Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A bump in the road

February 14, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve hit the skids in recent days and weeks. All this being sick all the time, the sinus pain, the serial colds, the lack of energy, has caught up with me. I guess I’ve been experiencing low-level depression. I’ve had an extremely good depression-free run since my move to Romania; it was bound to rear its ugly head again at some stage.

Last weekend was a low point. Some cancellations meant I had no work at all on Saturday. Lack of work is rarely a good thing. In the morning a shelf loaded with books and files collapsed. This was my stupid fault; I knew the shelf was far too flimsy for everything I had sitting on it. Luckily nothing was damaged. In the afternoon I decided to walk to Shopping City and try to find a bookcase. This took forever; just putting one foot in front of the other was a serious effort. I was also completely unable to relax.

This anxiety continued into Sunday, when S picked me up to take me to some of the various hardware hypermarkets in the southern part of the city. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this. She thought I just wanted a shelf, not something far bigger. We found something suitable but it didn’t fit into her car. She suggested getting her brother (who has a bigger car) to pick it up for me, but I hardly know her brother. During our trip, she tried to execute a U-turn that I’m amazed was even legal (this is Romania, though) and could easily have caused an accident. As it was, her manoeuvre led to a queue of cars and honking horns left, right and centre (again, this is Romania). We got back into the centre of town, but many of the bars near the river were inexplicably closed. We ended up in a café in the square, where they were showing the Fed Cup match between the Czech Republic and Romania, on Czech turf. S knew almost nothing about tennis (she said she’d never played it), and I tried my best to give her a run-down of the rules in Romanian. Simona Halep beat Karolina Pliskova in a tight three-setter. When I got home, I saw Mihaela Buzărnescu lose in straight sets to Katerina Siniakova. That left the encounter tied at two matches apiece, and the doubles match would decide it. This was one of the best doubles matches I’d ever seen. Drama and quality from start to finish, and a great atmosphere. When the Romanian pair dropped the first set on a tie-break, I expected the Czechs to rattle through the second, but no. Romania won the last two sets 6-4 6-4 to record something of an upset. A great result for Romanian tennis. (This reminds me, it would be good if I could start playing tennis again soon.)

I’ve had a solid amount of work so far this week. That seems to be a good remedy. Yesterday’s early-morning lesson started in amusing fashion: he’d been driving the car immediately behind S’s when she attempted that U-turn. He said he recognised me in the passenger seat, and thought my face was a picture. One of those funny coincidences. Last night I had a new student, and I should have another one – my 70th – this evening. The sun is shining, there’s a busker outside singing Vinovații fără vină, and I’m reasonably confident that this latest episode will be no more than a bump in the road.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Making a difference

February 4, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

The last few days have been a struggle. I’ve picked up my fifth or sixth cold (I’ve lost count) this winter, and I feel feeble. All the colds have pretty much merged into one, and with all the sinus pain that never totally goes away, it’s a long time since I felt anywhere near 100%. Maybe I contracted this latest bout at the doctor’s surgery on Thursday night. As I do every four weeks, I went to the after-hours doctor to pick up my prescription, but that might not have been all I picked up. There had been a flu outbreak and the woman behind the desk was wearing a mask.

The good news is that I met S for coffee this morning, and we spoke for two hours in Romanian. Being able to speak someone else’s language is one of the most awesome things ever. I haven’t seen a lot of S lately. She got sick, I got sick, she went skiing in Austria, she got sick again, I got sick again, and so on. Before we met it was just lovely being out in Timișoara on a Sunday morning. It’s always so quiet and peaceful then. Then it was equally lovely having somebody to talk to. On the way back from the café I filled a pair of six-litre water bottles from the well, as I do every few days, but this time the bottles in my backpack felt unusually heavy. My life here is primitive in a lot of ways, and I don’t mind that too much. The water trips, the tram trips to pay my rent in cold hard cash, and of course work. My work is deliberately manual. The world we live in is automate, automate, automate, but manual is often way more interesting and fun.

