Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Photos

Take the long way home

April 21, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s my birthday, and my first thought when I woke up this morning was, jeez, people are going to want to communicate with me more than usual today and I’m not sure I’ll cope with that. Instant messaging stresses me out like you wouldn’t imagine. I wish I could go back to checking my emails every few days.

Mum and Dad called me first thing, to wish me a happy birthday. Mum was in a shitty mood, and I could hardly blame her because she was facing her own Barclays ordeal. (Mum deals with all my parents’ banking stuff, online and offline.) Then I got an unexpected message from S, whom I met on Tinder (ugh!) in 2018. Heaven knows how she remembered my birthday; my brother doesn’t even manage that. She now has a nine-month-old daughter.

I’ve got a new student who’s having five one-hour lessons with me today, tomorrow and the next day. She’s 22, lives in Cluj, and wants a job in IT just like almost everybody else in Cluj. This evening, during my second session of the five, I realised that I end an awful lot of sentences with “right”. I only knew this because she kept repeating the “right” right back at me. It’s like the time I accidentally recorded part of a lesson and realised how much my head (and not only my head) moves when I talk. I wonder what other (annoying?) mannerisms I might have.

Last weekend I was cycling down the Bega when I saw a whole pod (if that’s the word – I’m sure it isn’t) of freshwater turtles. Soon after that, my back wheel got a puncture. There are now kilometre posts along the river, and this happened at the 108 km point. To go home, I turn at about the 116 km post, and then ride another kilometre to my door. I didn’t have a repair kit, not that it’s easy to repair tyres on this Dutch bike anyway, so that was a decent walk. I did patch the inner tube without removing the wheel, but I got another flat this evening as I was coming home from my 4-till-6 lesson.

Some of those turtles

A long walk home

I wasn’t the only one taking pictures of the flowers in the park yesterday.

Too many lessons now to watch much snooker – that’s a good thing – but this afternoon I caught the tail-end of Joe Perry’s 10-9 loss to Robert Milkins, in a battle of players in their late forties. Perry had led 5-0 and 7-2, but developed a knack for missing almost anything. Fancy coming through qualifying on a black-ball decider only to then lose like that in the first round; that will be a hard one to take. Now they’re showing the fancied former champion Shaun Murphy in a close match with Si Jiahui. It’s the last first-round match; I hope Si wins and I don’t know why. Update: Si did win, 10-9. He led 9-6 but Murphy won the next three. In the decider, Si knocked in a break of 56 but was very unlucky not to be on a red after opening up a cluster, then Murphy ran out of position himself and tried to force the less experienced Si into an error. In the end Murphy couldn’t escape from a snooker and the 20-year-old Chinese player clambered over the line after a gripping final frame.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The new religion

April 9, 2023 by 0 Comments

Where I come from it’s Easter, but in Romania, where the Orthodox church dominates, we have to wait a week.

My teaching volumes were down last week, mainly because of the girl who has gone to Dubai and the 20-year-old guy who told me he “couldn’t see me again”, quite possibly because I argued with him about his favourite topic – cryptocurrencies. (A misnomer if ever there was one. They aren’t currencies at all.) Crypto is nothing short of a religion in Romania, but if you don’t have a willy, or if you do have one but it’s over 35 years old, you’re highly unlikely to be an adherent.

This morning I had a 7:45 start for my online lesson with the woman who lives near Bucharest, then it was off to Dumbrăvița for maths with Matei. My route goes past one of Timișoara’s many second-hand clothes shops – there are always hordes of people outside waiting for it to open at 9:30 – then I pass the tram cemetery full of rusty Ceaușescu-era hulks, then I go over the railway line. The crossing is at the 571-kilometre post but I don’t know what it’s 571 kilometres to. Bucharest, which would make sense, is less; Constanța, by the Black Sea, is certainly more. The crossing is dangerous because often the lights flash and the barriers go down but no train appears for several minutes; drivers often give up and turn back, while bikers and pedestrians go round the barrier. Then of course eventually the train does come. There are flowers outside the crossing.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. Her two eldest sons are at university. I saw the youngest one (going on 15) who plans to join the police. We talked about the fallout from the pandemic and I mentioned that I used to watch Dr John Campbell’s Youtube channel. In fact I watched it near-religiously in the early headless-chicken days; I found his videos informative, unbiased, and a voice of calm. Around Christmas 2021 I felt I’d gleaned all the information I needed from his channel, so I stopped tuning in. Since then, unbeknown to me, Campbell has gone off at a sinister tangent, peddling misinformation about vaccines and drugs like ivermectin, and falsely saying that Covid deaths have been inflated. What a shame.

