Language teaching

Coronavirus - Language teaching

Flattening the curve

March 22, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I can’t complain. My hours have dropped off a cliff in the last ten days, and that’s certainly a bugger, but psychologically this new way of living, this new normal, isn’t all that different from the old normal. The things we’re all told to avoid – interacting with large groups of people, mostly – are precisely what I like to avoid anyway. Self-isolation is practically my default option!

For some people it’s clearly been harder. I’m talking here about the (mostly young) people crowding on beaches, or even worse, in pubs. You are killing people by your actions. Have killed people. It’s that simple. You might not get the virus yourself, and will in all likelihood survive it even if you do, but you have unnecessarily caused the virus to spread further and faster. This will cause extra strain on the health system, and in two or three weeks some doctor might be forced to decide who lives and who dies. All because you wanted a few pints with your mates.

I can hardly imagine what doctors and nurses in Italy are going through at the moment. They are forced to do the impossible – decide who lives and who dies – every day, and are putting themselves in grave danger in the process. It is heartbreaking. Today – on one day – Italy recorded almost 800 deaths. Those are wartime numbers.

The question I keep asking myself is whether the UK is going the same way as Italy. All things being equal, it shouldn’t be. The proportion of very elderly people isn’t as high (Brits don’t live as long as Italians on average), three-generation households are far less common, and Italy had the huge disadvantage of being Europe’s guinea pigs. But the UK death toll is rising fast, and they lost at least two weeks of precious time in late February and early March when the control panel was flashing red but they peered out of the window instead and everything still looked rosy.

Yesterday my aunt called me from the UK to wish me a happy birthday. My birthday is the 20th of next month, not this month, but that didn’t bother me. She said that Boris is doing a good job. I remain unconvinced, but I watched his chancellor Rishi Sunak (22 days younger than me) at yesterday’s press conference and he was very impressive indeed, and the sort of compassionate conservative Britain used to have.

Romania has yet to record its first death within the country, although some patients are in critical condition. Cases today rose from 308 to 367, a rate of increase that is very close to the fourth root of two. In other words, if cases continue to increase at the same percentage rate as they did today, they will double every four days. Although it could be worse – Turkey’s official case figures are doubling almost daily – that isn’t good, and alarmingly, nearly a tenth of those tested in the last 24 hours were positive. That suggests that the real figures are much higher.

Here is my manual logarithmic chart of Romanian coronavirus cases, starting from 10th March, when the numbers first exceeded 25. It is some comfort that, after going like a steam train at the beginning (from 59 to 95 in one day – ouch), the curve has flattened somewhat.

Coronavirus cases in Romania to 21-3-20

I just got the highest level of alert on my phone – it made me jump out of my skin – telling me that groups larger than three will be banned outside the home, and that everybody must stay inside between 10pm and 6am. So far we’ve taken more draconian measures than the UK every step of the way, and I’m all for that.

I haven’t seen the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor for a while. They’re probably hunkering down in their apartment. (Why can’t you hunker up? Or just plain hunker? As an English teacher I have these thoughts all the time.) I wrote them a message to wedge in their doorway, but I’m not sure which apartment is theirs. I then put my note in their letterbox. I wonder if they’ll go downstairs to collect it.

Tomorrow I will try advertising for Skype lessons. Are you bored? Why not learn English? Some of my students have been happy to migrate to Skype classes, others not, and my hours have been cut in half. I might set my location to Bucharest because my location is all of a sudden irrelevant.

And a funny (I guess) story from one of my students yesterday. Unlike in Australia and the UK, people in Romania haven’t been hoarding bog roll. Here it’s flour, which makes a great deal more sense. My student told me that she’d put the last three remaining bags of flour in her trolley, but when she’d got to the checkout they’d magically disappeared.

