, are sure to finish with the best record, giving them home advantage throughout the play-offs. When I started watching, Boston were already leading 10-3 in the bottom of the fifth inning. Their bats continued to explode as they added another nine unanswered runs. A complete blowout in other words. And it was first against worst, so that was to be expected, right? Well, the two sides met again just a couple of hours later (it was a doubleheader caused by a rain postponement the previous night) and in that second game, the Orioles won 10-3. In baseball, that sort of reversal, even on home turf, even against the worst team in the competition, is by no means unusual. That also means that come play-off time, when teams are of a similar standard, all bets are off.

I played an extraordinary game of Scrabble last weekend, slapping down two bingos to my opponent’s ridiculous four, and I lost 521-445, the highest-scoring game I’ve ever been involved in. And talking of Scrabble:

Language teaching - Other sports - Politics - Tennis

A cluster of random thoughts

September 9, 2018 by 0 Comments

I didn’t watch the women’s US Open final, but now wish I had, for the sheer drama alone. Serena is an incredible player but she’s also a bully, with a “Don’t you know who I am?!” attitude. She has a history of using her bullying tactics at the US Open in particular, where she knows the crowd will probably side with her (as, shamefully, they did in this match). This time she also made completely irrelevant comments about being a woman and having a daughter. I’m pleased that Naomi Osaka played great tennis and got over the line, even if Serena and an obnoxious crowd robbed her of that special moment of winning her first grand slam. Osaka even felt the need to apologise for winning. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too sorry for Osaka – she took home US$3.8 million, which is a crazy amount just for being rather good at whacking furry yellow objects over a net with a bat.

This year’s US Open has seen its fair share of upsets and retirements; the searing heat has been a major factor in the latter. The biggest shock on the men’s side was Federer’s loss to John Millman. I remember Millman from my first day at Flushing Meadows three years ago. I was queuing with my cousin and his fiancée, and Millman (who I didn’t recognise, but I saw his name tag) was at the next-door kiosk, trying to sort out something quite important for his match that was due to start in half an hour. I thought at the time he was clearly one of the have-nots of tennis. With his win over Federer he’ll make the world’s top 50, and he earns nearly half a million for reaching the quarter-finals, so he’s starting to do quite nicely from the game.

On a different day, Federer would have beaten Millman in straight sets, but on this occasion he wasn’t at his best on the big points. On the same day as this match, I watched the Red Sox beat the Braves by the totally flattering score of 8-2, a game in which they were outplayed for long periods, with the result in serious doubt until the eighth inning. After these two results in different sports, I thought about the importance of clustering and sequencing, in sport (and in life too). There are different concepts from timing, which obviously has a profound impact on results as well – a double fault or a walk can range in importance from meaningless to game-changing depending on when it occurs. Sequencing, or the order in which events happen, is also very important, as is clustering. As a rule, you’re better off if good things happen to you one after the other, but you spread your bad things out a bit. That’s very true in life too – we can often handle one issue at a time, but a pile-up of problems can send us into a tailspin. On the other side, achieving a major success (say, a deal with a large record label) relies on a series of positive events happening one after the other. Baseball analysts have tried to figure out what determines effective timing, clustering and sequencing, and the answer (in that sport at least) is very clear: luck.

Politics is one area where clustering is of paramount importance, especially in first-past-the-post systems. The clustering of Democrats in urban areas was a big (and understated) reason for Trump’s win in 2016. Clinton ran up the score in those large cities, making her vote inefficiently distributed. It also affects the other branches of government. Because their opponents are neatly clustered in areas of high density, and because they’re arseholes, the Republicans are able to gerrymander effectively, and that’s why the Dems will need a hefty popular-vote win if they want to take the House in November. Clustering isn’t always bad for political parties, however. If you’re a big party trying to form a government, it harms you, but it’s to your advantage if you’re a small party trying to get some representation in parliament. An interesting case (and a terrible advert for FPTP) was the 2015 UK election, where 3.9 million people voted UKIP but they won just a single seat because they weren’t a dominant force in any geographic area. In the same election, the SNP managed to achieve the best of both worlds, by being entirely “clustered” in Scotland but very unclustered within Scotland. Their 1.5 million votes (half of all votes in Scotland) gave them a whopping 56 of 59 Scottish seats.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. The All Blacks v Argentina game was about to start, and they pointed the camera at the haka. It sounded like a great game. Mum and Dad had just spent a few days in a chilly Moeraki.