The temperature plummeted in the early part of the week. On Tuesday we had unseasonal snow and howling winds. Out of my window I can see an aerial that wobbles if a bird lands on it; in the strong wind it was swaying madly and I wondered if it would come crashing down. I live in one of the blocks in the background of the photo below. The aerial is atop a corner shop (dairy in New Zealand); next to that is some cosmetic place and a popular bar (known as a birt here) where the locals sit outside. On the right is a street with two slightly different names.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up with Mark. Our plan is to play pool or snooker at a hall not too far from where I live. I haven’t done that for ages. I was always so hopeless, and although I liked snooker, I never enjoyed pool very much because it was always dominated by extroverts and drinking and flirting. Right now, the qualifiers for the World Championship are going on – a ten-day do-or-die marathon where players have to negotiate as many as four best-of-19-frame matches to book a place at the hallowed Crucible. I’ve been dipping into some of the commentary-free matches. Stephen Hendry fell at the first hurdle. He was barely a shadow of the young whippersnapper who utterly dominated the game back in the nineties.

The centre of town last Sunday
Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Tennis

A few tips

April 3, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching a YouTube video on tipping in the US. It was already way out of hand when I visited in 2015. Waiters, who for some bizarre reason are exempt from minimum-wage laws in states that have a minimum wage, behaving like performing seals, and all that unnecessary time-consuming awkwardness. But at least then I paid cash for virtually everything and didn’t have to cope with the guilt-inducing touch screens that have proliferated since then, often at places where people aren’t providing a service at all – they’re just doing their jobs. My cousin who lives in the US said he was once so appalled by the service at a restaurant that he manually entered a $0.01 tip on one of those screens. The solution to all this “tipflation” is obvious – stop tipping entirely, pay staff what they deserve, and incorporate that into the price of the food or whatever else you’re providing. In an otherwise good video, they got one thing badly wrong: they said the word “tip” stands for “to insure promptness”. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just a word. Not every short word has to be an acronym. Incidentally, I often use “tip” in my lessons as an example of an English word with several meanings.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open during last night’s snooker, where commentators gave their tips as to whose cue tip would be the steadier and who would be tipped out of the tournament, his career perhaps headed for the tip. The semi-final between Shaun Murphy and Mark Selby went to a deciding 19th frame; I only found out the result (Murphy won) when I got up this morning. After reading and grocery shopping, I met the English lady in town. After a lesson on Tuesday in which I struggled to teach pronouns to a beginner student, because they work differently in his native Romanian, I suggested that we sit down together and get a handle on these damn Romanian pronouns once and for all. Every solo attempt I’ve made so far to properly learn them has ended in failure. So we had coffee in Piața Unirii and we went through the accusative and dative pronouns. The third-person accusative pronouns are gender-dependent but the third-person dative ones aren’t, and that’s just the start of it.

We had mild weather today and it was busy in town. Some tourists are now making their way to Timișoara, perhaps to see what the “Capital of Culture” fuss is about. I was struck by a young couple carrying backpacks and dressed in clothes of every colour of the rainbow; not so long ago that was commonplace, but now there’s a certain drab conformity in what young people wear.

I had a good session of tennis this evening. Domnul Sfâra, now 88, was there. My partner commented on how good his reflexes were for a man of his age. The diminutive Domnul Sfâra was on the other side of the net, and we won 6-2 6-2.

After 32½ hours last week, I’m expecting something lighter this week.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

A life of slime

April 2, 2023 by 0 Comments

It’s been a wet, miserable day. After my first outing on the tennis court last Sunday, you could forget it today. It’s been a real mixed bag – only 3 degrees and sleet on Tuesday, but beautiful yesterday.