Books - Coronavirus - Language teaching

Starting to bite

March 12, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Coronavirus. It’s affecting me now. No, I haven’t got it or anything, but people are cancelling lessons left, right and centre. One of their workmates has “weird symptoms”, or maybe they have to look after their kids who are now at home. Today I’ve been given a complete day off. This morning I went to the supermarket, stopping on the way to pick up my second-hand copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that I’d bought on Ebay. I thought I might never get it; seeing that slip of paper in my letterbox was a pleasant surprise on a sunny day of no lessons. At the supermarket I wish I’d used the self-service checkouts that were introduced just before Christmas. I prefer to deal with real people, and evidently so do most Romanians. But with the self-service tills you avoid crowds of often elderly people. On the way back I read the first few chapters of my new book, which was once a present for somebody named Dani.

The response to the virus continues to be bizarre and politics-driven, most notably in the US where the only reason cases aren’t yet at sky-high levels is that they aren’t testing people. At times like this, Trump is a very dangerous man. Last night he took the nonsensical step of banning travel to the US from European countries inside the Schengen zone. So you’ll still be able to fly from either Romania or the UK. In his speech he called the coronavirus a “foreign virus”. No it ain’t! It’s a fully-fledged citizen of the US now. No green card required.

Last night I dropped in on the Champions League match between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. You’re playing it in front of 50,000 fans? Seriously? Allowing all that air travel from Madrid or wherever else? And just in case the risk factors weren’t already through the roof, the match went into extra time (an extraordinary half-hour, it must be said).

Yesterday, in my lesson with the twelve-year-old boy, the Hangman words and phrases included “Virus”, “Wash your hands” and “Don’t touch your face”. As for now, this weekend’s trip to the mountains is going ahead, but watch this space.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

The latest fodder

March 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’d only just hit “Publish” on my last post when I got an audible red alert from the Biziday app, its highest level of notification. Coronavirus had hit Timișoara. Predictably, the affected woman had travelled from Italy. So far there’s little sign of panic here beyond the occasional face mask.

This morning’s student told me he now wants to move to the UK. It might not be the cure-all that he expects. He comes every Saturday, and at the end of today’s session he correctly pointed out that it was his fifth meeting with me this month. He’ll have to wait 28 years to have the pleasure of seeing me five times in February again. I have vague memories of a maths lesson 28 years ago today (yes, a Saturday – my school was decidedly weird) where my teacher said something about the palindromic date: 29/2/92. I have much clearer memories of 29/2/16 – flying from Timaru to Wellington after I’d seen my brother and future sister-in-law, wandering through the airport at the other end, and feeling sick because there’d be no escape from my flatmate when I got home. It shouldn’t have been anything like that horrible, but it was.

I had a busy evening yesterday: a lesson with the two boys in Dumbrăvița, then a session with the 18-year-old girl in Strada Timiș, then just enough time to have a late dinner before my Skype lesson, which finished at 10:30. With the young woman I played perhaps my favourite game, where I ask my student to bet on whether words are real or fake. “Scurvy?! There’s no way that’s a real word.” Coming up with dozens of fake but plausible words was time-consuming but fun. In the middle of the game, I thought, this isn’t a bad life really.

real or fake game
Isn’t tomfoolery wonderful?

At this time of year the streets are lined with mărțișoare, which are talismans (I want to write talismen but that can’t be right) that men give to women to mark the beginning of spring on 1st March, and all the optimism that’s supposed to go with it. Some of the handmade ones are pretty cool. This year I’ve given a mărțișor to all my female students.

mărțișoare
Street stalls selling mărțișoare
Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Writing a book

Is it time to panic yet?

February 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I might have to lose my beard, dammit. I saw my doctor this evening, and he told me all my facial hair isn’t very face-mask-friendly. Yep, it’s got to that stage here. There’s currently a very Romanian headline on Digi24 (a national news site): Watch out in churches! Don’t kiss the icons! Don’t shake hands with other churchgoers! I’d seen all kinds of scare stories about empty shelves at the supermarket, but this afternoon everything was hunky-dory. I did pick up a few extra cans though. Who knows where this will end up. Timișoara is at some risk, because it’s the closest major Romanian city to Italy, Europe’s coronavirus outpost.

