Family

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

The start of my collection, with nothing to play it on (yet)

December 19, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum and Dad called me again from Hampden yesterday. It was a relief to see a smile back on Mum’s dial. She’s always more relaxed down there, away from what is now (let’s not mince words) a shithole. Mum seems strangely magnetised to that dreadful place which they should stay away from as far as humanly possible until the building work is completed.

Yesterday Dorothy messaged me to say there was a vinyl and book sale on at Scârț. Sounded good. Sale wasn’t quite the right word though – some of the LPs were really quite pricey. I picked up five second-hand records for a total of 300 lei (just over NZ$100 or £50): Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel, 18 by Chicago, Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits album. That’s a start; I just need an actual record player now. Oh, and I bought one book for 5 lei: H. W. Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, in Romanian.

Four English lessons today. I started at 8am with my Bucharest-based online student – I found out today that he’s only two months older than me – who wanted help with adverbs of manner and uncountable nouns, among other things. I was in contact with the east of Romania again for my second session, this time with a 35-year-old woman. She said that if her six-year-old son (her only child) doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas, he’ll make his disappointment very obvious. He’s still very little, I said, but by twelve he’ll have learnt to hide it. You can’t always get what you want. She said, no, he won’t do that when he’s twelve because I’ll have told him to fight for what he wants. If he doesn’t like something, even a glass of juice, I want him to make his feelings clear. I still remember at seven or eight telling a family friend that I didn’t like some juice – probably something Ribena-like – and wouldn’t drink it. My grandmother told me I was already too big to act in that way, and I think she was right. Little Vlad (I don’t think that’s his name) has the pleasure of going to intensive after-school classes, which include nine hours of English lessons a week. Right Vlad, I’m going to make you work stupidly hard, and in return you get to be total dick. That’s the modern way, it seems. She earns well by working extremely hard at an investment bank, doing something that I would find utterly pointless.

In between my first two English sessions was the Romanian lesson, which was mostly spent discussing the downfall of Ceaușescu during an unseasonably warm few days in the lead-up to Christmas 1989. Our teacher was 20 at the time; I would have guessed several years younger. Yesterday the song Timișoara, produced by Pro-Musica in the wake of the Revolution, came on the local radio. It starts with a few bars from the Romanian national anthem and turns into something spine-tinglingly powerful. I recommend that you watch the video. My third English lesson was with a 17-year-old girl who came to my place. We went through some B2 Cambridge papers. I struggled to get her to write anything. In the end she wrote about her “happy place”, the mall, but didn’t even say much about that. My final lesson was the twins who live near Piața Verde. Because it was our last meeting of the year we had an extended Bananagrams session, which is always fun.

The World Championship darts. It’s back on again. Though the game is skin-deep compared to the multi-layered wonders of snooker, this tournament can be worth a watch because it’s the pinnacle of the sport. If you can get past the tedious football-style chants, you find an event filled with personality and drama. I’m a big fan of the format which, like in snooker, is a straight knockout and calls for matches of increasing length as the rounds progress. In the pre-Christmas phase, matches are best of five sets. The top players only need one win, and anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, to book their place in the post-turkey stages. Yesterday I saw a great game involving the Canadian player Matt Campbell. He was two sets up and had multiple opportunities to win the match in three. His Filipino opponent Lourence Ilagan took advantage of his reprieve to tie the match at 2-2, only for Campbell to storm through the fifth in some style. After Christmas the matches are best of seven, and in the new year they get longer still, culminating in a best-of-13-set final.
Update: I’ve just seen Man-Lok Leung of Hong Kong (he goes by Hugo) win an absolute belter of a game against Dutchman Gian van Veen, coming from two sets down – and missing no end of chances – to win 3-2 in a joyous finale. He fired a whopping eleven 180s and was a very popular winner. A Kiwi by the name of Haupai Puha – he lives in Wellington – is on next, but it’s bedtime for me.

