Maths teaching

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Writing a book

Wouldn’t it be nice

May 29, 2024 by 0 Comments

Today was my aunt’s celebration, the last ever get-together at her house which is already on the market for half a million quid. I haven’t heard from my brother yet to see how it went; I expect he’ll have been part of a small contingent. I’m just so glad I was fortunate enough to see her a week before she passed away. Today would have been my grandmother’s 102nd birthday. I wrote about her 88th birthday here: how time flies.

This afternoon I had a lesson with the boy who wants to be a farmer. So refreshing when so many of them want to be YouTubers. Last week I taught him some irregular plurals, so today I gave him a worksheet on them, complete with pictures. Easy peasy, he said. Seconds later he’d written mouses and foots and sheeps and childs. Tonight I gave my new maths student (a 15-year-old girl) what I called a quick quiz. Target time two minutes, three max. After about twelve minutes she was still slaving away, so I put her out of her misery. She’d forgotten just about everything I’d taught her about prime and square numbers. I wasn’t annoyed by this in any way; maths is just tough and weird for a lot of people.

Before all of that the plumber came and put in the new pipe. I had to go to Dedeman with him to pick up some blocks to which the tiles will be attached in front of the bath. I’m getting used to being actively involved, even though it’s bloody annoying when I have lessons.

I forgot to mention that I got stung by a bee at Șag on Sunday. It was my left middle finger. As a kid I got stung quite often on my foot. I was barefoot most of the time in summer – my Kiwi mum encouraged that – and the bees would be in the clover. That was back when the UK still had bees. When I was in the car I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if my parents were with me, but my blog posts for June 2017 have given me second thoughts. That got pretty fraught. If my family friends from St Ives came over, that would be quite wonderful. Even when I wander around my little patch of a warm evening I think it would be lovely if they were here, doing simple things like wandering from one funny little bar to another. It’s sad that I never get the chance to do that.

Yesterday I had a lesson where my student (a manager at a big bank) read an article about giving feedback to low-performing employees. I said that a lot of this poor performance comes from low engagement which shouldn’t be a surprise. She said that the objectives and deadlines are all there in black and white, so there’s no excuse. I replied that frankly who cares if xyz has to be done by 31st May if xyz seems pointless. How do you get motivated, when most of what you do all day is meaningless crap? The answer to that of course is that people are motivated by money and status and power, or simply job security when they have family members who depend on their income, but the “pointless shit” aspect (which is more salient than ever before) can’t help.

The book meeting, which I had to reschedule two lessons to accommodate, has been postponed again to who knows when.

Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Travel: Romania

Positive plumbing and my latest trip

May 9, 2024 by 0 Comments

Good plumbing news. It turned out that the previous guy did a botched job of the seal around the bath, so we won’t need to smash the tilework after all. Or at least I don’t think so. The plumber put some silicon around the edge which the other guy didn’t bother with. I also got him to fix the loo in the small bathroom. I went with him to Dedeman in my car; we picked up a cistern and some other bits and pieces. He told me to go a completely different way there to what I would have done – he clearly knew better than me. He should finish the job tomorrow.

I had my first maths lesson last night with a 15-year-old girl who goes to British School. She’s struggling a bit with the subject; her almost nonexistent mental arithmetic isn’t doing her any favours. But I found her very personable and that makes her very teachable. I’m glad to suddenly have her as a student, right when my proportion of pointless lessons (which don’t help my mood) is at an all-time high. Teaching her will be far from pointless, and quite a challenge.

Monday was a warm one. I went for another long drive – about 250 km, skirting the borders of both Hungary and Serbia. My first stop was Periam, a town (or large village) of about 4000 people; a lot of our local stone fruit comes from there. Being a public holiday, it was extremely quiet there. I called my parents from a café: though it was closed I could still sit at one of the tables in the shady outside area. I then made a short stop at Sânnicolau Mare, a bigger town, before going back to Dumbrăvița via Jimbolia which is a fun name to say. At 4:30 I had maths with Matei on the eve of his final maths exam; we went through a bastard of a past paper from 2021.

The snooker is over. After a tournament in which the big guns didn’t really show up, Kyren Wilson is the champion, beating Jak Jones 18-14 in the final. He made a blistering start, going 7-0 up, but in the end he flopped over the line. Wilson won a drama-packed frame on a respotted black to put him one away, but Jones – the pressure off him – started reeling off frames. Jones was having fun and the crowd warmed to him, while for Wilson it wasn’t far off becoming his worst nightmare. Finally he got there. His reaction to winning was worth watching in itself, as was the very cute bit when his two sons joined him on the stage.