I had a bunch of cancellations again last week, but the lessons I did have went pretty well. One of my latest exercises for kids is asking them to come up with 26 foods, or animals, or games, one for each letter of the alphabet. Last week one of my eleven-year-old students thought of Tasmanian devil, or diavol tasmanian in Romanian. He wanted to put that under D, but he already had “duck” there. Of course it needed to go under T instead, and that letter was free. It’s cool when kids come up with stuff that I hadn’t even thought of. I asked another eleven-year-old boy to write about his favourite time of day, expecting about four lines. Instead he wrote almost a whole page about why he liked evenings. I was bowled over, not just by the amount he wrote but also by how much his English had improved since I started with him in October 2017. Man, this is fantastic. All my work is making a difference, hopefully.

The men’s Australian Open final sure didn’t take six hours. It barely lasted two. Djokovic was brilliant and Nadal was very passive and indecisive, perhaps simply because Djokovic was playing so well as to leave him flummoxed. That’s the 52nd grand slam won by either Federer, Nadal or Djokovic. Thirteen years’ worth of majors. Extraordinary stuff. I’ve sat in Rod Laver Arena once, back in 2005 (I did also visit the Open in ’08, but didn’t have tickets for the biggest court). In ’05 the experience felt “big” but not too big. Not like today, with obnoxious electronic advertising boards pulsating in between games. Wimbledon seems to be getting too big as well. They’ve purchased the adjoining golf club, so more land, more courts, bigger, bolder, better. Bleuugh.

Scrabble. I’ve had a fairly iffy start to 2019, but I won all seven of the games I played yesterday. Although my results haven’t been fantastic so far this year, I’ve made some interesting plays: my first-ever triple-triple (ACTIONeD for 149 – he left the C in the triple lane, not particularly dangerous in second position, but I just happened to have a play that fitted perfectly); TOUZLED for 120; SqUARELY (the first time I’d ever used the blank as a Q); and two nine-letter bingos in ASPERsION and OVERDOINg (that last one in the final game I played yesterday; OVERDOg was also playable but I didn’t see it; I only saw its anagram gROOVED which didn’t play).

Brexit. Oh dear. Last Tuesday was a quieter than average day on the work front, so I watched a stream of the debates and series of votes, open-mouthed. One of the amendments was to extend Article 50 in the event that no agreement is reached by a certain day. A chance to sit down, have a cuppa tea, and think about what you actually want to do. It was voted down. So hang on, there are barely 50 days until the scheduled exit day, you’ve got no bloody clue what you’re doing, you’re fast running out of options, and you’ve just voted to deny yourselves the option of a bit more time in the event that no solution magically presents itself in the next few weeks. Are you insane?

Five lessons planned for tomorrow.

Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Politics - Tennis

Don’t panic!

January 27, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had my first “half-and-half” lesson with the teacher at Universitatea de Vest. In the Romanian half of the session, she kept complimenting me on my knowledge of the language, but said I need to relax a lot more when speaking it. I shouldn’t beat myself up when I can’t find the right word. Nor should I panic when I’m at the front of a long queue and I’m told to “Speak!”. That’s solid advice. She also helped me with those pesky pronouns. “She sent it to me.” Mi l-a trimis or Mi-a trimis-o, depending on whether the thing she gave me is masculine or feminine. You might add a mie at the end if you want to emphasise that she gave it to me and no-one else. It gets way harder than this, and after more than two years I still struggle.

I had a couple of Skype chats with New Zealand relatives, yesterday and today. They were shocked when I turned the screen around and everything was white; we’ve had another fairly major dumping of snow, including mega-snowflakes the likes of which I’d never seen before. My cousin and family might be coming over next January. Let’s hope so. I really miss the ten-minute drive to their place on a Sunday, seeing the three boys grow up, the roast dinners, the chats. Just as we were about to hang up, my cousin dropped a bombshell of sorts: her husband had just resigned from his job.