Life with my sinus problem ain’t a whole lot of fun. I haven’t had one of those excruciating headaches since December, but the low-to-medium-level pain (like I have right now) is unremitting. Blowing my nose eases the pain; often I only have to tap the right side of my nose and a jet of colourless slime shoots out of my left nostril at a rate of knots. Sometimes I don’t even know where the gunk has gone. Dad said it’s in Embarrassing Bodies territory – get on TV and maybe I could be sorted. Whenever I blow my nose during our Skype calls, Mum says, “I hope you don’t do that in your lessons.” I do try to tone it down, but what about me, Mum? She’s more bothered that I might briefly annoy my students than she is about my pain. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dad suffered from terrible migraines when I was growing up, and Mum’s sympathy cable was permanently unplugged. The only emotion she showed was anger. What will they think of me if we don’t show up to Jackie’s party? Or if I turn up alone? Thankfully Dad’s migraines are fewer and farther between these days.

On Monday I managed to catch my brother on WhatsApp when my nephew was up and about. It was great to see him grinning away on his playmat, but my brother and his wife are struggling with lack of sleep. My brother looked whacked. In the middle of my call, my sister-in-law’s parents showed up to provide some respite, but I could tell my brother would have preferred it if they’d stayed away. I don’t envy him one bit. Some time ago he said it’ll be a “one and done”, but we’ll see. This morning I read an article about only children. They’re selfish and spoilt according to the stereotype, but people with siblings can sure as hell be selfish and spoilt too.

Last night I had an interesting lesson with the Romanian guy who lives in London; he now has two sons. He’d just made a trip back to Romania, and said he felt a sense of greyness on his arrival back in the UK. I know exactly what he means because I’ve felt the same thing many times. That journey from the airport; the grey M25 and M11 with an equally grey sky overhead. He said that people in Romania were happier despite being poorer. That was something I noticed on only my second evening in Timișoara. It was a sunny Sunday October evening and I was walking along the road from the guest house to the university campus to grab some dinner. I passed a constellation of ugly communist-era blocks of flats which had a park outside, full of basic play equipment and half a dozen cheap-looking ping-pong tables. Kids were playing, people were walking their dogs, and all the ping-pong tables were being used. I was amazed how happy everybody seemed. I got the same feeling last night – another sunny evening – when I collected my 15 litres of water; not much money but a real sense of community. In contrast, when I have my lessons in well-to-do parts of town where Porsches abound, there’s no sense of community at all.

This afternoon, in one of those well-to-do areas, I managed to convince my 15-year-old student that a haggis was a hedgehoggish creature that inhabits the Scottish highlands. We read an article on Haggis scoticus from the Daily Record. Then I asked him to check the date on the article, which was 1st April 2021.

Last Sunday I had a wander through the woods with Mark and his two dogs. It was great to be out in nature and to hear the hammering of woodpeckers and humming of insects instead of the rumble of traffic. One thing I love about Timișoara is how easily you can escape from urban life.

The culmination of the snooker season is upon us once more. The sport is going through a rough patch with several Chinese players having recently being banned for match fixing. I also wonder where the fresh new faces will come from: it seems to be a middle-aged man’s sport. Is whiling away hours in a snooker hall, rather than on TikTok, even something a teenager would do these days? At the moment the Tour Championship, featuring the season’s top eight players, is in full swing, then later this month it’ll be the big one – the World Championship, the one event in the game that dwarfs all others.

I’m currently reading The Twisted Ones, which (unsurprisingly) is a horror novel. The author is Ursula Vernon, who wrote the book under the pen-name T. Kingfisher.

Language teaching - Life :)

Conversation Club

March 26, 2023 by 0 Comments

Our clocks have just gone forward and later today I’ll be playing tennis for the first time this year. Before that I’ll be meeting Mark in Dumbrăvița – I expect we’ll have a walk in the woods with his two dogs.