Forty years ago, snooker was massively popular in Britain and had a serious following elsewhere. Steve Davis, Alex Higgins, Dennis Taylor, a young Jimmy White – they were all household names. British football was in the doldrums – attending matches in crumbling stadiums was dangerous, the government of the day treated fans as animals, and very few games were televised. Snooker filled the gap. It was perfect for colour television – still pretty new – and back then there were only four channels, with few of the endless entertainment options we have now, not to mention social media which is a disaster zone. If snooker was on the telly, with its colourful characters, there’s a good chance you’d watch it and get hooked in. Nobody cared if a match took several hours; what was the rush? How the world has changed. Football is now a global gazillion-pound machine, while snooker is down to just one and a half household names in Ronnie O’Sullivan and maybe Judd Trump. Both sports are in grave danger of being Saudified.

Trains still stop at Periam

The Orthodox church in Periam…
…and the Catholic church

Romanian trees are often dați cu var, or whitewashed with lime, to prevent their trunks from cracking as a result of the extreme temperature variations between summer and winter.

Plenty of Serbian in Sânpetru Mare
Miloje Polić
Family - Life :) - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Trying not to sweat the small stuff

April 30, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit. Not at the level of last January or February, but struggling nonetheless. So many small things that add up to a big mess, with no resilience and nobody to share the load with. For instance, I made an online order and got a message to say it would be delivered today, but because I knew I’d be out for lessons I called their number and asked them to deliver it tomorrow instead. But now I’ve just had an email saying (in Romanian) “Great! Your package has been delivered! Mission completed! Give us a review.” So now what, apart from maybe zero stars? Perhaps I’ll still get it tomorrow (the last day before a public holiday) but who knows? Last night at eleven my doorbell rang. It was Domnul Pascu, the man of nearly 80 who lives directly below me. Water was leaking from my bathroom, through his ceiling, and in danger of electrocuting him. A plumber is coming tomorrow morning.

As I cycled to my maths lesson with Matei today I realised I hadn’t yet washed my car. There are car washes all over the city in beyond; they make me think of Sheryl Crow’s mid-nineties song about Santa Monica Boulevard and Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy and a giant car wash where people scrub the best they can in skirts and suits during their lunch breaks. On this sunny afternoon I had five spare minutes so I dropped into Car Wash Point, one of many car washes on the same stroad, just to see how these things work. There was a wash bit and a hoover bit and a blacken-your-tyres bit. There seemed to be a central machine where you obtain and then charge a card which you insert at the various stations. Just the wash bit had six buttons: pre-wash (what does that involve, I wonder?), normal wash, extra foam, wax, something else, and STOP. I wish I could wash the damn thing myself like I used to, back when life was simpler.

Matei has his first of two IGCSE maths papers this Thursday; the second paper (which accounts for 130 of the 200 marks) is next Wednesday. He’s fine with anything that involves a tried and trusted method, but his problem solving (a hard skill to teach) isn’t quite there. I felt powerless today as the sands of our two-hour lesson ran out. We’ll have two more lessons between his two papers. The I of IGCSE stands for International, and interestingly there are three versions of each paper; you get a different one depending on your time zone, so those in later zones can’t gain knowledge of the exam a few hours beforehand.

Yesterday I visited Lugoj, a large town 70 km from here. The river Timiș, and small island between two branches of it, makes for a picturesque setting. In the island there was, as always, an abandoned swimming pool. I could make a niche YouTube channel in which I travel around Romania showing nothing but abandoned swimming pools. The temperature was in the high 20s, hotter than forecast. Had it been 1984 I would have had a dip in that pool. My car heated up spectacularly and I was glad to get home. I should mention that I recently got my old winter tyres replaced with all-season ones. The old ones were nine years old and cracked, and only good for the gunoi (rubbish) according to the mechanic.