The watched the women’s Australian Open final this morning, and a bloody good match it was too. It lacked those long, scrambling, edge-of-your-seat rallies (the only point that fell into that category came at 5-5 in the first set and featured three net-cords), but apart from that, it was gripping stuff. The lefty-versus-righty match-up and the fact that they’d never played before added to the unpredictability. The drama dial got turned up to 9 when Kvitova saved those three match points. From 5-3 in the second set to 0-1 in the third, Osaka went through a stretch where she lost 11 points out of 12, then another where she lost 12 of 12. The stuffing had been knocked out of her. But she showed impressive fortitude in putting all of that behind her. At 2-4 in the third, Kvitova even fended off triple break point with a barrage of big serves, and at 4-3 Osaka might have cracked, but her own serve was brilliant throughout. Either player would have been a worthy champion (and don’t forget that Kvitova was stabbed two years ago) but Osaka has now won the last two grand slams and is the new number one.

Tomorrow we’ve got the men’s final. Djokovic against Nadal, yet again, in a repeat of the final from seven years ago, which might as well have been played on another planet. I’ll stick my neck out and say that this match won’t last almost six hours, because there’s now a super tie-break (boo!) if they get that far, and a proper shot clock. I can’t pick a winner though: they’ve both been in supreme form the last two weeks. The 2012 final was a bright spot in what was otherwise a shitty period for me. I moved house, something I wasn’t particularly interested in doing, everything went pear-shaped at my job, and my grandmother died. I still miss her. At times I wonder what she’d have made of my move to Romania. I think she’d have loved it here, actually. The late summer evenings, sitting out in the bars in the square, the buildings, the similarities between the Romanian language and Italian (she spent some time in southern Italy).

I’ve been watching the Brexit shambles, and it seems Britain of 2019 bears little resemblance to the country I was brought up in. A country of compromise, of pragmatism, of tolerance for others’ views. The actions of senior politicians in the last few months have been totally irresponsible. That includes Jeremy Corbyn, whose non-Brexit policies I have a lot of time for. Regarding Brexit, however, he just seems to want maximum chaos. As for Theresa May, I had sympathy for her in the early days of her tenure, but not any more. In 2017 she called an unnecessary election, thinking she could lead the Tories to a thumping majority without even showing up. That didn’t exactly happen, but she acted as if nothing had happened. Ten days ago her deal got annihilated in parliament. Still it was as if nothing had happened. In between, she has kowtowed to the extremists on the back benches of her party, while the country has become more and more polarised. The saga has become a game, where leavers want the gold medal they “earned” in 2016, they want it now, and sod the consequences. The tragic thing is that 2½ years have gone by since the referendum, and the multitude of reasons why so many people decided to give the middle finger in 2016 haven’t been addressed at all.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Tick-tock

January 18, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Occasionally one of my students does something extraordinary. That happened this afternoon. I gave her an IELTS writing exercise, where she had to write a letter about sub-standard student accommodation. Twenty minutes, a minimum of 150 words. As always, I had a go at the task at the same time. Hmm, too much noise? Problems with the heating? Too far away? What should I write about? These questions posed no such problems for my student. With barely half the time gone, she gleefully said “Done!” and presented me with a letter easily good enough to get the grade she’ll need when she does the exam. If she’d actually used the last ten minutes it might have been just about perfect.

Dad recently acquired a 9-carat gold pocket watch that his great-grandfather (or to be specific, his dad’s dad’s dad) had received as a present from work. He showed it to me over Christmas. For some reason he was happy to throw it away, or get some money for the gold. It’s a double hunter, meaning it has a lid on both the front and back. The case (monogrammed on the back) has been battered a bit, and the glass is missing, as is the second hand. We couldn’t get it to work. I told Dad I would take it in to one of the watchmakers here in Timișoara; he might be able to do something. The shop, on Piața Libertății, was a delight to visit. Every type of clock and watch, and piece of clock and watch, and tool for mending clocks and watches, was on display. Old cuckoo clocks were going off, left right and centre. It was like visiting a clock museum. Fitting the theme perfectly, the pocket-sized man who dealt with my great-great-grandad’s watch was about seventy. Two hours after handing it to him, I went back to find he’d got the mechanism going. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It might have been the first time it had tick-tocked for half a century, perhaps more. Unfortunately he didn’t have a glass that fitted, nor a second hand, but that’s a start.

