Language teaching

Family - Hiking - Language teaching - Life :)

Some trip pics etc.

June 28, 2019 by 0 Comments

Today is Dad’s 69th birthday. He isn’t doing an awful lot, and I can’t blame him. His recovery will take time.

Right now he’s struggling to go to the loo properly, and asked me what my record is for time between visits. When I was eight, I once went 18 days. Then another 16 days. Then 15 days. Or something like that. But the first figure I know is accurate. Yes, back in 1988 I really did go two and a half weeks without a poo. All the prunes, and jars and bottles of this or that liquid from the doctor, just wouldn’t shift it. The pain was excruciating. When I finally went, holy shit.

After last week when I could hardly keep up, this week my load is much lighter. (I’m talking about work now; I’ve moved on from the previous paragraph.) As Dad said (and he’s had four decades of experience) that’s what happens when you’re self-employed. It’s either feast or famine. You can’t win. On balance I’m grateful for the reduced volume; having to trek around the city to give lessons isn’t a lot of fun when temperatures soar well into the 30s.

I’ve watched a fair bit of grass-court tennis on TV. The most compelling matches have been at Wimbledon qualifying. The stakes are just so high. Yesterday I saw Liam Broady (a Brit) in the final round, where the men play best of five sets. Broady was off like a rocket, leading 6-3 6-0 in no time at all, but sadly that was all the time it took for his higher-ranked French opponent Grégoire Barrère to click into gear. For two sets he’d been nowhere. Barrère simply had more firepower – his backhand was particularly pacy – and he reeled off the last three sets. The other match I watched yesterday involved Sabine Lisicki, runner-up to Marion Bartoli in 2013 (what a wonderful match-up that was). Six years is an eternity in tennis, though, and Lisicki has practically zero recent form. I wanted her to win yesterday against Lesley Kerkhove from the Netherlands, and she started almost flawlessly, storming through the first set 6-0. But her level dropped and Kerkhove had just enough composure to capitalise, winning each of the last two sets by 6 games to 4. That was a shame. This morning I hit against the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. I managed to fall over on the concrete and graze my knee, and hit a woman on the head with the ball. Not my best session. (Normally there’s nobody else there to hit.)

On Monday I had a lesson with Octavian, who will be twelve next month. It’s natural on a Monday to do the “How was your weekend?” thing. After he told me about his weekend, I proudly showed him my photos from 2000-plus metres. His impress-o-meter wouldn’t budge. “Yes, I’ve been there. Yes, I know. You don’t need to show me that!” I slapped my phone down in anger. Look mate, I know you travel business class to Hong bloody Kong with your dad and have been there and done that, but you’re being quite rude. The rest of the two-hour session went absolutely fine.

Here are some pictures from last weekend. I hope you’ll be a bit more impressed than Octavian.

Hut at Cuntu
The hut we stayed in
The generator for the hut
Climbing up Țarcu
We’ve made it!
A typically Romanian structure at the top of Muntele Mic
Chairlifts on Muntele Mic
The creepy reception area of what used to be Hotel Sebeș
Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Travel: Romania

Scaling new heights (and Dad’s operation)

June 21, 2019 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday one of my students invited me on a hike this weekend, with him and about half a dozen of his mates, to the top of Țarcu Mountain, at an altitude of 2190 metres. I shifted and cancelled this weekend’s lessons (it was hard to do that at short notice) and accepted his invite. We’ll be staying at a hut on Saturday night. I know it will be beautiful up there and I really want to get away and also explore more of Romania, so saying yes was an easy decision. I’m still (as always in these situations) apprehensive, though. Will I be equipped enough? Fit enough? Waterproof enough? Then there’s all the social stuff. My student is Hungarian. So are all his mates. I can’t speak a word of Hungarian. (It’s amazing really that even the Hungarians can speak Hungarian, it’s so complex and unlike anything else on the planet.) But it has the potential to be a great experience and a whole lot of fun too. Part of the whole point of living in Romania is to have these sorts of experiences. I had a gap in my schedule this afternoon where I ran around the mall trying to find a sleeping bag and other bits and pieces.