At this rate my parents will be cancelling their trip to Europe for the second summer running. Dad also has his latest mini (I hope) health scare. Yesterday he had a scan, and next week they’ll be shoving a camera down his willy, as he put it. In Wellington I worked with CCTV footage of drainage pipes; this sounds like a scaled-down version of the same thing.

The owners of this flat want to sell. They haven’t put my rent up in the three-plus years I’ve been here, while rents on average in Timișoara have soared by at least a third, so I’ve had a good run. But still, bugger. I’ve enjoyed being in this central location, and finding a new place at short notice is always a hassle. It’s possible I won’t have to move out at all, because the buyers are likely to be investors. The sale price is €100,000 – that’s a lot by local standards – and when the estate agent came on Monday to take photos, I could tell she thought it was overpriced. “But there’s no balcony! And all you can see from the window are the cathedral and the park!” If I do have to move, it might be worth forking out a bit extra for somewhere with a space that I can dedicate solely to teaching. For three years I’ve been teaching in my living room.

The book. I met with my Romanian teacher on Tuesday, and outlined to her my idea in what I thought was shocking Romanian. The idea is pretty simple. There are loads of English textbooks (and the like) written by Romanians, and sadly most of them are terrible. There are also plenty of English learning materials written by native speakers living in the UK or America, and these are, on average, eight times better. But they’re not geared towards Romanians and the aspects of English that they, specifically, find difficult. This is where I come in (I hope). I’ve given well in excess of 1500 lessons in my time here, and the same difficulties and mistakes crop up time and time again, often from students who otherwise communicate at a pretty decent level. I want to present each of these big-ticket items with a how-to-do-it page and an illustration. Luckily I know a man who can do rather good illustrations, and he seems willing to help during the times when he hasn’t got a camera stuck up his dick. My Romanian teacher knows the market and has some contacts, so hopefully I’ll be able to make a go of this.

Family - Language teaching

Just doing my day job

February 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

There just isn’t a whole heap of news at the moment. Timișoara is balmy for the second half of February; the kids are disappointed we’ve had a virtually snowless winter, though I wouldn’t entirely discount an appearance of the white stuff in March.

I had my fourth lesson with the ten-year-old boy who continues to impress me. He knows the English alphabet upside down and backwards; most adults have a tough time with their G and J and E and I and W and Y but he managed just fine. His grandmother lives there, in their typically Romanian apartment, and I’m always amazed by her hair. Midway through the lesson she handed me a big bowl of frișcă, or whipped cream, topped with a kind of purée made from chestnuts. I’m not used to eating something that sweet in the middle of the day, and I only got through about half of it.

One of four lessons yesterday was with a guy who doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to speaking – for a lot of people that’s more than half the battle – but he’s still speaking Romanian with English words. I went through some exercises with the goal of getting him away from word-for-word translation, but they were rather tough for him.

This morning I had one of my rare half-and-half English and Romanian sessions at the university. In our previous session the teacher gave me a signed copy of her mother’s recently published children’s fantasy book about a dragon-like creature and a kite. The Romanian word for both of those things is the same – zmeu – hence it was a kind of play on words. It was a lovely story. I learnt that her mother is something of a celebrity in her home town of Alba Iulia. I meant to discuss my book idea with her, but we ran out of time. I did send her a message though and who knows, maybe I can start to get the ball rolling.

Dad’s sister seemed to have blocked his phone, and he thought she’d deliberately severed all lines of communication with him for good. But then on Sunday, out of the blue, she called him. She might be selfish and frustrating, but it turns out she isn’t actually an ogre.