The Australian Open is back, with its crazy hours. Last night a match didn’t finish until nearly quarter past three in the morning. We’ve also got a new tie-break rule. There are (sadly) no more advantage final sets; instead there’s a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-6 in the decider. Even if it feels gimmicky to me, there’s nothing wrong with the new rule as such; I just think the old one was better. We’re now robbed of the kinds of drama-filled long final sets we’ve seen at the Aussie Open in recent years, such as in both the Djokovic–Wawrinka matches (2013 and 2014) and both marathons Simona Halep was involved in last year. If they wanted to change it, I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down the route Wimbledon has done: a normal (less gimmicky) tie-break to seven points at 12-12. But that’s not what they did, and we’re now in the slightly mad situation where all four grand slams have different systems for determining the winner of close matches. The French Open is the only one to retain a no-limit deciding set, although I can’t imagine that will be for long. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll eventually plump for the Aussie system.

Towards the end of last week I got hooked on the BDO world darts tournament. This isn’t the biggest and best tournament in terms of standard and prestige (that would be the PDC worlds) but it has that pleasant eighties feel about it. The story for me was really the women’s tournament, with Mikuru Suzuki of Japan steamrolling her British opponent in straight sets in the final, walking on (and off) to the strains of Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.

Eighteen games of Scrabble in 2019 so far, and I have a 50% record. Last weekend I got utterly taken apart, 574-313, in my biggest loss ever. That took my record for 2019 to 4-9, but to my surprise I followed that up with five straight wins, including (in my final game) a 557-336 victory where I out-bingoed my opponent 4-0, two of my bingos scoring in the 90s.

I’ll leave discussion of the Brexit shambles until next time.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

Romanian commentary 12 – barriers

January 13, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s ages since I last discussed my Romanian language skills, or lack of them. It’s an ongoing battle. People who don’t live in Romania might assume that after more than two years I’d be just about fluent by now. Total immersion, right? Well, no. Considering how many barriers there are to learning the language, I haven’t done too badly. What do I mean by barriers, exactly? Every time I go to a fast-food outlet or a bank or a pharmacy and I’m dealing with somebody under thirty or so, I get nervous. I’m going to get Englished again, aren’t I?! I always speak Romanian, but I might be the only non-native speaker who has attempted to speak the language that they’ve come across all week. Even if my Romanian is perfectly understandable, they’re likely to find my error-strewn version, with a funny accent, comical or worse. So then they reply in English, often with mistakes, and in a slightly funny accent: “Sorry. Are not dere.” But as a speaker (and teacher!) of a language that everybody wants to speak, I’m used to mistakes and funny accents. They don’t bother me. So Romanians can get away with their dodgy English whereas I can’t with my iffy Romanian. Usually I persist, speaking Romanian for the rest of the exchange, but still feeling that I’ve failed. Sometimes, if I’m not desperate, I simply walk away.

It doesn’t happen like this all the time, of course. Or even half the time. But it happens enough to frustrate me. Am I really this bad? Still? Often the person behind the counter will greet me with “Spuneți!” which means “Speak!”. Talk about putting the pressure on. Speak, boy, speak! Shit, what do I say now? The “Spuneți!” situation is just one of many where I become anxious and uncomfortable, and therefore less able to process the language. One of these times came up yesterday, when I got my hair cut in a place I hadn’t been to before, just on the other side of the bridge. People were talking loudly across me from opposite sides of the room, cracking jokes. I couldn’t see my watch from under the cape I was wearing, nor could I see the clock from where I was sitting, and I had a lesson to go to afterwards. That sort of stuff makes me tense in any language.

