Maths teaching

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Tennis

No more marathons, and more’s the pity

March 27, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve got my TV tuned to BBC news, with the war now centred on Lviv in the west after the Kremlin said they’d concentrate on the Donbas region having been pushed back by the Ukrainians. Since the first morning of the war, none of this has made any sense at all. Joe Biden has just made a speech, saying at the end that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”. Whenever I see Biden speak about the Ukraine war, I wonder what the orange turd might have come out with.

Today I had my maths lesson in Dumbrăvița – he did well on a practice exam paper – and then when I got home I had a last-minute cancellation, meaning I just one had English lesson before stepping on the tennis court. I played two sets, both with the woman who struggles a bit with her footwork, so I had to run a bit, which was no bad thing. It was a lovely early evening for tennis, and it’s been a great week of weather all round. Blue skies every day.

Yesterday I called my aunt, and this time she answered. I remembered to add “Auntie” before her name. She was much better than she can be. In the past she’s seemed unaware of anything beyond her four walls. She’ll say the weather is bad, I’ll then mention that it’s fine and sunny where I am, and then she’ll almost seem put out by my mentioning other weather. Incorrect weather, as she sees it. I got none of that yesterday. We spent most of the ten minutes or so discussing the war. She still did her usual trick of ending the “conversation” when I still had things I wanted to say.

My aunt would get on well with the eight-year-old girl in Germany whom I teach on Skype. Yesterday’s lesson with her was especially hard because her father was with her the whole time. I made what I thought were fairly strong noises to say that I’d prefer it if he’d damn well go away, but he paid no notice. Half-way through the hour-long lesson her mind wandered. She must be tired, I said to her father. No, she’s just bored, he said. There might not be a whole lot I can do about that. Her English has got noticeably better in the time I’ve taught her. I think that’s down to YouTube more than me; her accent is very American.

Wednesday saw the return of Zoli, my first-ever student here, way back in November 2016. I hadn’t seen him since the very start of the pandemic in Romania, two years ago, when I joined him on a trip to the mountains. As we drove there, he told me that the hut had been closed because of the virus and we’d have to sneak in, and I got angry at him for not telling me before. Though it was beautiful up there in the snow, I was aware that a tsunami of disease and death was about to hit us. I thought I might never see him again, so it was a great pleasure to receive a text from him to say that he wanted to restart lessons. Wednesday’s meeting was hardly a lesson: it was a chat followed by a game of Bananagrams.

I’ve ordered a Samsung phone to replace my iPhone 5½ (as I call it) which I got as a present almost five years ago. My present phone doesn’t charge unless I place a heavy book on it, and then its battery runs down almost visibly (actually visibly if I’m making a video call, say), so I end up not using it much. It’s a low-end Samsung, called an A13 (it cost about NZ$300 or £150) but it seems to do everything I could ever want and much more. What it won’t do, however, is FaceTime, so I’ll have to switch to Skype or WhatsApp or something for keeping in touch with my parents. FaceTime has been so convenient.

Amid all the news of the war, they’ve been showing the PR disaster that is P&O, the once-proud British shipping company. P&O stood for (and presumably still does stand for) Peninsular and Oriental, a name that conjures up the world’s great trade routes and general intrepidness. Now it’s Dubai-owned (ugh), and the name makes me think of an outfit that lays off 800 of its staff on Zoom without giving any notice, and now has a ship that is deemed unseaworthy.

And finally, back to tennis. Ashleigh Barty has decided to retire from tennis at the age of just 25, at the pinnacle of the game. After winning Wimbledon and then her home grand slam in Melbourne, she probably thought, just what else can I achieve, and why not play cricket or golf or any of the other sports I’m ridiculously talented in. Tennis will miss her, though; I remember not long ago hearing some commentators suggesting that she might be too nice to ever be a champion. In other news, the no-tie-break final set, which has produced extraordinary drama over the last half-century, is no more. The movers and shakers of the tennis world thought we’d all be better off without that suspense, and now all four grand slams will be (quote) enhanced by a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-all in the final set, as the Australian Open has employed since 2019. I’m always wary of that marketing-speak word enhance. The new system has been billed as a one-year trial, but you don’t usually trial something in the biggest events on the calendar. It’s possible that, say, Wimbledon reverts to what they used before, but in all likelihood this will be a permanent change. Well, until someone else comes along and decides to shorten things even further.

Life :) - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 by 0 Comments

What a final that was, all 5 hours and 24 minutes of it. I never imagined Nadal would find himself anywhere near the final, let alone winning from two sets down against Medvedev who is one of the best players on a hard court. I still don’t know how he did it. That game where he dug himself out of a love-40 hole at 2-2 in the third set was the catalyst for his fightback, and you could see Medvedev tire ever so slightly towards the end of that set. There were so many long, draining games in the match, going several deuces. Nadal won less than half the points – in the first set he was completely outplayed, and he got hardly any easy holds until the very last game. Just wow. There it is then, his 21st grand slam in extraordinary circumstances, with Roland-Garros around the corner. The French don’t take kindly to anti-vaxers either.

Last Sunday, on the morning of my trip to the fortresses, I heard from a friend I first met in Wellington back in 2011. She shifted to Auckland not long after that, and then upped sticks and moved to Naseby in Central Otago. I’d sent her some pictures of apartments – I still haven’t made much progress there. It was a huge pleasure to hear from her. To get up and see that message felt great. It’s sad that I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my NZ-based friends, and even some of my extended family, and that hasn’t been for want of trying. I send sporadic emails but don’t get replies, then eventually I give up. People are selfish. They want contacts that will give them results. Tangible benefits. Access to other people who will give them results and tangible benefits. Friendship itself doesn’t cut it. (It doesn’t help that I don’t use social media. Communicating with one person at a time, like in an email, is oh so cumbersome and inefficient.)