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The stress of it all

December 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents Skyped me this morning from the hotspot in Hampden. It was blowing a gale there; a purple and white flap-in-the-wind “Takeaways” sign was about to be unmoored until a member of staff came out to save it. Mum looked pissed off and washed out, and still far from fully recovered. Dad, who didn’t get Covid as badly as Mum, wore a more stoic expression. The line was much better than it normally is from there, and we spoke for 18 minutes. (Skype keeps a record.) On a call of that length there would normally be at least something to interrupt Mum’s gloom – a moment of levity – but this time there wasn’t the faintest ghost of a smile. I hate seeing them under so much stress, especially when so much of it (OK, maybe not the Covid bit) was avoidable. On the plus side they were away from home, that godforsaken place where building work is taking place at a glacial pace and right now they can’t even have a shower. They’d arrived in Moeraki a short time before, and I hope they spend a good few days down there. It would be great if they didn’t have to go back.

Dad and I talked about British Christmas. I’m so glad I decided not to make a trip to the UK for the festive season. For travelling and just being in the UK, it’s the most horrible time of the year, as Andy Williams might have sung 60 Christmases ago. If I had the prospect of a 6am flight and a bus trip from Luton and charades with my brother’s in-laws, my stomach would be churning right about now.

My lessons got cancelled this morning. Annoying for a bunch of reasons including lack of a bike ride, so I went for a walk. This place is big enough that I can still ramble down random streets and see things I haven’t clapped my eyes on before, such as this rustic-looking restaurant:

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Saying no

December 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went over pronouns and possessive adjectives with my extroverted beginner student this evening (see below). When I asked him what should replace the question marks, he said “shim”, which I thought was funny because (a) it has a certain logic to it, and (b) who knows, maybe “shim” is actually a pronoun now. Edit: “shim” is already a word: it’s a thin sliver of material (wood, usually) that you wedge into a gap to ensure a nice tight fit.

In my previous session with him we talked about his extroversion. He has to be around people all the time, and the more the merrier. At 33 he’s never spent a whole day alone; the very idea filled him with dread. We’re at opposites ends of the spectrum, I said, and be thankful you’re at your end – life will treat you better.

I called up my tennis friend yesterday and told him that no, I wouldn’t be going to the New Year’s do because I had “other plans”. I said I felt bad for not going (which was true – they’re all lovely people) and I’d like to meet up for a drink at the usual place by the river (also true) in the near future. Saying no was really hard, but after doing it I realised it was still eight times easier than going to the bloody party would have been.

Next week things will start to wind down a bit. I’m going over to Dorothy’s for Christmas; there should be four of us there. Other than that, I’m looking forward to the time to myself – reading, watching the darts (I know), and working on the book I started a year ago but soon put to one side. I’ve got to finish it.

Last night I watched a film called The Whale, which Dad had recommended to me. The title is a reference to the main character, a morbidly obese online university professor, as well as to the novel Moby-Dick. I found the story gripping, even if it was harrowing a lot of the time. I certainly recommend it.

I’m about to call my parents. Last time we spoke, there was a chink of light at the end of the Covid tunnel, so let’s hope it wasn’t a false dawn. If I really wanted to wind Dad up, I could ask him what “shim” means.
Update: I gave them a call. They’re on the mend, but it’s been a really rough time for them. With all their ridiculous building work which will continue into the new year, their living quarters would be dangerously impractical even if they were in rude health.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching

Looking positive in Geraldine

December 12, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Now Dad’s got Covid too. He didn’t look too clever when I spoke to him this morning (my time). Mum had already gone to bed by then. He told me that Mum had forced herself to do painting and other ridiculous DIY that day, despite being sick as a dog herself, and had been angry with Dad for not doing the same. It beats me how Dad has lived with Mum for half a century without ever (as far as I know) telling her to eff off.