I’m more comfortable in open-air markets or funny unsophisticated dive bars, which are generally run by slightly older people who didn’t start learning English when they were at kindergarden. Those places also have a couple of side benefits: they’re more interesting and cheaper.

Since the start of the year (which isn’t very long, obviously), S and I have been alternating languages. We spoke Romanian the first time we meet up, English the second time, then switched back to Romanian again, and so on. This seems to be working. At one point, S suggested that my Romanian level is something like B2, but that can’t be right. Perhaps I’d just scrape B1, or about a 5 on my personal 0-to-10 scale.

It’s been brass monkeys here. We had heavy snowfall last weekend, and on Tuesday morning the temperature dipped into the double-figure negatives. One of my students then showed up on the wrong day: Tuesday instead of Thursday. Somebody else would be coming minutes later, so I had to turn him away. I felt sorry for him, having braved such bitterly cold weather to come here, and I also felt that it was partly my fault: I’ve been teaching in Romania long enough to know that everybody seems to struggle with the words Tuesday and Thursday. I’ve even had texts from people wanting lessons on Thuesday. In this case, a simple reply of Marți? or Joi? and this misunderstanding never would have happened. Luckily he was still able to come two days later.

It’s been a good work week, and the more work I get, the motivated I seem to be with everything else. Hopefully that will extend to the Romanian language.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Cold hard facts

December 18, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been a bit of a crappy day. At the weekend It was possible I’d have up to five lessons today, but everybody has cancelled. Literally everybody. The weather might have something to do with that. I also have no hot water. The plumber (or handyman) was here for two hours and after speaking to someone on the phone, he fixed it temporarily. Very temporarily.

My parents landed in the UK five days ago, and in another five days I’ll be there. They aren’t enjoying the cold and darkness, least of all Mum. Here in Timișoara we’ve had quite dramatic weather. Snow fell almost constantly for about 36 hours at the weekend, and the city is blanketed. Today I slipped and fell, appropriately outside the skating rink that’s been put up in Piața Libertății.

Outside my window on Saturday night

Some good news is that last week I picked up a bunch of new students and had a busy week: 29½ hours of lessons. It bodes well for 2019. Some of my recent discussions have made me very glad not to have office Christmas parties anymore. One woman of about thirty sought advice from me after getting drunk and stoned at her work do, and finding out that a man of about fifty had supposedly kissed her. She couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t think of much in the way of advice. Um, how about next time try not to get totally off your face at a work function.

Last weekend my body corporate in Wellington had their meeting. At 11pm on Friday I tried and failed to join the discussion on Skype. For some reason the plug-in didn’t work for me. The least bad option appears to be selling the whole block. With the deadline for objections rapidly approaching, last night I sent off my form to QV, contesting the latest hike to the rateable value of my apartment. I included the independent valuation report that we got six months ago, only to find an email this morning telling us NOT (bold and caps) to include it. Whoops.

No Scrabble during the week but I got in seven games over the weekend, winning six. My rating has hit 1400, which I think is hugely flattering. (Average is around 1000, while 1800 is expert level.) In short games I’d be eaten alive. Likewise in games where you lose a turn if you play an invalid word. While my strategy is pretty sound, I still don’t know nearly enough words. Heck, I’ve played fewer than 300 games. One of my opponents at the weekend, also rated 1400-odd, had played 18,000. He was the only player to beat me, although we played a second game which I won.

Four lessons in my diary for tomorrow.

This is from last night’s carol singing in the cathedral


Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Unashamed

November 26, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I met up with S on Friday I felt pissed off: my work day had been just about wiped out by last-minute cancellations. I asked her if she could help me write a short contract to give my students, starting in the new year. I knew what to say; she just needed to ensure that the Romanian was right. “Pay for lessons in advance, in blocks of five. If you cancel within 24 hours or don’t show up at all, that counts as a lesson. End of.” But a bit more politely. S surprised me by saying that a contract might not be such a good idea. Romanians are unashamedly late and unreliable; perhaps I just need to get used to that. Hmmm. It’s hard, because where I come from, cancelling an appointment half an hour before the start because you’re “not in the mood” (yes, I’ve had that) is laughably bad form. This weekend I took stock of what S said, and realised that my cancellations are running at the same 15% or so that they always have – it’s just felt as though I’ve had more recently because they’ve come in flurries. And heck, when I came here I didn’t know whether me teaching idea would even be viable. It certainly has been. I’ll finish 2018 with more contact hours than a schoolteacher would get in a year.