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei. I didn’t see him last Saturday because he’d gone with his family to Milan for the long weekend. As you do. My job as a maths teacher is to explain things that are obvious to me but non-obvious to him, and I partly failed to do that, as a result of my inexperience. I’ll revisit the topic at the start of next week’s session, after giving it a lot more thought.

Some good news, I suppose, about my book. I’ve completed my journey through the thousand or so words and expressions that baffle and bemuse Romanians. I still need to put some more meat on the bones in a few of the sections and add one of two appendices. But then what? How will this huge tome (that’s what it is) ever see the light of day? I could go back to the Romanian teacher at the university. She stopped communicating with me too. What is it with people?

Wordle. It’s taken the world by storm, in a way that no puzzle game has since Sudoku back in 2005. If you haven’t heard of it by now, it’s a daily game created by Josh Wardle (hence its excellent name) where you have to guess a five-letter target word. Enter your guess (which must be a real word) and it’ll highlight in green any letters that are in the right place in the target word, while any letters that are in the word but in a different place are coloured yellow. Letters that don’t appear in the word at all are highlighted in grey. Then you try again, until you (hopefully) home in on the final word. This was my attempt today. I think I got lucky:

I average about four guesses. The concept of the game isn’t new, and it’s interesting (and surprising) what takes off and what doesn’t. As someone who has created a whole ton of word and number puzzles in my time, I’m pleased that this has been a success. Why has it blossomed? Well, it’s simple, it’s pleasing on the eye, the coloured grids are shareable on social media (gotta have that), and best of all, you can only play it once a day. A couple of minutes, then gata, as they say in Romanian. The ultimate anti-Candy Crush. It takes you back to the days of internet cafés when you’d pop in for ten minutes to “check your emails” and then return to glorious disconnection.

Poker. Not my best session today, but it’s been a good January. I’ve made $205 this month, and my bankroll is now $1648.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Maths teaching

Maths and the reality of Covid

December 12, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had my first maths lesson with Matei this morning, and also my first face-to-face lesson of any sort since September. The back tyre on my bike had a slow leak, and I arrived with only a minute to spare. It was good to see Matei, who now has a mop of long hair, rather like me. That’s pretty unusual for a 13-year-old in a fairly conservative country like Romania. We sat down – I had a comfortable but very impractical chair for teaching – and did some geometry problems. These were only 2-D, and no trig, so it didn’t matter that my maths was a bit rusty. Matei understood it all fine, but his weakness, I feel, is a lack of mathematical sense (or reasoning), and that’s difficult to teach. For instance, there was one question where he had to calculate how many 20-centimetre-square tiles you need to cover a floor measuring 20 by 5 metres. A simple problem, and he understood how to get the answer, but he couldn’t instinctively tell that it was a big floor, the tiles weren’t much bigger than his hands, and you’d therefore need lots of them. He also did what many not-great-but-not-terrible maths students did even back in my day, which was to reach for his calculator at the first opportunity. (I mean, 84 divided by 4, c’mon!) He goes to British School which follows the British system – all his lessons, except for Romanian and Spanish, are in English – so there were no language issues to worry about for either of us. It’s quite different from the Romanian system, and that’s the whole reason they contacted me instead of a Romanian.

In the middle of our lesson, Matei told me all about his father, who nearly died in autumn of 2020. The three of them – Matei and his parents – all came down with the disease; his father was the worst by far. He spent at least three weeks in hospital, requiring oxygen, and still needed an oxygen supply when he came home. At the worst point, he only had use of 30% of his lungs. Matei told me the common story of someone who gets a bit sick, then improves, only to find a day or two later that he can hardly breathe. The awful part was that his family couldn’t see him of course; they relied on FaceTime. Thankfully he made a full recovery – it sounded like it was touch-and-go. He’s in his early fifties and is carrying quite a bit of extra weight. Matei expressed his anger at anti-vaxers; I completely agreed with him (obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog).

When we got to the end of my lesson, I panicked. Where’s my phone? I couldn’t see it anywhere. I had a long and painful trip back on (and off) my bike, not knowing if my phone would be there when I got home. But it was. Phew. For some reason (being in a rush, mostly) I never took it off the charger. As for my bike, I hope it’s a puncture and not the valve, because taking off the back wheel on that thing is a complete nightmare – the gear hub and the brakes are in there, and it has a chain case. If it’s a puncture I can repair it without taking the wheel off at all.

This October was Romania’s deadliest month since World War Two, according to the official figures that have just been published. That includes March 1977, when there was that massive earthquake, and December 1989, when the revolution took place.

On Thursday I read this piece on Stuff (a New Zealand news site) about the plight of earthquake-prone building owners in Wellington, and thought how good it is to be out of that. Just think of all the meetings and emails and body corporate politics. I don’t get my rent anymore, but I don’t get any of that drip-drip-drip of unremitting powerlessness and desperation either. I was extremely lucky to come out of it as well as I did. The comments (there aren’t many) on the article aren’t too sympathetic to building owners. The only comment I agree with is (currently) the last one, saying that earthquake strength testing, and the rules around it, are a complete sham. (The NZ property market is a sham too. That’s half the reason so many people buy crappy properties in the first place, because that’s all they can afford. It would be better for the country in the long run if the whole thing would burn. Any party that proposes policies to at least singe it would get my vote.)

Yesterday morning I spoke to Dad, whose eye was running at the time. He had his other eye operated on in the UK in the mid-nineties, so that it wouldn’t run, but since the other one started running he’s just lived with it.

I’m still full of cold, though much better than a week ago. (These things never pass quickly for me.) I was going to join Mark (the teacher) on a road trip tomorrow, but the forecast is for rain and maybe snow, so we’ll probably meet up for a drink in town.