Last week I got an email from one of the other ex-owners in our Wellington apartment block. Ex. Thank our lucky stars that we’re ex. Still being embroiled in that misery (which about 650 owners in Wellington are) hardly bears thinking about. The email contained the words disproportionate, unfair and inequitable, which the whole situation absolutely is. (I spelt that out to letters I sent to Grant Robertson, my local MP, but they got passed on to the housing minister who was bloody hopeless.) The ball is starting to roll now, but up a depressingly steep hill.

Last week it was Boris Johnson’s turn in the hot seat at the Covid inquiry. He had aged, and at times he looked quite ill. The interesting bit came right at the beginning as some protesters were asked to leave during Johnson’s initial apology, and then Hugo Keith (the KC) pointed out that the UK had the second-worst mortality rate in Western Europe, behind Italy who were extraordinarily unlucky in the early stages and have a very high elderly population. “Look at the table!” the ex-PM protested. “Why are you excluding countries like Bulgaria [top of the European Covid death league overall] or Romania [fourth, I think]? When you include these vastly poorer countries full of anti-vax nutters, we’re slap-bang in the middle!” What a joke. After he’d got that apology out of the way, he spent two days justifying and normalising everything, including missing those five emergency Cobra meetings prior to mid-March. No, the toxicity in government at the time was not normal nor in any way desirable, and I seriously doubt it would have been like that had Theresa May or Gordon Brown or any of a number of former prime ministers had been in charge. This week the current PM Rishi Sunak, of Eat Out to Help Out fame, is stepping up to the plate.

Before my maths lesson yesterday, I met up with Mark at the beer factory. I had a pasta dish while he had a very Romanian combination: a slab of pork, some sausages, some mici, and mămăligă. I’ll go for that next time. Just one beer each; I’d soon be explaining algebraic fractions. We discussed various ongoings in his job which are making the experience rather less fun, and the possibility of my one day getting Romanian citizenship. Becoming actually Romanian and having triple nationality would be totally mad, wouldn’t it?

Talking of mad, someone else to put in the mad-but-good category is Luke Thompson, an English teacher based in Paris who has a long-running YouTube channel with over 850 episodes. I use his channel as a teaching tool for my more advanced students.

Five English lessons for me today after my initial Romanian one. Plenty of work, and with a welcome drop in my life admin, I’m not complaining.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Photos

Mum’s Covid and a spot of music

December 10, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Almost four years after everything went nuts, Mum’s got Covid. She’s been ill for five days – fever, sore throat, aching joints, the works, and different to anything she’s had before – but she only tested positive this morning. A bright second line in under a minute, she said. I’m glad it’s Covid – she looked wiped out when saw her on Friday on our Skype call, but now the mystery (as it was then) has been solved. Let’s hope she’s back to normal ASAP and Dad doesn’t now come down with something five times worse.

“Shine your light,” big bright yellow posters proclaimed at the beginning of the year, as Timișoara became European capital of culture. The slogan alluded to Timișoara being the first city in mainland Europe to get electric street lights, back in 1884. Since then we’ve mostly been kept in the dark. The whos and whats and whens and wheres of the events have been badly publicised, and visitor numbers have been well down on expectations. It’s done about as well as the Festival of Brexit. This weekend has been something of an exception though, with a well-signposted (by Romanian standards) closing ceremony in town. On Friday night I was lucky to finish lessons at 6:30, and I managed to drag Dorothy along to the free concert in Piața Unirii. I’m very glad I did. It kicked off at eight with Delia, a celebrity in Romania and an exponent of bubblegum pop. It was visually impressive – dry ice and streamers and fireworks – but the music did nothing for me and even less for Dorothy. Fifteen-odd songs that blurred into one another. We didn’t have much of a vantage point; the square was rammed with young people who then filed away the moment Delia’s hour-long set ended, allowing us to get much closer to the stage. On came Katie Melua who is very, very good. British but born in Georgia (the country, not the American state) she hit the scene in oh-five with Nine Million Bicycles, the inspiration for which was a guided tour of Beijing. Because why not? Her other main successes were The Closest Thing to Crazy, which is partly in 7/4 time, and The Flood, a track with regular changes of tempo and a total shift half-way through. She treated us to all three of these and several other songs – all dripping with emotion and creativity – that I hadn’t heard before. I felt so lucky to see her in Timișoara, at a cost of zero lei. Dorothy seemed to like her too. When she’d done her bit, I was keen to get home – my hands and feet were like ice, and I had an early start in the morning.