On a not totally dissimilar theme, today there was a blessing at the yet-to-be-completed monster cathedral in Bucharest. I saw the half-finished monstrosity when I visited two years ago. The final bill will be something like £100 million. In such a poor country it’s an enormous, and very sad, waste of public money.

More positively, buildings are being renovated all the time in Timișoara. There are a lot of them, and limited funds, so it will take a while. Today I saw this beautifully restored building near Piața Unirii. The picture doesn’t quite do justice to it. It’s on quite a narrow street; this was as much of it as I could get in the frame without doing anything fancy.

Today I sold my bike. That was my first bike, which I bought in March. I put it on OLX (Romania’s equivalent of TradeMe) this morning and within 2½ hours it was off my hands. I got the same 200 lei I paid for it, although I had to cough up a 20 lei fee. That’s a pretty good outcome.

Scrabble. I’m trying to learn some seven-letter words, which are extremely important for bingos. Eights are equally useful, and very occasionally you’ll even play a longer bingo. One of those occasions for me was yesterday – the nine-letter MENTIONER, through TI, as a 94-point double-double. That’s one of my best plays to date. Anyway, the sevens. Some people prefer to study alphagrams – seven-letter strings in alphabetical order, which they can map onto the correct word, such as ABEITUX for BAUXITE. This seems a terrible way for me to study. My brain doesn’t work like that. So instead I’ve been studying six-letter “stems” made up of common letters, such as ORNATE, and then coming up with mnemonics for the letters that combine with the stem to produce valid words. For instance, the mnemonic I use for ORNATE is “I’d pinch curving bums”. Any of the letters in that phrase can be added to ORNATE to give a valid seven. The first letter (alphabetically) is B, and that combines to make BARONET and the rather obscure REBOANT. Add C and you get ENACTOR. Adding D will give you TORNADE, which is another word for tornado. (Ashburton had a pretty impressive tornade last week.) The next is G, which makes NEGATOR. And so on, up to V, which gives VENATOR. I had to find a method that was an least vaguely interesting, or else I’d give up.

Three lessons scheduled (!) for tomorrow.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Heavy stuff

November 12, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday night I picked up a cold. Again. It’s not a lot of fun. Last night S invited me to see Luna Amară (Bitter Moon), a rock band from Cluj that have been around a while, at a venue called Capcana (The Trap), only a ten-minute walk from here. I didn’t expect her to have two female companions, and that totally threw me. They communicated in that way that some people do here, mixing English words into otherwise Romanian sentences, because they think it makes them sound so damn sophisticated. It gives them an air of superiority over those who don’t know enough English to be able to do it. For me, a native English speaker who takes words fairly seriously, this kind of speech is at best comical and at worst extremely jarring. We arrived at eight, but the band didn’t start playing till ten. The crowd, who weren’t that young, were restless by that stage. The band weren’t young either, but they certainly put their heart and soul into it. At times I thought the frontman might burst a blood vessel. About 20% of the music was beautiful; the rest was heavy, headbanging stuff. S, it turns out, is a headbanger. For me it was an experience, and what’s the point of living in Romania if I don’t experience things, but I breathed I sigh of relief at around 11:30 when it was all over and I could go home. I wonder what S thought of me.