Yesterday morning I had my first chat for ages with my cousin in Wellington. Though I spoke to her after her cancer diagnosis and operation, I hadn’t seen her like this with her drooped jaw. Her bilabial plosives – Bs and Ps – became Vs and Fs respectively. As expected, there was no mention of her health. She doesn’t even broach the subject with her three younger sisters. I wasn’t sure how much she really wanted the chat, and we were done in twenty minutes. It was good to see her youngest boy who wants to be a policeman. Then I had a long chat with her husband who was far more, well, chatty than her. We talked about his business plans (the bottom has dropped out of the manuka honey market, he said) and driving in Romania.

On Saturday I watched the relegation battle between Huddersfield and Birmingham. Not a whole ton of quality, but Blues took the lead on the stroke of half-time through Koji Miyoshi. I don’t know what the Huddersfield team talk was during the break, but it worked. They equalised immediately and for a few minutes were rampant. Blues weathered the storm though, and the game rather petered out. One apiece. The draw sent Huddersfield down, while Blues themselves are in the mire. Realistically they now must beat Norwich in the last game of a zany season, and hope that either Plymouth fail to win, or one of Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn actually lose. There’s all kinds of football vocab now that didn’t exist when I followed the sport more closely. In the nineties, wild goal celebrations in the crowd with arms and legs flailing weren’t known as limbs, and teams with nothing to play for weren’t on the beach. I saw that UB40’s Food for Thought (heck of a song, with the saxophone) is now a Birmingham City anthem of sorts. The song is supposedly about the genocide in Cambodia. In a similar vein, the Cranberries’ brilliant Zombie, which references IRA violence in Northern Ireland, was a favourite of Irish supporters during the last rugby World Cup.

When the football was on, I had one eye on the snooker. The corner pockets are noticeably tighter than last year, and century breaks have been at a premium. I particularly enjoyed the match between Jak Jones and Si Jiahui, which the Welshman won 13-9. Every other frame went down to the wire. In a week’s time both the football and the snooker will be over, and I won’t mind that one bit.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Other sports - Tennis

Lucky to have him

April 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve now heard that my aunt won’t be having a proper funeral service. Instead they’ll have an informal celebration at her house in Earith in the coming weeks before the place is sold. Her ashes will be scattered in the river in Wales, where my uncle’s also were after he died in 2002.

With family members popping off around him, Dad feels like the last man standing. After what he’s been through health-wise, we’re lucky to have him. We nearly lost him in 2005 – he was only 55 – when his heart valve operation in the UK went awry. Then five years ago he got bowel cancer. He’s just had a check-up on his heart – he was supposed to have them annually but because his operation took place in the UK he slipped through the NZ net. A sleeve was placed over his aortic valve to stop it expanding, but a section was left sleeveless (why?) and that’s a potential problem. He said it’ll be OK for now but he’ll get it looked at every year until he’s 85 (they stop caring at that point) and maybe at some stage he’ll need an operation.

When I spoke to my parents yesterday they’d just been to Ashburton. They dropped in on Mum’s mother’s cousin (aged 106) in the home. Imagine that, three whole decades on top of what my aunt managed. Amazingly, she isn’t even the oldest resident of Ashburton. Her childhood friend, three months older, is also still alive. The two of them, still kicking around today, at odds of zillions to one. Mum had been to a performance of The Vicar of Dibley in Geraldine, which just happens to be the vicar’s name. Very well received, even if Alice was too fat. I suggested that Father Ted, which is bloody hilarious, would also go down well there.

Two big stories came out of America last week. One, the total solar eclipse. A student of mine mentioned the 2000 eclipse which was visible all over Europe and at its most extreme (perigee? apogee?) in Romania. I said that in fact it was in 1999, then he “corrected” me by saying that it must have been 2000 because they came out with a commemorative 2000-lei note. I then pointed out that not even crazy Romanians would have produced a 1999-lei note. The most striking aspect of that eclipse, which took place in August, was the plummeting temperature. The other headline was that OJ Simpson died. Like my aunt, he was 76 (trombones). His car chase in 1994 was one of the most-watched events in American TV history, then for the next year he was never out of the news until he was finally acquitted of double murder. I remember the school cricket team instituted an “OJ award” for getting away with murder.