Last week I posted about 100 flyers in letterboxes in Dumbrăvița, and I got a reply. Hopefully this week I’ll be starting with a 17-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Insults, intensity and incredible finishes

September 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

This morning I had my back-to-back lessons with the brother and sister in Dumbrăvița. On the way I got a coffee from the little shop with benches outside. On one of the benches was a slightly darker-skinned man in his twenties with his feet on the bench, and on another bench was a man of about sixty who didn’t look particularly healthy. The older man didn’t like the fact that the young guy had his feet on the bench, and told him, “This is Romania! We don’t put dirty shoes on benches. Go back to Turkey, you fucking immigrant!” The young man said only a few words and otherwise ignored him; he was soon in the middle of a voice call.

As for the lessons, well this time I started with the boy. He’s hard work, and he really doesn’t want to be there, but it’s only for one hour and he seems to find the motor racing board game at least somewhat engaging. It was a relief though when he was out of the way and I got to see his big sister who’s much less of a handful.

I’ve watched some extraordinary sport – both tennis and baseball – in the last few days. This morning I turned on the TV – it was well past midnight in New York, but you never know – and lo and behold, Nadal and Thiem were still out there. They were out there for a good deal longer too, Nadal squeezing through in a fifth-set tie-break, a few minutes past 2am local time. There was incredible shotmaking under pressure from both men. I only just managed to see the finale before heading to Dumbrăvița. Then this evening, after a high-intensity grammar workout with two beginner students, I saw that the Red Sox were down 7-1 in Atlanta, heading into the final two innings. In other words they’d all but had it, but hey, this is the 2018 Boston team and you just never know, and over the next 90 minutes I saw the most incredible comeback.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Romania - Tennis

Heading into the home straight

August 31, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s the last day of August, the final day before we hit those similar-sounding month names that signal the home stretch of the year. As yet, there’s little sign of autumn. Our expected high today is 31 degrees.

Yesterday morning I got a phone call during my lesson. The number was unknown and I couldn’t answer it. I rang him or her back straight after the lesson, but the number was busy. Later I’d need to see my landlady, or to be more accurate my landlord’s intermediary (my actual landlord is based in Israel), to pay my rent in euros and my expenses in lei. Having to trek across town at the end of each month to physically hand over cash in two different currencies doesn’t seem any less ridiculous now than it did nearly two years ago. I walked to Piața Badea Cârțan where I handed over 1390 lei in return for €300 at one of the many exchange offices, picked up some fruit and vegetables and a 2.25-litre bottle of Timișoreana, and then read the final chapters of Station Eleven. I called my landlady to ensure she’d be home, then hopped on the tram (Line 4) just around the corner from the market. It was the hottest part of the day by then, and it was steaming inside that old tram. The only respite I got was when it stopped and the doors opened.

For the first 17 months I met my landlady at her work, the power company which is situated almost next door to the Timișoreana beer factory and conveniently close to Piața Badea Cârțan, but she no longer works. She lives with her husband above a pizza restaurant, almost right outside the penultimate tram stop on the line. Her husband seems to be suffering very badly from depression, perhaps with additional complications, but severe depression is more than enough on its own. The last few times I met my landlady at her office, she broke down in tears. I called her again when I got off the tram, and I could hear a small child in the background. Her husband came downstairs to meet me. I asked him how he was, and immediately regretted it. “Sick,” he said. He took my money, said goodbye, and that was that. I went home on Line 7. When I arrived home I called that unknown number back. After several rings a young woman answered, and said she’d found another teacher in the intervening few hours, almost certainly a non-native speaker.