Last time I forgot to mention the English Conversation Club which took place last Saturday at the elderly English lady’s apartment. She and her Romanian friend (who speaks extremely good English) had decided to resurrect the club after about a decade. There were about ten of us including two teenagers who had been dragged along by their mothers and didn’t say much. People brought food; I made a cottage pie – I would have made a shepherd’s pie, but lamb is hard to come by in Romania. I felt at ease there, even when I made a hash of explaining something to the group in Romanian. I think it was the word “gossip”. Apart from us two native speakers, people spoke English at wildly different levels, so it was suggested that (if the group expands) we split into two. Next time we meet, which – frustratingly – won’t be until 13th May, I’ll give a presentation on New Zealand. It was great to see a social event succeed in the world of TikTok and ChatGPT, and nice to know that social events in which I’m not hopelessly intimidated actually exist. I got a new student out of the meet-up – we met for the first time yesterday. Her level is close to zero. She has four kids, aged 23 and younger, and she was born in August 1981. Yikes.

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

The freight train is coming

March 5, 2023 by 0 Comments

I had a long chat with my brother last night. I’m thinking of seeing the three of them over Orthodox Easter weekend. If his grandparents aren’t able to see the little one, at least his uncle can. Mum and Dad have mentioned the cost of the flights as a reason for not coming over. They have loads of legitimate reasons which I entirely understand, but the cost ain’t one, I’m afraid. They’ve just spent almost ten times that amount – money they won’t get back – on an EV. Edit: They will of course save money on fuel, and isn’t there some kind of rebate? But it’s still a fast-depreciating asset.

My work week (28 sessions totalling “just” 32½ teaching hours – unusually many short sessions) is over. Last night I had a weird 90-minute session with the bloke who lives near the Dartford Tunnel in London. As usual he read an article out loud a paragraph at a time, but this time he used ChatGPT to translate the text into his native Romanian, bit by bit. He could hardly contain himself, such was the quality of the translation in his view. “Sounds like you don’t need me anymore, then,” I said. Supposedly it can even translate jokes, and he showed me a letter he’d written to a phone company that was ChatGPT-generated. Although it’s free and intriguing, I haven’t tried ChatGPT, mainly because it forces you to create an account. Why should I have to do that? I know, I know, I have accounts with everything else. Like, for instance, one of the clinics here in Timișoara. Call reception and there’s no receptionist on the other end, just a message telling you to create an account – the 47th goddamn thing in your life that needs a password. You have no choice in the matter. More alarmingly, this artificial so-called intelligence is ripping jobs away from us like a freight train – it’s already gathering serious momentum and will soon be unstoppable. As a private teacher I’m probably safe for the next 10 to 15 years, but all bets are off after that.

This morning I had a one-hour online lesson with a Bucharest-based woman, then I cycled to Dumbrăvița for a pair of two-hour lessons with teenage boys. From 10 till 12 I had maths with Matei. He informed me that the boy I’d be seeing after lunch had just joined him at British School, and in only one week had already become slightly unpopular. “The rich kid,” Matei said. His father owns a computer hardware company. After a packed lunch – a cheese and salami sandwich, a boiled egg and some fruit – I had my English lesson with the rich kid, who can at times be conceited but wasn’t today.

I’ve just been reading something about the demise of cursive writing. I found the whole thing a bit puzzling, because it suggested that there were only two types of handwriting – the flowery swashy style and letter-by-letter printing, when surely there’s a very practical in-between. When I was at school, the word “cursive” was never mentioned – we just called it “joined-up writing” – and a version of that is what I use to this day. Romanian kids, interestingly enough, still learn what I would call proper cursive. The Romanian cursive has some distinctive features like a curvy x, like the one I use when writing maths, but with an added crossbar.

Here are some recent samples of my handwriting from my whiteboard. It’s slightly less joined-up than normal, because I’m sacrificing some speed for an increase in legibility. Note that in the third sample, my student has written “where” and “were” in the bottom-right corner with w‘s that look like pairs of crossed v‘s; that’s typical of Romanians – their native language is w-less, so they don’t develop a quicker way of writing the letter.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report

February 6, 2023 by 0 Comments

Edit: I see I’ve used that Simon and Garfunkel song lyric as a post title before. It is one of my favourite songs, so it can’t be helped.