This June-like weather – high 20s most days, 31 forecast tomorrow – will soon end. It’s been a heck of a run. Romanians are used to weather being predictable, and if it’s out of kilter with the time of year – even if that means bluer skies and beautiful sunshine – they don’t like it. As for me, I was brought up in the UK and spent 5½ years in Wellington, so I take what I can get. Yesterday I had only five hours of lessons, all in Dumbrăvița. First up was maths. Circle theorems – not my favourite topic. I learn them, then forget them. And I’m supposed to teach them. If I have time tomorrow I’ll spend an hour on them before I see Matei again in the evening. After that I saw Octavian’s sister who is coming on in leaps and bounds, then Octavian himself. My lessons with him always frustrate me; he’s doing an IGCSE which forces him to study literary devices, when improving his pronunciation and intonation (still nowhere near good enough) would be far more useful.

After teaching I played tennis with Florin. Whether it was a panic attack or a kind of derealisation I wasn’t too sure, but I felt shaky out there in our 90-minute session. In the first set I led 4-1, but felt unsteady in the next game in which I opened with a double fault and dropped my serve to love. Leading 5-3 on his serve, I had two set points at 15-40, then another two, but couldn’t break him down. He was zoned in. After a torturous rally in which I finished second best, I let out an Andy Murray-like screech, to my slight embarrassment. In the following game I was lucky; he had a point for 5-5 and I clipped the tape to keep myself in the game, then closed out the set on my sixth opportunity. I got that same wobbly sensation in the second set, especially on serve, but I won it 6-3. The whole time I was battling the heat and my inadequate-sized water bottle. Florin hardly broke sweat. In a little while I’m meeting him and some of his friends down by the river.

Football. I watched Blues’ home game with Cardiff on Wednesday night. They weren’t terrible but they were uninspiring and lacked creativity. When Cardiff scored midway through the second half, I was done watching it. There were no further goals, and Blues were plunged deeper into the mire. On to yesterday’s game at home to Coventry, a local rival still fighting for promotion and with an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United in the pipeline. To everyone’s surprise a hungry Blues gobbled up Coventry 3-0 in front of 27,000 fans – a huge result as they try to dodge the drop in one of the weirdest seasons ever. There were fireworks before the game – what relegation battle? If they do stay up, the future is very bright for the club; the new owners have near boundless ambition.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - Tennis

Panic, picking peaches and plums, and plexing your googol

March 26, 2024 by 0 Comments

It was playing tennis on a balmy early Saturday evening when I had another panic attack. Despite making far more unforced errors than normal I led Florin 5-3. In the next game I was about to serve, down 0-30, when it hit me again. It felt as though my lower body might give way. I soldiered on through that game in which I even had a set point, then to some relief I broke him to love in the following game for the set. Relief because that meant we could change ends. We restarted almost immediately and I staggered on through three games with great difficulty, feeling the need to support myself with the back fence after every point. Look, I’m really not feeling great, I admitted. “Are you dizzy?” Well that’s one way of putting it. He was sympathetic and with ten minutes of our session left we called it a day. I wonder what has brought this on all of a sudden. I can’t be the fear of getting behind the wheel; my first episode was before I bought the car. I’m glad to be going away for a few days – my trip might act as some kind of reset button.

This evening I had my 285th session with Alin and my last for a while. He told me he had to leave his job for personal reasons and would need to give up our twice-weekly meetings until he gets himself sorted. Normally when people say that I don’t expect to see them again, but we’ve built up quite a rapport in that time – a long journey through phrasal verbs, native-speaker podcasts, and a great deal of humour – so I’d put my chances at about even. Tonight we talked about cars and little else; he told me about his five-minute driving test in the mid-nineties. Yesterday I sent the mother of one of my students a message to say I could fit her son in before I go away. She replied to say that he’s too busy and by the way I’ve just cut my finger while slicing a carrot, with an accompanying picture of her bandaged digit. She’s into star signs and stuff so I then suggested that the full moon was responsible for her bad luck.

On Saturday morning before my long day of lessons (they continued after my truncated tennis session) I had a great chat with Mum, the best I can remember for a while. She had been picking Black Boy peaches from trees (pomi) outside the nearby preschool, wondering how all that ripe fruit was still there. I always wonder the same thing when I fill a whole rucksack with plums from the Mehala area of Timișoara. She gave me some tips on preserving fruit – I’ve been hanging on to my jars. Then we talked about our trip to the West Coast and the incredible weather we had, then the possibility of my coming back to New Zealand. My parents are putting me under no immediate pressure, and that’s just as well because while in theory NZ would be great, in practice I dunno man. For one, could I even afford it, and secondly I feel so alive in this place. Then Dad came on the line and we discussed cars. A recurring theme right now.