During Delia’s set

Katie Melua during The Flood and I Cried For You

I’ve had a busy week of teaching. I was supposed to have a two-hour maths lesson at nine this morning (Sunday – not my preferred day), taking me to 33 hours, but my student messaged me 35 minutes before we were due to start. Any chance we can move it? Hmm. Where I come from, you’re committed at that point. At the very least, the word sorry needs to appear somewhere in your message. But this is Romania. She’ll now be coming at 4pm instead. Yesterday I had my first online lesson with a guy in Bucharest whose wife I used to teach, then it was off to Dumbrăvița to see the kids. The heating in Octavian’s place is always jacked up to something crazy and I’m unable to stifle my yawns.

In a recent lesson I asked a very capable 14-year-old boy to write a short essay responding to this statement: Some people think women should be allowed to join the army, the navy and the air force just like men. Do you agree? His well-articulated response was a resounding no. His first sentence was: No, I don’t agree, because women have to take care of children, not take men’s occupations and manners. They shouldn’t steal men’s jobs, in other words. His mother, for what it’s worth, is vehemently anti-vax (though he himself was very careful during the pandemic, especially around masks). I asked him what he thought about women’s sport. Tennis and badminton were fine, but football?! God no. He’s a big football fan. Nobody actually watches women’s football, do they? Um, I hate to break it to you, but there was a World Cup recently and, yeah. His views are far from universal here – a 12-year-old boy I teach knows many of England’s top female players by name – but it’s interesting that they’re still so easy to come by in 2023. The pair of “position vacant” ads below are on the window of a popular second-hand clothes shop near me. I often cycle past it on a Saturday morning just before it opens at 9:30, and it’s heaving outside. Both the ads specify a woman (implicitly through feminine forms in the first ad, and explicitly in the second).

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Accomplishments

December 3, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to all the family. First I Skyped Mum and Dad. Mum had that pissed-off look. I didn’t entirely blame her. While she’d been painting the ceiling, Dad had been watching YouTube videos about Covid vaccines. The vaccines were useless according to the latest video he’d watched. “He’s a very creditable, highly qualified scientist.” Sure, he’s got a list of qualifications as long as your arm, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying is true. At all. In fact you see people weaponising their qualifications all the damn time. YouTube is great if you want to find good music. Likewise if you want to know how to make sarmale or put up bookshelves or even solve quadratic equations. For “information” about Covid vaccines and treatments though, you should probably give it a pass. There’s a lot of nuance about the Covid vaccines. Maybe they were pushed out too soon. Some vaccines were clearly better than others. (Um, the Chinese one, anybody?) Side effects were real, to the point that maybe for a fit young person it was just about worth chancing their arm on getting the virus, from an entirely selfish perspective. The efficacy of booster jabs – fourth, fifth and beyond – is debatable. But to say that the vaccines were a waste of time is quite clearly ridiculous, when all the data points to vaccination massively reducing mortality. The more shocking a YouTube video is, the more eyeballs it gets, and that’s pretty much the story. Dad wants me to watch this latest (long) video, and I suppose I’ll have to, just to humour him.

After Mum and Dad, I spoke to my brother. He, his wife, and his son have been under the weather lately. The little chappy has had a bout of scarlet fever, which sounds like something from the Middle Ages. They’re almost recovered now though. My brother is going to St Ives in the next few days. It seems Mum and Dad have now considered paying for them all to come out to New Zealand (maybe after a comment I made, who knows) – that would be fantastic if it happened.