Family - Language teaching - Tennis

No more time wasters please

February 4, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

My brother called me during the fifth set of yesterday’s men’s final at the Australian Open. I didn’t answer. I thought before the match that Dominic Thiem had a real shot, and arguably he should have won. Djokovic had been there so many times though, and he wisely chose not to press when he went two breaks down in the third set, deciding instead to save his energy for sets four and five. Djokovic’s serve is now more of a weapon than it used to be, and he’s certainly beefed up his second serve. Throughout his career he’s continually made tweaks to his game. This notion that he’s boring and robotic and does the same thing over and over is, frankly, bollocks. He’s a genuinely nice bloke and super intelligent to boot. I don’t get people’s dislike of him. The only dark spot for him in the final was at 4-4 in the second set. Having just broken back, he was twice pulled up for taking too long between points. He dropped his serve again in that ninth game, and having lost the set, he ranted at the umpire on the way to losing six straight games. Sorry Novak, the clock had hit zero both times. You don’t have a leg to stand on. As for Thiem, he’s knocking on the door now. Hopefully he can barge through it soon.

I saw most of the men’s final, but only a single game of the women’s in between my lessons. Another first-time grand slam winner in Sofia Kenin. She lifted the trophy by winning a whole bunch of tight matches including the semi-final and final. Muguruza’s big, high-risk game paid dividends at key moments in her close semi-final with Halep, but in the final it seemed to have the opposite effect.

It was a pretty good tournament all round. And heck, it looked for a moment that it might not happen at all. The tournament started amid orange haze. But we were treated to some fine matches, my favourite being Nadal’s drama-packed four-set win over Kyrgios.

When the tennis was over, I called my brother (who has zero interest in tennis) back. He was fine. He told me about their new hens. They aren’t laying yet because all their energy is being consumed in growing feathers. We talked about our aunt who, for some reason, seems to have blocked Dad’s phone. Dad can’t imagine what he’s done “wrong”.

My brother celebrated Brexit Day on Friday night. Yes, it’s become reality. He’s wildly optimistic about Britain’s post-Brexit future. (This attitude makes as much sense as the other extreme. Right now we simply don’t know, and it’ll be many years before we do.) My immediate priority is being able to stay in Romania beyond the transition period which expires at the end of the year.

My first Syrian student (I’ve since acquired another) didn’t last long. Last week he twice cancelled lessons on the day, and third time (yesterday) he didn’t show up at all. He told me he’d overslept. For his 6pm lesson. I said if we wants to continue he’ll need to pay me for the lesson. He said no thanks. I’m glad to get shot of him.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis - Travel: Europe

Travel time taking its toll

January 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week I had 33 hours of teaching – that’s on the high side, but nothing out of the ordinary. What is exceptional is all the time I spent walking or biking or bussing or tramming to lessons, and I guess that’s why I feel exhausted, a bit like during those few months in Wellington in 2016 when I had that flatmate who drove me into the ground.

Dad sent me a link to some truly wonderful photos of Naples, a city he lived in for a time as a boy, while his father was stationed there. I would like to visit one day. The photographer did well to gain access to the interior of so many homes, and their residents. I get to see the insides of people’s homes here in Timișoara, and at times it can be a fascinating experience. Today I had my second lesson with the ten-year-old boy. I could see into the next room, where a row of two-foot-long (at least) Romanian-style sausages were hanging over the back of a chair. The boy said his grandmother, who also lives there, had made them. On the way out, I saw one of the apartments on the floor below had various religious iconography pinned to the door, with some sort of obscure coded message written in chalk. This was an old apartment block. The expensive new blocks aren’t fascinating in the slightest: inside those clinically white places, you’re met with English signs saying LOVE and HOME and GOOD VIBES ONLY and other equally ghastly decor-shit. SHOOT ME NOW.

Today’s match between Nadal and Kyrgios was a treat. Good job for the spectators, who had paid an eye-popping amount to witness it. That third set, which Nadal won in more than 70 minutes, was the most gripping I’ve seen for a while. I couldn’t quite see the end – as Nadal attempted (and failed) to serve out the match, I had to set off in the rain for my lesson. I warmed to Kyrgios a bit during this match. He will have gained more fans than he’s lost during this tournament, I feel, and for the first time I thought that maybe, just maybe, he has it in him to convert his extraordinary talent into a major title or five.