In my maths lesson with Matei we strayed (partly) off topic as we discussed the googol and its big daddy the googolplex. A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros, right, and a googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. It took him a while, then bam!, mind blown. You can’t write it out because there aren’t enough atoms in the universe. Um, sorry what? That’s one thing I love about teaching maths. English is very cool, but you never quite achieve the bam! effect.

I loved this morning’s Romanian lesson. Most of it was spent discussing our teacher’s day-to-day experiences of living under communism. She told us about the summer of ’89, the Ceaușescus’ last summer. She was at university, sharing a tenth-floor room with three other girls. It was inhumanly hot and air conditioning was an unthinkable luxury back then. During an important exam period the only way she could sleep was by soaking bedsheets in water. There was a lift which sometimes left the girls stranded between floors. Escaping involved opening the door by disengaging a small wheel and then climbing up or down, at not inconsiderable risk, to the next floor. Occasionally the water supply would cease and they’d be forced to get water from a well (as I do now with my drinking water) and carry it in glass bottles (no plastic bottles back then) up those ten floors. Now she lives in a ground-floor flat. After those experiences I’d want to be close to the ground too. At the end of a lesson we played Taboo where I had to describe a word to Dorothy (or vice versa) while avoiding five forbidden words. On one occasion I had to guess “panic”. I play Taboo with my students; I created over 500 cards of my own, with just three banned words for each.

When I discussed my favourite vinyl albums of those I own (so far), I neglected to mention Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. A masterpiece, and how she made it as a teenager I’ll never know.

Books - Language learning - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports

Beating the drop

March 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time in the park near the cathedral, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once recommended it to me. Whenever I go there I get a twinge of sadness as the trams and trolleybuses clatter by and the cathedral bells chime four times an hour. Now I just feel the occasional mini-earthquake when a large truck goes past. As for the book, my initial reaction was, I don’t think I can stick this, but now I’ve reached chapter four I think I’ll persevere. I went back via Parcul Regina Maria and sat in the gazebo there. A girl of about 14 was with her parents. Her mother kept quizzing her, presumably for an upcoming history test as school. What happened in Philadelphia in 1774? Poor girl. I found this distracting and went home.

Kaufland has become my go-to supermarket of late. As the name suggests, it’s German-owned, so I get to pick up odd snippets of German there, like erbsen for peas. The signage in the shop (and outside it) is sensibly all in Romanian though.

On the sign above you can see both plural forms of monedă, which means coin. (It’s quite obviously related to the English money.) Should the plural be monede or monezi? From what I gather (and the Romanian academy would agree) the plural should be monede, but people often plump for monezi because most Romanian nouns ending in -dă form plurals in -zi (oglindă – mirror – becomes oglinzi; ladă – crate – becomes lăzi; livadă – orchard – becomes livezi, and so on). Debates about plurals of nouns abound in Romanian. I’ve found an excellent YouTube channel on languages, hosted by somebody called K Klein. Imagine being as clever as him.

On the way back from Kaufland I passed a small market where people (often gypsies) sell old jewellery and other mostly low-value bits and bobs. Two of the stallholders (men) were having a fight. One threw something at the other and hit him in the face. Great.

Saturday was my usual busy day. My final lesson was a two-hour maths session with the 15-year-old girl. After a calculation involving a flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, she told me how much she loved travelling and that she goes on a family holiday to Dubai every year. Dubai. Please make it stop. After our session I checked the football scores. Birmingham were 3-2 down, and a man down, against Southampton. The situation sounded hopeless. But then Blues equalised. A miracle. With ten minutes of normal time left I found a stream for the match. There was wave upon wave of pressure from Southampton. Blues hardly saw the ball. Could they hold out? Nine minutes of added time. Oh lord. After five additional minutes Southampton fired in the winner, and Blues are now in relegation peril. This is what the table looks like from 12th place down:

Rotherham are done. Two of the twelve other teams on the list will join them in the league below, unless something very weird happens to one of the teams above this truncated table. (Blues could well be one of them; they have an extra game to play relative to the teams around them, but their manager being out of commission is a massive blow.) Calling this a relegation dogfight doesn’t do justice to how tight it is. And that’s why the system of promotion and relegation is the best thing about club football. (Much of the rest of it leaves me cold.) Ten years ago Blues avoided the drop by scoring with just moments remaining; a 2-2 draw at Bolton kept them up on goal difference over Doncaster. Most dramatically of all, in 1999 Carlisle (sponsored by Eddie Stobart, a haulage company who had a cult following) were seconds from dropping out of the football league entirely when their goalkeeper scored the winning goal deep into injury time, relegating Scarborough instead. Part of the drama on the last day comes from following scores of other games. In the pre-smartphone age this was quite something: news of goals would filter through the crowd Chinese-whispers-like and you’d see players crowding around radios, agonisingly in some cases, at the end of the game.

Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching

That’s a first

March 1, 2024 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been to get my 15 litres of drinking water, as I do every fifth day or so. The wells – about 90 of them dotted around the city – are a microcosm of Romanian society. There’s often a queue, there are usually old ladies (babe, the plural of babă) sitting on the benches nearby, and this time there was a young guy on a quad bike pumping out manele, a controversial genre of Romanian music.

My brother. He’s now officially first-class. Last night he got confirmation of his top-drawer BA degree in business management. I must say I’m impressed with his discipline and application throughout the whole process, and what’s more, how much he enjoyed it. This from someone who had zero interest (if I’m being kind) in his schoolwork. He may even decide to do a master’s. It helped that he had completed a number of leadership courses in the military, so he could skip through the early stages, and his degree was all paid for by the army. (Not to pour any cold water on what my brother has achieved, but in my day roughly one student in a dozen across the UK got a first. Now it’s one in three. There’s some grade inflation for you.)

That lesson on Monday with the 17-year-old girl. I’m still thinking about it. I spent most of my time wondering, what am I dealing with here? Not who, but what, for she hardly seemed human. It’s been the same every time with her, except during the could snap in January which briefly humanised her. She’s the latest in an increasingly long line of students I’ve had from so-called Gen Z – young women, mostly – who live curated lives on Instagram. They aren’t living, they’re performing. How exhausting must that be?

It’s a mild, if grey, Leap Day. I still clearly remember the dread I felt eight years ago today when I came through Wellington Airport after flying from Timaru, knowing that I’d soon have to face my flatmate. Last night I got thinking: wouldn’t it be nice to reform the calendar? Just tweak it ever so slightly. The 28/29 business in February, when all other months are 30 or 31, doesn’t make much sense and messes up a lot of statistical comparisons. If it was up to me I’d make the months 31 30 30, 31 30 30, 31 30 30, 31 30 31. Nice and easy to remember. (Yes, that adds up to 365.) I’d add the Leap Day, which would be a worldwide holiday, to the end of June. And that’s all. Oh, apart from fixing Easter to the first Sunday in April. Even my modest changes would cause major tech headaches, dwarfing what we saw with Y2K, and social media would be dripping with anger, mostly from those with birthdays such as 31st March. Saying that, if the orange blob is re-elected I wouldn’t entirely discount him from introducing a reformed calendar, right around 1st Trump 2027.

Here is a great video from City Nerd, an urbanist YouTube channel. I really like this guy’s sense of humour. In the first five minutes of this video – a must-watch, I’d say – he explains the Gini coefficient of income inequality. (Integral calculus, yay! Not that I was ever fantastic at that.) In the rest of the video he looks at the North American cities with the highest and lowest Gini coefficients. Interestingly, he says that 190 million Americans – nearly 60% of the country – live in urban areas with over a million people. For comparison, that figure in Romania is a little over 10%.

Before yesterday’s maths lesson with 14-year-old, six-foot-one Vladimir, I had a 20-minute phone chat with his mother. I couldn’t get her off the line. Neither could I convince her that her son is actually pretty good at maths. Her expectations are stratospheric.

Family - Maths teaching - Other sports

Kept in the dark (and an update!)

February 14, 2024 by 0 Comments

My friend in New Zealand said I’d been writing more often lately, and it’s true. Because nonsensical shit keeps happening.