Yesterday I had four lessons – three in Dumbrăvița, then an online session with the chap in London. My first session was maths with Matei. He’d been learning some basic stats and had no problems that I could see. At the end of the session, as I’ve done the last few weeks, I gave him a few short multiple-choice questions on a variety of topics, mainly to get his mathematical brain working. They’re designed to be answered in under a minute. One of them was this:

He stared at it for a good five minutes, maybe more. He eliminated A (“it can’t be smaller than 36”) and D (“too big”), but was unable to choose between B and C. The question clearly says (perhaps unfairly) that you can’t use a calculator, though I don’t think it would have helped him. If I was tackling this question, I’d immediately see that 75% is three-quarters. If 36 is three-quarters of our number, then 12 is a quarter, so I’d just add on 12 (the remaining quarter we need) to get the answer. It would take me ten seconds or so, without any recourse to algebra. Just for a laugh, I gave Mum that question on our Skype call this morning, without the four options. She got the answer impressively quickly, using the exact same method that I did. As soon as I read out the question, Dad blurted out, “is it a hundred?”. Ha! But how do I teach the method that Mum and I use? Between us we’ve been fiddling with numbers for over a century, and in that time we’ve developed all kinds of hard-to-teach tricks and time-savers that we use without even thinking about them.

After Matei I had English with Octavian. We looked at yet more poems by Ted Hughes, such as The Thought-Fox, a poem about writing a poem. By the time he does his IGCSE in the summer, he’ll be beyond sick of Ted Hughes’ poems. I wish I could focus on his pronunciation, which could be greatly improved, rather than poetry which while interesting is of far less long-term benefit. Then came his little sister – after last week’s horse-heavy session, this time I gave her loads of sheets with dinosaurs. Next time she wants stuff on Christmas. When I got home I had my online session – we went through two articles, one on AI, the other on consumerism.

Friday was Romania’s national day, and a much warmer day than we’ve had of late. I met Dorothy in the centre of town – my old stomping ground – and we watched the parade of military and emergency vehicles. Unlike previous parades, this one was disappointingly short. When I sent my brother the pictures of the vast crowds, he likened it to Red Square victory parades. In truth there was little of that kind of vibe, but in Ceaușescu’s time they were just like what you saw in Moscow, or what you see now in North Korea. When the parade was over, I suggested to Dorothy that we walk through Central Park as I did countless times when I lived there. We walked by the busts of the great and the good of Timișoara – all men – and read some of the inscriptions. Some of them were ex-mayors. Many of them were writers. One was Béla Bartók, the famous Hungarian composer, who had links to Timișoara. When we reached Ioachim Miloia’s bust, I noted that he was my age now when he died. Look what he accomplished in that short time!

An art-history guru, a library founder, a writer on all matters related to local history, and painter who helped to restore numerous churches in Timișoara and its environs. And then look at me! Wouldn’t it be nice to say I’d accomplished something? Dorothy was taken aback by my comment, and I explained that I’d probably feel quite different if I had a family. My biggest accomplishment is, without a doubt, coming to Romania and making a life for myself here (and having a job where I help people, at least in a small way). In early 2015, a few months before I started this blog, I had the realisation that nothing would happen unless I did something drastic. Visiting the US that year – seeing the big wide world out there – gave me the impetus to actually do it.

Here are some pictures from the parade. The main square is being done up nicely.

Piața Unirii, 4:30 pm last Sunday
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A wintry blast

November 29, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

We had an early – and quite spectacular – flurry of snow on Thursday as I met Dorothy for coffee in Piața Unirii. Half an hour of dense, chunky, fluffy flakes. I can’t remember getting snow quite that early before. The Christmas market had just started – the Capital of Culture might have prompted an earlier start than usual. In my early days here, being among the aromas of mulled wine and chimney cakes and traditional meaty dishes was extremely satisfying. There was the parade for Romania’s national day on 1st December – almost upon us again – and all the lights and fireworks. It was all very new and exciting.