Dad. That’s the big news. The operation went about as well as it could possibly have done. I haven’t managed to speak to him since Monday’s op: the reception on the top floor of the hospital is patchy at best. Mum has been very impressed by the staff at Timaru; they’ve looked after him very well. He had a big feed at Mum’s birthday dinner, which he described as being like the Last Supper. It was his final opportunity to eat anything solid. We now anxiously wait for the results of his biopsy.

I’ve got a tricky-ish day in store tomorrow (but even the trickiest days are miles better than life insurance ever was). Two hours with Mr I Don’t Know’s mum, followed by two with Mr IDK himself, then 90 minutes with the 7½-year-old boy, then a final hour with a new boy of just five. Definitely a challenge.

Family - Language teaching

Mum and Dad and fish and chips

June 13, 2019 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning. I had a good chat with Mum on the last day of her sixties, while Dad was out to get fish and chips. (That made me think. Why has fish and chips always been a Dad thing in our family? Is it like that in other families, just like with barbecues? Mum would never and will never go inside a fish and chip shop, or make fish and chip phone orders, or doing anything fish-and-chip-related except eat them. It also made me think that although Romanian food is lovely at this time of year, I could still just about murder some cod and chips.) Mum was tired, and wanted nothing to do with the birthday dinner she’ll be going to tomorrow at my uncle and aunt’s place. There are good practical reasons to avoid something like that; with all those people, Dad could pick up a cold, delaying his operation which is scheduled for Monday. We all just want the whole thing over with. If the surgery is successful, my parents plan to go to one of the islands and not do a whole lot.

Mum looks very good for 70. She has always kept fit, and I guess she has reasonably good genes. She shares her birthday with Steffi Graf (who will be 50 tomorrow) and Donald Trump (73).

Work. So far this week I’ve had loads of it. Fourteen lessons on the first three days, including six on Tuesday. The only way to handle Tuesday’s workload, and lack of preparation time, was to give three people exactly the same thing. It was an especially tiring day, with a 10:15 pm finish, and having to trek across the city in the baking sun, both for one of my lessons and to pay my rent. Tomorrow I’ll be starting with a five-year-old boy. Heaven knows what that will be like.

There’s not much else to say, except that I miss having my parents here, and I hope it won’t be long before I see them. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed for Monday.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

My best decision: the world of work

May 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

This morning I had a Skype lesson with a very pleasant woman who speaks well but loves to say “of course” when she’d be much better off with a simple “yes”. It’s a common problem. In our first lesson we discussed the difference between “I smoke” and “I am smoking”, and I asked her if she smoked. “Of course,” she proudly proclaimed. C’mon, this is Romania, dammit! Her job involves making short films. She showed me one of her creations, which was all about Transylvania’s legends, and asked me to check the subtitles. One of the words that appeared in a caption was “landshave”. I was baffled. Landscape? Something about mowing the lawn? The penny dropped the next morning. It was missing a space between “lands” and “have”.

Then it was off to the other side of Iulius Mall for a four-hour stint with the Cîrciumaru family. The mother still only spoke English on rare occasions. There’s no convincing her of the importance of actually speaking the language. It’s rather frustrating. Teaching the boy is starting to get easier. Maybe he’s a bit more comfortable with me.

From there it was a short bike trip to see the 7½-year-old boy. Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Faster and faster. Supercharged Simon Says. Throwing and catching. His card collection. His pen collection. Various forms of bingo. Glorified snakes and ladders. Games of luck that, unfortunately, he can’t always win. Vain attempts to read to him. All in all, he’s a nice boy, though.

My work day isn’t over yet. Soon I have another Skype lesson with a guy in the UK who will become a father any time now. Yesterday I had just two lessons, including a tricky one with two boys aged 15 and 12. I met the younger boy, and we entered the older boy’s room. He was in bed. At 4pm. The 12-year-old was glued to his phone. I said out loud, Why am I even here?! What’s the point? Between us we read nine news stories from the “funny” archives, but the comedy clearly didn’t work on them. I gave them a crossword, then we just talked, and I was glad to see the clock roll around to 5:30.