On Friday my UK-based student asked me what “gusts of three degrees” meant on the weather forecast. He said he’d heard it several times. A frost and three degrees, maybe? He insisted that it was gusts. Sorry mate, I’m struggling with that one. But it did make me wonder about weather forecasts. Sometimes they just kind of wash over you, don’t they? If Catriona MacLeod came on Radio NZ and said there’d be “gusts of three degrees, south-westerly fog patches, and moderate to heavy drizzle later in the ranges, rising to 30 knots”, half the listeners wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Here in Timișoara, the actual weather has been pretty nippy. When I went out today in mid-afternoon, the temperature was zero. Yesterday was one of the windier days I can remember here, with the exception of this day. It was also wet. Getting to my pair of two-hour lessons in Dumbrăvița on my bike, worried that my left handlebar grip might fly off at any moment with all the moisture, wasn’t much fun. After my maths lesson I had my 252nd session with Octavian. I feel bad because, although he’s now got a pretty handy command of English, he still has a very non-native pronunciation – he hasn’t got a proper handle on the English r or th sounds, nor can he properly distinguish the vowel sounds in bit and beat, or bet and bat – so I spent almost the whole session on pronunciation drills.

What a horror day last Tuesday was. This blog tells me that 10/8/16 was pretty bad; perhaps 31/1/23 was even worse. I felt so hopeless and overwhelmed by everything, and had lost control of my emotions. When I think about it I’d been feeling anxious for some time, and my memory and concentration had shrunk to comatose goldfish level. It reminded me of the last time I worked in life insurance, when I couldn’t remember what I’d done five minutes earlier, let alone on the previous day. I really need to act on those first warning signs – take a day or two off, whatever – before things spin drastically out of control. Since Tuesday I’ve bounced back reasonably well, I feel. I’m trying to get back to what I did during the initial stages of Covid which, bizarrely enough, were quite a positive time for me because my life became quieter and simpler. I planned each day the night before, went to bed early, got up early, and executed the plan as best I could. Grocery shopping was always first thing on Monday at the exact same place. I’m going back to that routine now. It’ll be harder because of my increased workload and the books – things are bound to get in the way – but if I have to put something off until the next day because of something out of my control, that’s OK. Tomorrow, apart from my four lessons, my list consists of shopping (I’ve made a list), tidying this flat which has become a mess, cooking, booking flights to NZ (I’ve got to bite the bullet on that one, and bugger the cost), calling the plumber, spending an hour on the dictionary, and reading.

Yesterday Birmingham City – Blues – scored twice in the last few minutes to win 4-3 at Swansea, snapping a run of five straight losses in the league. Mayhem ensued when the winner went in.

Language teaching - New Zealand - Other sports - Politics

Knowing when to go

January 19, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just had another online lesson with that boy who cried. It was hard work – he rarely uttered anything apart from “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know” – but at least he didn’t cry this time. Later I’ve got that maths lesson again. Yesterday I had a terrible session with the four twins. Having already exhausted all topics with them, I tried a printable domino-style words-and-pictures game that I found online – lots of painstaking printing and sticking – but the game descended into farce because there were too many cards and they were unable to read the words on them; none of them can read in English beyond words like “cat” and “dog”. The rest of the session turned into a load of nothing. It didn’t help that my mood was terrible and my enthusiasm at rock bottom.

Jacinda Ardern has resigned as prime minister of New Zealand. Good decision, I’d say. Most leaders are ego-driven, desperate to retain power at all costs, and they outstay their welcome by years. She dealt admirably with the horrors of the Christchurch mosque shooting, then the initial stages of the pandemic. Had National retained power in 2017, I imagine thousands more New Zealanders would have died of Covid “to keep the economy moving” or some such tripe, and the economy wouldn’t have moved any faster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Set against chaos of Trump and the like, her leadershup was a beacon of calm. Latterly, though, her star has fallen. The disappointment, as I see it, is that Labour won a majority in 2020 – almost unheard of in the MMP system – but have totally failed to use it. Housing is a zillion-dollar disaster. Mental health for many Kiwis continues to be a mess. (Mental health provision got noticeably worse in my time there; here was a chance to reverse that.) My parents are always telling me that local farmers can’t get workers from overseas to do the jobs that Kiwis won’t. I don’t know anything about this Luxon bloke who may well be prime minister by the end of this year, except that he’s probably less of an arse than Judith Collins.