I was awake just before 4am, so I turned on the TV to see Simona Halep break Elise Mertens in a captivating game to lead 6-4 5-4, and then serve out to love. I then went back to bed.

Family - Language teaching - Tennis

Supporting the underdog

January 25, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Latest news from Dad. His never-ending headaches have finally ended. They won’t dog him for the rest of his life as he’d feared, and it seems the culprit was his tooth after all. Being headache-free (apart from the odd ones he always gets) has given him a new lease on life. That’s the good news. The less fantastic news is that he’s found blood in his urine and will be having tests, and who knows what they will turn up.

Old age. I often forget that Dad is five months short of seventy. Today I bumped into the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor. She had just been to the dentist. She showed me her teeth – she’s one of the several million Romanians who have none of the ones that sprouted naturally. This time they told me their ages – she’s 79, he’s 88. He told me that in the fifties and sixties, people used to stroll up and down what is now Piața Victoriei: it sounded like an Italian-style passeggiata. Now he said it’s full of gypsies and people who don’t care. The lift was out of order, so they had no choice but to painstakingly climb the stairs.

It’s been a tiring but productive week of lessons. On Tuesday I had my five-kilometre walk from the end of the tram line to Urseni to meet the 12-year-old girl. It was quite a trek, even if he road had been sealed since Google went there, apart from the last little bit. After the lesson her father took me into town (he was driving that way anyway), and in future her mother will pick me up from the last tram stop. I enjoyed the lesson – it made a refreshing change to teach a girl, after having a string of boys who play computer games endlessly and dream of being YouTubers when they grow up.

After my lessons today with the Cîrciumaru family, I was glued to live score updates from the first-to-ten fifth-set tie-break between Roger Federer and John Millman. Federer won six straight points from 8-4 down; Millman will surely be devastated. I wasn’t too happy either – I’m kind of over Fed now, and would have liked the gritty Aussie to have pulled off the upset on home turf (he did shock Federer in the US Open in 2018). I did a rough calculation in my head of the chances of a Federer comeback from 4-8 (which is a deep hole for anybody, even Federer), assuming both players are of an equal standard. The “answer” depends on how big advantage you think the server has on each point, but it’s somewhere in the region of 1 in 18. Obviously, if you drop the “equal standard” assumption and instead assume Federer has some kind of edge (probably a psychological one due to his vast experience), his chances go up, but I wouldn’t go any higher than one in a dozen.

I’ve watched bits and pieces from Melbourne. My favourite match so far has been the one between Tommy Paul and Grigor Dimitrov. Paul was up two sets but Dimitrov came storming back and served for the match in the fifth, only for Paul to break back and play an absolute blinder in yet another deciding tie-break. There have been so many.

And Serena is out, beaten by Wang Qiang 7-5 in the third set, while Coco Gauff had another massive result in beating last year’s champion Naomi Osaka in two sets.

Language teaching - Life :)

Big nu-nu

January 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I managed 30½ hours of lessons last week, and I might soon have more work than I know what to do with. I’m starting with a ten-year-old boy tomorrow, my Syrian student has a mate who I’ll be seeing for the first time next Saturday, and this morning a woman called me asking if I would give lessons to her twelve-year-old daughter. Once I’d found a gap in my diary I agreed, and then she sent me the location via WhatsApp. I’d say it’s a little out of my catchment area, meaning it’s in a village outside the city, far from any reliable public transport, down a dirt track uncharted by Google Maps. I’ve got a tram ride plus a long walk in store on Tuesday. (I do have my bike, but it’s become very slow of late.) This might have to be a one-off.