My job does have its awkward moments, but honestly I wouldn’t change it for the world. On Wednesday I had a lesson with a 17-year-old girl (who will be taking IELTS) and her father. We concentrated on speaking. I asked the girl to tell me about the best decision she’d ever made, and she mentioned her choice of high school. I then said that my best decision was to live and work in Romania. She was amazed by that (she has every intention of leaving the country), but I would say it’s true.

It’s just about the end of May, in more ways than one. Theresa has had to navigate some very heavy seas since she took over the helm in 2016, and her captaincy hasn’t been up to it. I’m just worried that whoever takes over will be like the captain of the Costa Concordia a few years back, and people will be wishing they could have May back, a bit like how some people view George W Bush in the Trump era.

The weather has been shocking. After Saturday night’s storm, we were hit by another, more intense one the following night. As soon as the cathedral clock struck eleven, all hell let loose and people outside began to panic. We’ve had more torrential rain and electrical storms this week.

I must get going; the Skype lesson starts in a few minutes.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Tennis

Dribs and drabs

May 20, 2019 by 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a lesson with the 17-year-old girl, and then had a half-hour wait while some family member delivered her nine-year-old half-brother for my lesson with him. I was scheduled to see the boy immediately after the girl, but they had made a detour to a phone repair shop on the way. I told the girl that I won’t stand for that kind of crap from her family. Lesson first, phone second. Got that? During my lesson with the boy, my phone rang. My parents were FaceTiming me. Obviously I couldn’t answer. This frustrated me because the lesson should have been over by then. After we finished, I called my parents back from nearby Parcul Dacia. It was a pleasure to show them the park – a hive of activity on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, with games of football and four table games in full swing. Dad is still waiting for the results of his colonoscopy. We talked about the books that Mum had ordered for my birthday. They’ve been coming in dribs and drabs. When she read out the titles to me, I told her it sounded like a horse race commentary. Nobody’s Boy coming up the outside; Chasing the Scream bringing up the rear. I’ve made a start on A Death in the Family, which admittedly doesn’t sound a lot like a racehorse.

I’ve managed to pick up a cold, after what had been a good run by my standards. Last night we also had a thunderstorm, so I didn’t sleep a great deal, and I’ve felt sapped of energy today.

I failed to mention that ten days ago I had my first knock of tennis for two years. I wasn’t up to much, but the exercise did me good. If the weather plays ball I’ll book myself in for a session on the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. In 2014, after an extended spell off the court, I did some long wall workouts using the squash court in our apartment block. They were a great help.

Scrabble. I’m on a winning streak, and my rating is now tantalisingly close to 1500. A lot of that might simply be dumb luck. Yesterday I won all five of the games I played fairly handily, playing eleven bingos to my opponents’ one, but I did draw eight blanks. My favourite play of late is CHIRPED, a 60-point double-double. No bonus, no parallel play, no big X or Z spot, just a good old-fashioned word. I’m still trying to learn words, and my attention has shifted to fours. Learning words is like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Every time I learn a new word, it seems another has vanished from my memory.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Fitting everyone in

May 5, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s business as usual again here, after “normal” Easter, Orthodox Easter (that’s the big one), and Labour Day on 1st May. They call Western Easter “Catholic Easter” which is a little weird to me, coming from a place where Catholics, Anglicans and non-religious people all “do” Western Easter. People often ask me if I’m a Catholic, which they pronounce with the stress on the second syllable and with a “t” instead of a “th”: Catolic. I explain that, well, I went to a Catholic church every Sunday as a kid, but now I only go once a year at the most. I sometimes also say that where we come from, religion is a personal matter.

Anyway, after a bit of a lull (which was nice) I’ve got plenty of work again. Last night I was lying in bed thinking about the coming week (when I worked in insurance, I never did that), and I realised that fitting everybody in at the times they want (or even at times they don’t want) will be an impossibility. Somebody is desperate for a lesson tomorrow because he has a job interview the day after, and accommodating him has thrown everything else out of whack, not that it was exactly in whack in the first place.