On Tuesday night I watched a football match for the first time in ages. Birmingham City, a.k.a. Blues, a team I saw several times at university, were playing Forest Green Rovers away in the third round of the FA Cup. Forest Green are based in Nailsworth, a town of 5000-odd in the Cotswolds, and the smallest town in England ever to host a league football club. They’re owned by renewable-energy business moguls and everything at the club is fully vegan. During the game, flashing advertising hoardings counted up the number of plastic bottles thrown away, millisecond by millisecond, and other depressing environment-killing stats. Forest Green took the lead with a stunning goal in the eighth minute. Birmingham were terrible in the first half, though I liked their young player Hannibal, mostly because of his name. Their manager must have dished out a bollocking at half-time because they sprang into action and equalised just after the break. The big moment came at 1-1, when Blues’ keeper pulled off a scarcely believable double save. Though the atmosphere was mostly flat – the magic of the FA Cup is nothing like it once was – it was worth watching the game just for those ridiculous saves. Blues soon took the lead and saw out the remainder of the match. Forest Green were unfortunate not to at least force a replay; Birmingham now go to Blackburn in the next round.

Yesterday, before my bad session with the four kids, a fresh breeze blew, and as I was sitting at my desk hundreds of helicopter seeds hit my window before slowly twirling to the ground. At first I thought they were insects. This isn’t normal for mid-January, is it?

Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Grand designs

January 17, 2023 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to my parents who were cheesed off, as Mum put it. Just as the builders were about to get stuck in, they got an in-passing estimate of $800,000 for the job. One zero too many, I suggested. But no, they were expecting it to be $500,000. Sweet jeebus. Now they’ll have to start all over again, taking care not to besmirch these builders’ good reputation throughout Geraldine, and coming up with excuses for the many occasions when nosy (and, let’s face it, competitive) “friends” ask them what’s happening with their house. I was sympathetic to the extent that it was affecting their mood, but (and this might sound rude) their ambitious project itself is neither here nor there to me. Tomorrow they have to make a trip to Wanaka to pick up a painting.

Outside my lessons, and thank heavens for them, life has been a struggle. Yesterday I had my cerebral MRI scan. First I had to go to another clinic for a test to confirm that the contrasting dye wouldn’t wreck me. An allergy test, right? No, we don’t do allergy tests for that. We do something else. Ugh, this is getting complicated. Beyond me. Outside the Nokia office block next to the clinic, I tried calling the MRI place but momentarily forgot that my credit had expired because I’d had problems with the BT Pay app the night before and wasn’t able to top it up. I visited the nearest branch of Orange in the centre of town and got my credit restored, then went back home, took photos of the six water meters and sent them to the administrator of this block who requests them once a month, and called the MRI people who confirmed that the something else was what I needed. I returned to the clinic and got the something else which was just a blood test. The nurse asked if I’d ever had a blood test before because of the way I must have been acting. I felt a mess. I went home for a second time, planned and printed out some material for my lessons, then left for my scan.

The MRI place was just over the border into Giroc. I rode to the stadium and another 2.5 km down Calea Martirilor 1989 which turns into Calea Timișoarei at the boundary. When I arrived I told them my weight, ensured them I had nothing metal inside me, and filled in a bunch of forms. I had to tick “Da” about two dozen times in what looked like a kind of waiver. They chuckled at my distinctly non-Romanian name and email address, but were good-natured. They hadn’t had the confirmation of my blood test, but proceeded with the scan anyway. I stripped almost naked and lay on the bed, my head clamped. I wore headphones and the woman placed a squeeze ball in my left hand; she said she’d stop the scan if I squeezed it. Was it a good thing that I had that option or a bad thing that I might need it? She said it would take twenty minutes so I counted the seconds. The initial screeching noises were like dial-up internet, then they changed to a “duvduvduv”, then a “baapbaapbaap”. The sounds were off-putting at first, but I got used to them. I was still going when I reached 1200; the time was only an estimate, and the noises had a rhythm which made it hard to count seconds with much accuracy. I was in the 1350s when I saw the light of day again. The lady told me that my test results had come through OK so I went back “under” for the contrasting agent to be applied – an injection to my hand, then a few more minutes of “duvduvduv”. It was all over. I got dressed, parted with 930 lei (NZ$320 or £170), then left. I should get the results by the end of the week.