I had four lessons on Wednesday, two of them back-to-back with the brother and sister in Dumbrăvița, and then two with adults. The lessons with the kids went pretty well; the ones with the adults less so. My 6pm session was with a bloke who is just one day younger than me. His wife used to attend too, but I think she took a dislike to me during a lesson in which we discussed Romanian customer service. She got a job in Vienna soon after that, although she’s since moved back. As for him, he’s had a tough year. His father, who lived in Spain, died in June after a long illness. On Wednesday he was very tired. I wasn’t at my best either, getting myself all confused about the meaning of “repatriation” in a particular context. At 8pm I had a lesson with two beginner-level guys in their early thirties, and I probably made most of the lesson boring, hard and confusing, all at the same time. The final part, where we discussed the habits of British people (football, beer, tea, and so on) possibly just about saved me.

When my aunt and uncle were in Timișoara, I took them to the Museum of the Revolution. The woman at the desk was called Simona, and my aunt said that one of their rhododendrons had the same name. When she was back in New Zealand, my aunt emailed me a picture of the Simona flower, for me to pass on to its namesake at the museum. I don’t think my aunt realised how many Romanian women carry that name, including one of the most famous right now, Simona Halep. Unfortunately for Romanian tennis fans, she fell at the first hurdle at the US Open. It’s been a brutally hot first week in New York.

The Red Sox appear to be back in business; they lost six games out of eight but have now won their last three, including Wednesday night’s game in which they belted a colossal eleven runs in one inning.

Books - Other sports - Politics

Just a quick update…

August 27, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I’ve been reading Station Eleven, a bloody fantastic book by Emily St John Mandel. I’m finding it hard to put down. I did however find time to prepare for tomorrow’s lessons and make a crumble with those plums I picked last weekend (but wouldn’t have done if I’d known someone was watching).

On Friday I heard that John McCain wouldn’t be continuing his brain cancer treatment, and less than 48 hours later he was dead. Although I was very glad that Barack Obama beat him to the presidency, I also felt that McCain would have done a fine job. Picking Sarah Palin as his running mate probably didn’t help his cause though. McCain was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War in 2003 but was seen as a maverick in more recent times; that’s more a reflection of how deeply conservative the Republicans have become than anything else. But his vote against the repeal of Obamacare last year was one of the more dramatic moments of Trump’s presidency to date. I’ve just read that McCain, who lived to 81, is survived by his 106-year-old mother.

Baseball. Yesterday morning I caught the tail-end of the marathon game between the Milwaukee Brewers and Pittsburgh Pirates. It went to 15 innings, finishing at quarter to one in the morning, local time. I was glad to see it because it was once-in-a-blue-moon crazy, and the sort of crazy that can only happen in the National League where the pitcher is forced to bat. The Red Sox, on the other hand, have lost five of their last seven, and are now only seven games ahead of the Yankees in the division race. That’s still a lot, but they have a tough run-in. It isn’t quite over just yet.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The big debate

August 16, 2018 by 0 Comments

Four lessons today, three of them with kids. My favourite moment was probably with the boy who never really wants to be there. We were discussing jobs, and he told me (in Romanian; he rarely speaks English) that he wanted to be either a hairdresser or a cook when he grows up. When I got home I was reading the Guardian and found an article by George Monbiot about obesity, where he notes the distinct lack of fat people in a photograph of a packed Brighton Beach during the heatwave of 1976. He said that excessive eating and lack of exercise are not the main drivers of the epidemic, and surprisingly the average British person consumes fewer calories than they did 40 years ago. Instead he blames the proliferation of sugary, processed foods. Whatever or whoever the culprit is, it’s obvious to me that only some of the blame lies with individuals. OK, so the choices we’re making now are making us fat, and 40 years ago they weren’t. Does that mean we’ve become stupider, lazier and less responsible in that time? I doubt it, and even that were the case, what’s the reason for that?

It’s kind of three steps forward, two steps back, as my teaching volume slowly picks up again. By mid-September I should be back to something like normal.

Since I last posted, the Red Sox have won all five of their matches, including a wild 19-12 game in Baltimore. That score wouldn’t be out of place in rugby. Last weekend also saw an ultimate grand slam, the 30th in the history of the Major Leagues, and something I got all excited about three years ago.