Today I haven’t felt like doing much at all. Eight games of Scrabble – six wins, two losses – might have been the highlight. I won the first five games to extend my winning streak and reach my highest rating yet, which seemed slightly inflated. The run came to an end with a fantastic game in which my opponent got off to a flying start and played very well throughout as far as I could see. I did my best to claw my way back, and towards the end I was in position to slap down SHOREmAN for what would probably have been a game-winning bingo, but my opponent blocked it and in the end I fell 46 points short. The next game was one of those horror shows that I experience from time to time. Getting stuck with a Q and nowhere to play it, being sure I had 24 bingos on my rack (containing a blank) but being unable to find any of them, and at times seeing absolutely nowhere to play. My total was abysmal as I went down 260 to 394. In the final game I drew both blanks on my opening rack and immediately bingoed, and later drew all four S’s, but only scraped home by 15 points.

I taught 28 hours last week. In some of my lessons with kids I saw both spoilt-brat syndrome and pushy-parent syndrome, simultaneously. A funny moment came with Matei, my ten-year-old student. I asked him to answer a series of “What if…?” questions, one of which was “What would you say if you could address the whole world?” Matei simply said, “Donald Trump sucks.” My lessons with adults were generally enjoyable.

Mum has been on a golfing weekend in Alexandra. That gave me the rare opportunity to talk to Dad. We talked for more than an hour. He told me how it really is. Mum gets wound up by certain people at the golf club, as she did at school in the UK, as she does pretty much wherever she goes. She’s unable to just let it all wash over her or take a back seat; she must get fully involved. Apparently the looming golf trip (and having to be with those people) dominated their recent trip to Moeraki and made the whole thing miserable. Then last week Dad received a final bill for the MG that he’s having restored. The figure was less than Dad expected and he thought Mum would be pleased when he showed it to her. Au contraire. Last week Geraldine had a decent fall of snow. In November. He showed me the mountains covered in the white stuff when we spoke on FaceTime. Timișoara has continued to be bathed in sunshine. Weather, like so much else in the second decade of the 21st century, has ceased to make sense.

Talking of bills, I did a double take last night when I saw the rateable value on my near-worthless Wellington apartment had risen by nearly 50%! You couldn’t make this shit up. I’ll have to appeal or do something.

Anybody reading this blog – and I know there are many thousands of you out there – please read this article from last weekend’s Mail on Sunday. Especially if you have any experience in dealing with autism. It’s horrific and will probably make you angry as it did me, but it gives you some idea of what a shitshow the treatment of mental health problems has become in the UK.

Books - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

Social life – what’s that?

November 5, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

After last week I was absolutely knackered. To be honest I still am. I had 30½ hours of lessons, which is a healthy rather than a ridiculous total, but it was my biggest week since April. With more work comes more exercise: the most convenient way for me to travel to my “off-premises” lessons is by bike.

On Friday night I joined S for drinks to celebrate her recent purchase of an apartment. After my experience, why entering the property market should be a cause for celebrating is beyond me, but I got to meet some of her work colleagues and we ended up at the Bierhaus where we tried some locally-brewed craft beers. S invited me to play board games last night, but I had two more lessons yesterday morning and after that I felt extremely sluggish so I said no. Normally I might have agreed, but tonight I’ll be seeing the film about Bohemian Rhapsody (which has the makings of a treat) with S and some of her friends. Three social events in a single weekend are one too many for me. Whatever happens with S, it’s great to have a semblance of a social life in Timișoara at last. I’m planning on joining S on a trip to Sibiu, either for Romania’s centenary on 1st December, or the following weekend. Either way, we’ll be there for the amazing (from what I’ve heard) Christmas market.

Interesting moments keep cropping up at work. One of my female students is a 23-year-old in her final year of a medical degree. Sometimes I also see her younger sister, who speaks English at a very basic level, at the same time. One time, when both sisters were in attendance, I did a lesson on directions, because the topic seemed appropiate for both of them. At one point I talked about pubs. “Is there a good pub near here? How do you get to the nearest pub?” The older sister then said that she didn’t do pubs, and could we please make the destination a church instead? She’s a devout adherent of the Pentecostal church.

