by It’s now grey and properly nippy out there. But that’s immeasurably easier to handle than the hellscape that was summer. We had two and a half months of disgustingly hot weather.
Yesterday I hit a brown pigeon on my bike. Ugh. There are so many pigeons here, I suppose I was likely to do that eventually. I didn’t immediately kill it, but I ran over one of its legs and damaged a wing. An old lady picked it up and put it next to a shop wall, where it would surely die.
Maths. Teaching that in addition to English has been a big plus. Pun intended. I don’t get all that enthused by trying to bump a decent student with rich parents up from a B to an A, but when you get beyond that it can actually be pretty fun. Like last night when I taught an 18-year-old guy that a minus times a minus equals a plus. I’m guessing he was taught that at school a few years ago, but maths at school often does just wash over you. Rather than just teach him that fact, I showed him what would happen if a minus times a minus remained a minus. This would be crazy, right? I gave him a “quiz” as I called it, based on we did in the previous session, then spent the remainder of the two hours scribbling on the whiteboard. Every few minutes he took a picture.
Lately I’ve found a Youtube channel called Combo Class in which maths is taught in a pretty unique way – outside mostly, often with things catching fire or falling over each other. The first time I saw it I wondered what the hell I was watching, then persevered and saw that this guy really knew his stuff and could teach it in a very engaging way. He taught me plenty I didn’t know and got me to think about concepts I did know in a totally different way. He’s a big proponent of using bases other than ten (six and twelve, mostly). Base ten, which is ubiquitous to the point that we can hardly think of any alternative, is far from the best base, mathematically speaking. We use it because most of us have ten fingers and ten toes. But it isn’t a fluke that (in the English-speaking world at least) there’s been a lot of twelve around. Time, money, length, cartons of eggs, and so forth. Twelve splits up much more nicely than ten does. And we even have the special word dozen for it. (Here in Romania, everything is so ten-centric – even eggs are sold in tens – that teaching fractions becomes a major challenge; people can’t conceive of dividing something into thirds or eighths or twelfths.)
On Friday I saw a film at Cinema Victoria with Dorothy. We saw Good Bye, Lenin!, a tragicomedy that came out in 2003. It’s about a woman who fell into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her son’s increasingly convoluted efforts to keep the news from her when she woke up eight months later. The film is in German; it was subtitled in Romanian. The soundtrack was composed by Yann Tiersen, who also did Amélie (great film) two years before. Very well done, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I’d have much preferred some good old simple British comedy. Amazingly, tickets were only 15 lei (£2.50 or NZ$5.50).
Saturday was a full-on work day, mostly in Dumbrăvița. On Sunday I went back to Dumbrăvița to meet Mark for lunch at a burger joint called E10. I wasn’t sure whether to pronounce it in the Romanian way, or if it was an English-language pun (Eaten? Eton?). The burger was fine, if a little pricey. The crappy plastic modern versions of great songs did my head in though, and just being in Dumbrăvița is pretty nasty in itself. A massive, sprawling suburb that just keeps growing, so much of it feels like it was plopped there last Tuesday. There’s the park with the two churches, which is nice, but veer far from that and you’re faced with endless acres of fakeness. And then there are the cars. They keep getting bigger and less Romania-like. The whole place hardly seems to be in Romania. The only positive is a large wooded area near where Mark lives, which is great for walking his two dogs.