This morning I had an interesting first online lesson with a priest aged around sixty. He’s in the middle of a theological project, as far as I can tell, and wants to brush up on both his English and his Greek. He has a good command of Serbian and a smattering of Russian and French, having studied both those languages at school as was normal back then. It wasn’t an easy session because I had to speak Romanian most of the time (for some reason I struggled there), and we used Zoom which now has a 40-minute limit so we kept stopping and starting.

The evidence from the UK Covid inquiry just gets worse with every witness who speaks. Yesterday it was the turn of the metropolitan mayors. I didn’t realise that mask mandates came in so ridiculously late over there, months after they did in Romania. And finally, someone said it: you won’t magically save the economy by letting a deadly virus run riot. It isn’t a trade-off, for heaven’s sake. It’s amazing how much currency that bollocks had, and still has. It’s also become obvious how dangerously politicised the response to the pandemic was. Today Michael Gove, who was minister of education for four years, is giving evidence. Largely because of him I have to teach those bloody circle theorems that I struggle to remember myself.

I’ve almost given up on a Christmas UK trip. I could manage the seven-hour bus trips if I didn’t have to do the jolly Christmas crap too. One or the other, but not both.

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Bamboozled

November 25, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got a phone call from Florin, the guy I play tennis with. They’re seeing in the new year at the same place as last year. They already need numbers. Do I want to come? Of course I don’t, but it’ll only be a few hours and won’t it be good to at least show my face? It couldn’t have been that bad last time, surely? Luckily I have this blog to remind me, and there it is, in black and white and orange. It really was that bad, and I even vowed not to put myself through that again. The difficulty is finding an excuse. A way out. There’s also the prospect of Christmas in the UK. A horrendous time of year to go there or be there. My brother doesn’t particularly enjoy Christmas with his wife’s family because they really go to town with party games and other activities he can’t stand, and I totally sympathise with him. I hope if I decide not to travel there for Christmas and instead go over at Easter, he won’t think I don’t care. Sometimes I really miss Covid.

The UK Covid inquiry resumed this week. Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Advisor, spoke unflatteringly of Boris Johnson. The former prime minister didn’t get the concept of exponential growth, or a heck of a lot else by the sound of things. In Vallance’s words, he was bamboozled. I liked Vallance’s comment about the heavy bias in government towards people with humanities backgrounds at the expense of science and maths. He said that it should be a 50-50 split, emphasising that a bias towards science and maths wouldn’t be a good thing either. Next week should be an absolute doozy – twat-in-chief Matt Hancock will be making an appearance, among others. The inquiry, or the bits I’ve seen so far, have thrown into sharp relief how dangerous the ministers and senior advisers were. The contrast between them and the general public, who were extremely compliant, could hardly be starker.

Maths last night. Plenty of bamboozlement there, as I started teaching my 15-year-old student the basics of probability. There are very few things in this world that I get, or that I’ve come somewhere close to mastering. Probability might just be one of them though, so you’d think I’d be on pretty firm ground. But there was one snag – this is Romania, and probability involves a whole ton of fractions. She really doesn’t get fractions, even at the most basic level. A half plus a quarter? Huh? I learnt about basic fractions when I was six or seven, before I ever touched decimals, but Romanians obviously didn’t, so when they join a British school where fractions abound in their maths classes they face an uphill battle. I’m in the middle of making a fractions worksheet (or workbook, as it might end up being). These things are all over the place online of course, but they’re (understandably) targeted at rather younger age groups.

Romania won their final qualifier against Switzerland 1-0 to finish their group in first place, with an impressive haul of 22 points from 10 games. It’ll be Romania’s first appearance in a major tournament since I arrived here. It was funny to watch the game against Israel on TV, where the local commentators didn’t even attempt to appear impartial.