After yesterday’s lessons I read a few chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale (S had given me a copy) and played eleven games of Scrabble, winning nine. I am improving, without doubt. My last game had just a 12-minute clock but I coped with that without too many problems. My next step (and it’s a big one) is to learn the words. I need to have the threes down pat and get a handle on their front and back hooks. I got my fingers burnt in a recent game by not realising ADRY was a word (why would it be?), and voilà, my opponent was able to hook an A onto the front of DRY and make use of the triple word square in the endgame, leaving me a-high and a-dry. I lost that game by three points. I get down plenty of bingos, but the vast majority of those are words I know from everyday life, and at some point I’ll actually need to study them in a way that isn’t a chore, if such a method exists.

Yes, the Red Sox are so-called world champions for the fourth time this century. Great city, great fans, you can’t say they don’t deserve it. What an incredible season they had.

The midterm elections take place on Tuesday night, my time. The Trump factor has focused the world’s attention on them in a way I’ve never seen before. According to Fivethirtyeight, one of my favourite sites, the Democrats will take the House but the Republicans will keep the Senate, so long as there isn’t a systematic polling error in one direction, which you can hardly discount.

Sodding Halloween, which shouldn’t be within 5000 miles of Romania’s borders, is mercifully over. It’s 4th November and it’s T-shirt weather here.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Flipping heck

October 29, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I wound up with 22½ hours last week, which isn’t a terrible total. This week I’ve got a total of 31½ hours booked – a fairly busy week in other words – and I hope I end up with something close to that. Saturday morning’s session (I hesitate to use the word lesson) with the 17-year-old girl was interesting. As is her wont, she asked me not to bother with the Cambridge reading test practice I’d prepared, saying she’d rather have a 90-minute chat instead. In this time she told me about her exploits in the swimming pool, and showed me the medals (including a national bronze in breaststroke) to prove it. Her description of her training regime sounded rather, er, Romanian. Three hours a day, seven days a week. She described her programme and coach in good English, but switched to Romanian to say, “He hit me.” What with? His hand? Did it hurt? She said, yes it absolutely did hurt, and it was some rubber implement. She rummaged around in a cupboard trying to find one without success, then she brought up a picture on her phone. It was a flipper. Her coach hit her with a flipper. “But it motivated me to go faster.” On her mother’s advice she gave up swimming when she was 14. This morning I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington and her family. Her eldest son is 16 and a very successful swimmer. I regaled them all of the flipper story.

It’s a shame I can’t watch the World Series. Well I could, but my sleep is too important to me. This morning I wanted to get up early, taking advantage of the clocks going back, and go fishing. I only spent an hour there and didn’t catch anything, obviously. But yesterday the third game went on so long that I was able to catch a fair chunk of it, including the wild 13th inning in which both teams scored. But I missed the end of it because I had go to Strada Timiș for my lessons with flipper girl and her little brother. (The game went for seven hours and 20 minutes, breaking all kinds of records. The Dodgers walked it off in the 18th.) The Red Sox bounced back last night in the fourth game to lead 3-1, and could wrap it up tonight. It’ll be party time, no doubt, in Boston if they do so. I don’t know if there’s another city on the planet as passionate about its sports teams.

Scrabble. I’ve now won eleven of my last twelve games and my rating has been gradually edging up. A bit more solidity on the three-letter words is helping me. My most memorable game among that dozen was one against a higher-rated player where I held a three-figure lead, only for my opponent to play a bingo on the triple lane while I was swamped with vowels. I made a clear blunder on one of my final plays, but got away with it, sneaking a confidence-boosting four-point win. And the very next game I lost by just three. That game illustrated the importance of the letter E in Scrabble, and indeed in English in general, as I only saw one E all game. I had a couple of milestone games: my first with four bingos, and my first 400-point game without a bingo at all. In my last game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-0 thanks to both blanks, but my opponent scored heavily on just about every turn, while I struggled with my post-bingo racks, and I had to sweat a bit on the way to a 49-point win.