After my lesson this morning, I had a longish chat with Mum and Dad. Well mostly Dad, about the geopolitical situation in my part of the world. The medium-term future terrifies me, truth be told. Yesterday I had a 13-year-old boy tell me that the rest of Europe (including us in Romania) should butt out of the Ukraine war and anyway Ukraine isn’t a real country, it’s just part of Russia. We’re on their doorstep, so that’s bloody great. After discussing all this with Dad, I asked Mum if she was playing tennis this week. No. Why? Well I had a lump removed from my back last Wednesday and I’m waiting to get the biopsy. I’m getting the seven stitches removed on Friday, so maybe I’ll know then. Yes, it is cancerous. Don’t you worry your poor little head about it, hahaha. I’d already spoken to her at the weekend, after the op, but she didn’t tell me anything then. If I hadn’t asked her about tennis I’d still be in the dark. I don’t know how long she’s had the lump. Dad said he’s encouraged by the fact that it came out in one piece, with no tentacles, as he put it.

When I got off the phone I messaged my brother. He had no idea (he’d also spoken to them at the weekend) and was incredulous. FFS! Why didn’t she say anything? I felt bad because he was probably mid-nappy change or something, but he needed to know. He said he wished our parents didn’t treat us like we were twelve, but he’s a few years out there. You’d even be open about this stuff with twelve-year-olds. Let’s hope she gets the all-clear from the biopsy and that’ll be the last we hear of it. In the meantime it’s obviously a worry.

In other news, I’ve got a new maths student (a 14-year-old boy called Vladimir – eew) starting on Thursday. He’s from the British school, where parents have money, so I can charge a bit more. His mum said he’s needed extra lessons for a while, which either means he really is struggling or his parents have high expectations. If I had to guess, I’d plump for the latter. It’s good to have another string to my bow – it gives me even more variety in my day as well as some extra income. It’s still fantastically mad that after all that unbearable corporate shite I’m now doing all this. Yesterday my student described her daily team meetings at work. How many people? In my experience, five worked well while eight became unwieldy. Beyond that and these meetings were pointless. Twenty-two, she said. That’s not a team, that’s a platoon.

A few posts ago I mentioned the optimism surrounding the new manager – Tony Mowbray – taking over at Birmingham after the Wayne Rooney debacle. Well they’ve just lost their last three games – all away from home – without scoring a goal, and that’s despite a boatload of chances. They’re now embroiled in a relegation scrap, just three points above the drop zone. Tonight they face Blackburn at home. Edit: Blues won 1-0 and they damn well deserved the win too. Blackburn very nearly snatched a draw right at the end though.

Update: Dad emailed me 20 minutes ago to say that they’d just got Mum’s results, sooner than expected. It’s a basal cell carcinoma – a type that doesn’t spread, so cutting it out should have got rid of it for good. I’ve passed that news on to my brother. A big relief all round. Dad also said they’ll need to get the boiler replaced in one of their flats in St Ives, at a cost of £2800, though that’s small beer in comparison to Mum’s health.

On a very different note, Steve Wright, a Radio 1 DJ who was hilarious to listen to at times, has died aged 69. His most famous show was Steve Wright in the Afternoon which ran during the late eighties and early nineties and included a very funny “Mr Angry”. He’ll be sorely missed.

Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports - Romania

Family contact

February 12, 2024 by 0 Comments

Good news – my brother and his family are going to New Zealand in August for three-and-a-bit weeks. They’ll come back just before my nephew turns two and the fare whops up. I spoke to my sister-in-law about it on Friday, just after they’d booked the trip. (She’d had to get the green light from her boss.) She was apprehensive about flying so far with her son, a placid little chappy though he is. Will the trauma of it all mess him up? I was roughly the same age as him when Mum took me – and my tiny brother – to New Zealand in 1982. The mind boggles. My parents are paying for the trip (“well I hope so,” my brother said, “because we can’t afford it”). That’s what living in the UK in 2024 with a sodding great mortgage does to you. Mum made the trip in ’82 (a similar cost in real terms) without batting a financial eyelid. They were living – pretty much – on just the unpredictable income of my father. Crazy, isn’t it?

They should have a nice time. The house will – I hope! – be finished, so Mum won’t be worn out and highly strung and miserable (let’s be honest) like she was when I was there. At any rate, even if she was under stress, she’d take great pains not to show it, unlike with me. I get the real deal. They’ll see a lot of Mum and Dad – if my parents had come to the UK, that might not have been the case – and there will be happy times as the little one is passed around various aunts and uncles.