A nippy start to the day as I had my lesson with the boy on the fifth floor. The lesson went well, though. Next week I’ll be starting lessons with her husband (a total beginner, she says, but I’m always skeptical about that).

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Why is English so dominant? (And can I face a British Christmas?)

November 20, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I managed 32 hours of lessons last week. I was my first time over 30 for a while. I always think of 30 as a good benchmark for a full, productive week, but cancellations had kept me below that level. After I got home from Dumbrăvița on Saturday I emailed Mum a logic problem about odd and even numbers that I’d given to Matei. She replied with the right answer. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to Matei that if you multiply two whole numbers and you get an odd number, both the numbers must be odd.) I thought about the night classes in maths she took when I was little, half her lifetime ago. She’d show me her book full of xs and ys. It would be nice if she could do something similar now.

At the weekend I read an article about the rise of English. It is undoubtedly the dominant language in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time. Most of this is down to American culture. Just look at Romania. As the country develops, slices of America keep popping up everywhere, with “Drive-Thru” and “Wash & Go” spelled out in English. Twenty-year-olds grew up on Cartoon Network. Teens (and even pre-teens) are all over TikTok – Chinese-owned but loaded with American popular culture. There were plenty of comments on the article, and some people said that the dominance of English isn’t only due to America, but also because it’s simply easier to communicate in than most other languages. “Me no like the cats” is very wrong but perfectly understandable to a native speaker. They’re partly right – English has few inflections, it lacks grammatical gender, and English text takes up less space than most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. But that’s only a small part of the story. Bad English is easy for us to understand precisely because we’re used to non-natives speaking English, or attempting to. We even simplify our language in return. I remember in Bali 30-plus years ago, where the locals often knew English but at a very basic level, Dad would say things like “Many motorbikes here” or “Takes long time?” It’s not the same with less widespread languages. If I utter a very bad Romanian version of “I don’t like cats”, my Romanian listener won’t have heard anything like that before in his life. He’ll be thinking WTF? So that puts a barrier in place to anyone trying to learn Romanian – you have to get to some kind of reasonable level before you can even start using the language. Its very pervasiveness is what makes English one of the easier languages to learn; in 2023 you’d have to be living under a rock to not know like or love or stop or OK. You get a lot of English for free, and that gives you a heck of a head start.

I don’t often watch football these days, but on Saturday I watched Romania’s Euro 2024 football qualifier against Israel, played in Budapest. It was originally meant to be played in Israel, but got moved for obvious reasons. If Romania avoided defeat, they’d qualify for next summer’s competition in Germany. Israel took the lead in only the second minute, then Romania equalised in the tenth. That dramatic start set up a very watchable game. Romania took the lead midway through the second half and held their advantage until the end. They probably should have won by more – a player by the name of Mihăilă missed a sitter and then got himself sent off just before the end. Romanian football, and sport in general, has been in the doldrums for a while, so it’s nice that they qualified. Beneficiaries of a pretty easy group it must be said, they’re unbeaten in nine games (five wins, four draws) and if they can get at least a draw against Switzerland in Bucharest tomorrow night they’ll top the group and in theory have an easier ride in the final tournament.

This song popped up on YouTube – Sleeping Satellite, Tasmin Archer’s one-hit wonder. It came out in 1992 and was the very first song on Now 23, one of the first tapes I ever had. A complex song, unique in many ways, with levels of rhyme adeptly woven into the lyrics. It brings back memories of a more optimistic time.

Last night I watched the first episode of the new series of Charlie Ottley’s Flavours of Romania. It’s on Netflix; I thoroughly recommend it. I hope to get a few ideas for road trips, for when I finally do own a car. I also watched Noel Philips’ trip from Amsterdam to Paramaribo (the capital of Suriname) – a nine-hour flight on an Airbus A340.