Tonight I had my rescheduled lesson with Ammar. He wanted to practise writing and I asked him to write a short essay about a family member he admired. He chose his eldest brother (he’s one of eight, as I found out). I had a go too, and I wrote about my grandmother. In the middle of my attempt I realised it was the eighth anniversary of her death. I often wish she could visit me.

Today I did my shopping at Kaufland. I immediately got into trouble. I entered, looked for one of their wheeled baskets, saw they didn’t have any, and went out the in door so I could get a trolley from outside. Big no-no (or, should I say, nu-nu). Suddenly I had security guards opening all the pockets of my backpack. They eventually let me go. Take two, and I realised how important it is to have the Romanian names of fruit and vegetables down pat at this particular supermarket. Other stores have numbered buttons, but at this place you have to scroll through an alphabetical list, usually with people waiting behind you. Cabbage is varză, so you have to scroll almost to the end, where you’ll find them next to the aubergines (vinete, which believe it or not is vânătă in the singular). Carrots begin with M in Romanian, swapping places with mushrooms (they start with C, as do onions). I’ve been here long enough that this seems totally normal.

It has been a tragic week in Timișoara. Four children were killed in a house fire, close to where I’ll be having my lesson tomorrow with the new boy. Their mother was working at the time – she said money was too tight not to – and she left the children, all aged under seven, in the hands of their 14-year-old brother who lit the fireplace in the younger children’s bedroom.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

The skis and ski-nots

January 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This week has been pretty work-heavy and I’m OK with that. Today I had my 100th lesson with Octavian – he’s my third student to rack up three figures. My number of students (to date, since I arrived here) are rapidly closing in on that mark too – I got a call this morning from the mother of a ten-year-old boy who, on Monday, will be number 99. I was supposed to see Ammar (number 98) this evening, but he called me at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it. We’re meeting tomorrow instead. This morning I did meet the IELTS-obsessed Victor (number 97) for a 2½-hour session which he wants to make a regular Saturday fixture. We spent the first hour on a long essay he’d written – I can’t fault his commitment. As for Ammar, I’d like to ask him about his journey from Syria, but I don’t want to pry.

In my fourth winter here, I’ve learnt that Timișoara people can be divided into two groups – those who ski and those who don’t. It’s hardly an even split – skiing is beyond the means of most here – but the people I get to teach aren’t “most”, and among them, skiing is a status symbol. Like most status symbols, skiing comes in levels. Hiring skis and boots for an occasional weekend is one thing, but becoming an accomplished skier with all the latest gear and spending weeks at a time in some Austrian chalet requires a whole other magnitude of moolah.

After watching the darts last weekend, I dipped into some old footage on Youtube. First I watched the tail end of a 1984 semi-final involving Jocky Wilson. Back then, you could smoke and drink on stage. In fact it was almost compulsory. Jocky Wilson smoked and drank a lot. At the end of the match, which he lost by a whisker, Jocky collapsed as he tried to congratulate his opponent. Eight years later, and they’d banned the on-stage drinking, supposedly to clean up the sport’s image. As a little boy I remember darts was always on TV, but by 1992, perhaps due to the game’s seediness, they only showed one tournament. I watched the ’92 final live at my grandmother’s place; my brother and I were staying the night there. My brother wanted to watch the Crufts dog show, which was delayed by this marathon darts match that Phil Taylor won, famously beating Mike Gregory in a sudden-death leg. I then had a look at the 2004 BDO final, which I didn’t see because I’d just moved to New Zealand, I had more important things to do like find a job, and I doubt I couldn’t have seen it anyway in Temuka. Judging from the decor and the crowd atmosphere, it could easily have been the eighties, but the 2004 final was won by the one and only Andy Fordham. He must have been at least 30 stone, and his arms were thicker than my legs.

I had a good chat with my brother this week. They were about to buy some more hens; their current stock has been depleted to just two. He said they’ll get ex-cage hens that have been pecked to within an inch of their lives and have never seen the sunlight.