A fairly standard week of lessons for me. On Saturday I had eight hours, including four of maths. With both my maths students it was the same story. Determine what the problem is and how to solve it, then do your calculations, not the other way round! There needs to be a maths equivalent of “aviate, navigate, communicate”. And jeez, when you’re 15 years old, dividing 35 by 7 doesn’t require a calculator. I wish someone would invent the shockulator, a calculator that administers electric shocks that increase in voltage the easier it gets to do the problem in your head.

On Wednesday I saw the ENT specialist again. We did the whole thing in Romanian this time. He put that probe up my nostrils. Stop flinching! Stop tensing up! Well I’m trying, but it bloody hurts! After then sucking the wax out from my ears (plenty of it), he gave me a prescription for some nasal spray that will last me two months, if that. I’ll probably wait until the long hot summer when I’ll need it the most.

Yesterday I went a different way on my bike. The wind made it slow going. I rode past the factories, some still in operation, others not, to Moșnița Nouă. When I went there six years ago for a lesson it was a village. Not any more. I wouldn’t want to live there.

Muzicorama – the nightly music programme on local radio – sadly finished last September, not that I got many chances to listen to it. The host, Bogdan Puriș, still does his show on a Sunday morning, and yesterday there was certainly an eclectic line-up. Four consecutive songs (saved on my Shazam) were Hey Matthew by Karel Fialka (1987), Bats by the Scary Bitches (2009) (because the lyrics mention Transylvania?), Come Down Jesus by José Feliciano (1971), and This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (1968).

Lately I’ve been listening – a lot – to David Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen.

I’ve just read that Kelvin Kiptum, marathon world record holder (2:00:35) died in a car crash yesterday. The Kenyan was only 24. At such a young age for a marathon runner, he would have had many chances to go under two hours. Tragic news.

Spumotim, which I think is still up and running. They make polyurethane foam products. (Spumă is Romanian for foam.)

As much of this colossal abandoned factory as I could get in the camera lens
Family - Maths teaching - Music - Other sports

Not this year, maybe not ever

February 4, 2024 by 0 Comments

Not a terrible week, if a fair few cancellations. Two or three times this week I’ve had to check myself. This will be nice for Mum and Dad when they come over. Ah. I’d been looking forward to it for months. But they won’t be coming this year, maybe not next year either, maybe not ever. I avoid the subject with them on the phone now. When we last spoke, they’d just been to Washdyke to do something housey. Mum talked about the importance of flow. Heck, they had all the flow in the world back at the other place.

Three sessions today, including a marathon 2½-hour maths lesson this afternoon. When I saw Matei this morning for our usual two-hour stint, his parents – they both have senior positions at a big supermarket chain – showed me photos of their recent team building. His father was up on the dance floor. An extrovert’s dream. When we were upstairs in his room, Matei – less extroverted than his father – said he dearly hoped he’d never have to do that. We spent most of the session on quadratic equations, which he can just about do in his sleep. He has an enormous world map on his wall. It’s fun to stare at. Spratly Islands popped out at me today. Sometimes I can even use it to explain concepts, like when we were doing bearings and I happened to have watched a video of a 1989 flight between the Brazilian cities of Marabá and Belém which went horribly wrong, partly because someone had keyed in the wrong bearing. On the way to Matei’s place I stopped at Kaufland to get a coffee from the machine. A homeless man who must have been there all night asked me for the time.

Yesterday I watched this YouTube video on Luton. Yikes, that hotel. A reminder that I’ll have to stay a night in Luton in two months’ time. The one positive from that video is the local football team: yes, Luton Town play in the Premier League. At a ground with entrances inside a row of Victorian terraced housing. Last season they went up through the play-offs in dramatic fashion. Their final against Coventry stood at 1-1 with moments left in extra time when they scored. Delirium. Only for the goal to be chalked off for handball following a video replay. Then they somehow kept their nerve to win on penalties. This afternoon Luton had a ridiculous 4-4 draw at Newcastle; they sit one point above the relegation zone.

On Tuesday I had my first haircut for ages. The place opposite me closed a few months back, and it’s now a trek to get it done. A middle-aged woman did it. I apologised for my dodgy Romanian. It doesn’t matter. I was hoping she might say it wasn’t actually that bad, but hey.

I’ve now ordered eleven records, the latest being Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue, and a few books. I’m getting them sent to a single location near Paris, and from there I’d get them delivered as a job lot rather than in dribs and drabs.

Tomorrow I’m going over to Mark’s place, and from there we’ll go to Buziaș, a town 30 km from here.