My brother called me on Saturday. My nephew was bouncing around, on the verge of walking. A very happy chappy. He’s fascinated by the cat, though the cat seems less fascinated by him. I’m thinking of going over there for Christmas, but can I face it? What I’ll really want are about four days with little risk of having to see or communicate with anyone.

Family - Maths teaching

A talking time machine and the great divide

November 17, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

When Mum was on the way to Christchurch to pick up Dad on Tuesday, she dropped in on her mother’s cousin Pat who now lives in a care home in Ashburton. Pat is 106 (!) years old – she was born during the First World War – and remarkably still has all her marbles. In this meeting Pat told Mum about her car journey from Christchurch to Dunedin at the age of four. A car journey of that distance would have been a mission back then, and something quite astonishing for a four-year-old; I can see how she still has a clear memory of it more than a century later. What was the car? Her family wasn’t wealthy as far as I know, so how did she end up in that car in the first place? What were the roads like? How long did it take? I’ll ask Mum the next time I speak to her; our conversation quickly moved on to the building work. Last year the local radio station had a phone-in where anyone who remembered Elizabeth’s coronation (in 1953) could call in and regale the listeners of their memories of the day. Pat called in. “I remember when she was born?” Um, sorry, what, you’d have to be at least a hundred. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?” That might not have been exactly how it went down, but I know there was disbelief on the part of the host.

Yesterday I had a late finish – a face-to-face maths lesson between 7 and 9pm, followed by an online English session. In our maths lesson, among many other topics (her schoolteacher switches between topics at a maddening rate) I helped my 15-year-old student divide by decimal numbers smaller than one, without using a calculator. We think of division as sharing – that word was used at school, I remember – and sharing money or sweets or bottles of orange juice between two or three or ten people all feels natural. But sharing between half or a tenth or 0.08 of a person – what on earth could that even mean? When you divide by something less than one, you end up with more than what you started with, and that messes with people’s heads. It goes against what people intuitively feel that division does. By chance, earlier in the week I stumbled upon a blog post that used bottles of juice as an intuitive basis for dividing by small decimals. When I explained how to divide 24 by 0.08, I asked her first to imagine 24 litres of orange juice and (big!) 8-litre bottles. How many bottles would all that juice go into? She correctly said three. Now imagine the bottles are 0.08 of a litre. You know, tiny, the size that you could take through airport security. You’d need loads of ’em, right? Turns out it’s 300. Move the decimal point two digits to the right, or in this case add two zeros. I told my English student about my maths lesson – she’s an accountant and has a strong mathematical background – and she couldn’t understand how my student didn’t just know to do these division problems. She’s fifteen, for crying out loud. Can’t she just think of that decimal as a fraction and go from there? No. So much of being a good maths teacher is empathy. Just because you got it at a young age and it all seems obvious to you, that doesn’t mean they will. And I certainly wouldn’t want to introduce fractions into the problem – fractions seem to frighten the living bajeezus out of Romanian teenagers.

Earlier today I watched this video of somebody multiplying and squaring numbers showmanlike, faster than a calculator. His party piece came at the end: working out 37,691 squared in his head. I actually paused the video and tried to do this. It’s not the worst five-digit number to have to square. It’s 9 away from 37,700. The repeated 7 helps. All (!) you have to do is square 377 and tack on four zeros, then find 18 lots of 37,700 then take that away, then add on 81. Hey presto, Bob’s your uncle. But there’s a catch. You end up with a ten-digit number, and my brain is nowhere near capable of storing that many digits while also carrying out calculations. I gave up. He can also calculate the day of the week that a particular date falls on, which is something I saw people do at the autism groups I used to attend. I recently had a go at this 21-question hard mental arithmetic test. I tried to do the questions as fast as possible, and got 17 correct.

The weather is wet and nasty. I had to go out in it this morning, for a lesson with a 12-year-old boy who lives on the fifth and top floor of a block of flats with no lift. He’s a nice kid. We mostly did the simple past tense in all its glory.