The next hour or so was the best part of the day. I had plenty of time before my lesson with the single pair of twins, but not long enough that I could go home. I bought a cheese pie (8 lei) from a bakery, then a coffee (2 lei) from a vending machine inside a shop. While my coffee was being poured, an animated advert for cigarettes flickered above me. Let’s Camel! Only 19 lei. I liked all the greens and yellows and the seventies-style font. I also liked that while my parents live in the world of smoking permabans and half-million-dollar home renovations, I live in the world of fuck-it-let’s-Camel. I love the rawness of these little shopping hubs located all over the city. I bought some celeriac, leeks and mandarins from the market, then I was off to my lesson.

I had three more lessons when I got back from the twins. The best one was with the 16-year-old girl. We did role plays set in bars and restaurants. One of them was set in a pub, and had three parts, a barmaid, a customer Tina and her husband Paul. I asked her to play the parts of both Paul and Tina. She did Paul in a deep baritone, then rose about five octaves for Tina. This was hilarious.

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

A major upset

January 13, 2023 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a ridiculous day really. For the first time I ever, I made someone cry. I told the 12-year-old boy at the end of our online lesson that he was being a pain in the butt (do you understand that?), and look, I really don’t care about what you’re saying because it’s irrevelant and disruptive, then he burst into tears. His mother then came on the line and she was fine with me, but I might never see him again and if I do, the next few sessions are bound to be frosty. After that I had to dash off to see the ENT specialist. She was very nice and had a look a the results of my CT scan in 2019, then recommended me for an MRI scan (known as RMN in Romanian) which I’ll have on Monday in Giroc, a place that used to be a village to the south of Timișoara but has now been subsumed by it, just like Dumbrăvița to the north. The scan will use a contrasting dye, so I’ll first have to get an allergy test.

Later yesterday evening I had my first maths lesson with the 16-year-old girl who started English lessons with me in November. She’s been getting low maths grades, so wanted help there too. That was a tough session for me because I don’t know to talk about maths in Romanian. I was unsure how to say even simple stuff like “root two” or “a over b” or “x to the y“. I had great trouble articulating the “hundredth triangular number”. Even the alphabet posed a problem, because when spelling a word (say vatră), Romanians say the letters differently to how they pronounce them in an abbreviation (say TVR). The T, V, and R are pronounced differently in each case. So what do they do in maths? Buggered if I knew. I resorted to writing expressions and pointing to them. What does this mean? What does that equal? She showed me her intimidating textbook which was older than her. I only skimmed it, but found no shape or space or anything else to give relief from the unremitting algebra, and certainly nothing handy for everyday life such as compound interest. She showed me a test she’d had to do, all handwritten by the teacher. It all seemed very backward.

I’ve been working on my book. Forget about the 28th February deadline I gave for myself; this project will take a while. The important thing is to work on it daily, or almost, so I don’t lose momentum. I remember when my grandmother wrote her memoirs. In 2001 she began with great gusto, but then her enthusiasm drained away and then she started losing her mental sharpness. In 2008, when she was really losing it mentally – probably as a result of a stroke she’d had – she verbally attacked the publisher when he visited her house. In the end it only just got published at all, although it did, which was certainly something. I feel a bit more optimistic about my first book now – “the handy English hints for Romanians” book – after the elderly English lady showed interest. I asked her if she’d like to collaborate more fully.

There’s another book that seems to have captured Britain’s – and the world’s – imagination this week. My brother somehow managed to get hold of a free PDF version of it. If I read any of it, it will be to look at Harry’s (or whoever’s) writing style and see if I should incorporate or avoid it in my own writing. Apparently it’s staccato. Short sentences. Like this. The content itself doesn’t interest me at all.

Now that it’s 2023, Timișoara is officially the European Capital of Culture. Or one of them – three cities got the honour. My home town, as it now is, was supposed to be the capital in 2021, but Covid put that back two years. In the centre of town on New Year’s Eve there was a celebration of Timișoara’s status, with live bands. I wish I’d gone and seen that instead of what I ended up doing.

Last Saturday I made $96 in my online poker session. A surprising second place in triple draw, followed by a win in single draw. It’s a shame double draw isn’t also a thing. I won’t be playing much for the foreseeable future – I’m getting more than enough screen time as it is.