Last Monday I had another attack of severe sinus pain. I had moderate pain from about lunchtime, but at around five or six, it ratcheted up several notches. I tried to soothe the pain with ice, and it subsided two hours later. Hopefully I’ll get the result of my CT scan in the next few days.

I’ve got back on the Scrabble horse, and things haven’t been that easy. A lot of tricky racks, bad draws, blocked boards, hard decisions (for me) that led to time trouble, and so on. After a run of 70 games out of 71 where I played at least one bingo (I doubt I’ll repeat that sort of record for a while; it seems so unlikely), I failed to play one in three of my next four. One bright spot was in a game yesterday, where I trailed by 138 but ended up with a 43-point win, without a bingo. The key moment was when I played off two tiles and drew two E’s (from a very E-heavy bag), allowing me to play ENQUEUE for 72. Do I really have enough E’s and U’s for that? Seems I do! I learnt that word early on; it’s one of the 60-odd seven-letter words containing five vowels, and from memory it’s one of only two such words where the consonants are side-by-side, the other being EUPNOEA, which means good (or normal) breathing.

In other news, it looks like I might finally have someone to play tennis with. We’re having our fair share of iffy weather, but fingers crossed our Tuesday morning game (or bash) goes ahead.

Language teaching - Life :)

Another year…

April 25, 2019 by 0 Comments

I turned 39 last Saturday; the next day the Queen turned 93. My birthday was even less eventful than my average non-birthday.

Work has started to taper off a bit because of Easter (Romania’s public holidays take place over Orthodox Easter, which this year is a week later than its Western counterpart). Today was a fairly busy day, however, with seven hours of lessons involving two bike trips. I was off to Dumbrăvița first thing for an 8:30 start: two hours with an 11-year-old boy where I read him a couple of chapters of David Walliams’ Awful Auntie, we talked about Easter, he did some writing about owning a shop, I gave him a quick multiple-choice grammar quiz, and we played three homemade games including (for the first time) a version of the popular UK game show Blockbusters. Then I did some vocabulary and pronunciation with a 22-year-old in her final year of university, then it was back to Dumbrăvița for two hours with Matei, and finally home again for some grammar (present simple and continuous) and two crosswords with the woman who works at the coffee machine firm. In between I had to visit the clinic to reschedule my CT scan.

Yes, tomorrow I’ll be getting a map of my head done. That might shed some light on all my sinus pain, which varies from being almost unnoticeable to utterly excruciating. I really hope something useful comes of it.

Last week two of my students (a married couple) invited me to join them and some friends on holiday in Greece, in the delightfully-named region of Halkidiki. I’ve never been to Greece, and so much of the country looks beautiful, so I was happy to accept their offer, even if I’m always apprehensive about spending any length of time with anybody. They (we?) will be going for a week in early August. In other words, hot.

Talking of hot, we’re forecast to reach 26 tomorrow, and a balmy 29 on Friday.

Environment - Language teaching - Life :)

Footprints

April 16, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve just been watching dramatic footage of Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze. I visited it back in 2003 when I met my French flatmate there (we’d lived in student-level accommodation in the middle of Peterborough). It’s sad to see what is a beautiful work of art go up in flames.

On the 15th of every month I do my meter readings. There are four meters in (or just outside) this flat: electricity, gas and two for water. Yesterday was meter day, and I also happened to read an article about carbon emissions, so I went online to calculate the size of my CO2 footprint (click here). I was surprised at the answer. The centre of this city is increasingly clogged up with traffic, while I don’t even have a car. I don’t fly very often. I don’t think I consume much at all, as I sit here proudly sporting a threadbare seven-year-old T-shirt with a picture of a clapped-out VW camper van on the front (yeah I know, VW, emissions…). But it calculated my footprint as 4.9 tonnes per year, compared to a Romanian average of 3.5. (The UK average is around 7, and for the Western world as a whole the average is about 11.) I did err on the high side with my estimates, figuring that there’s always something I forget, so it’s possible my real total is slightly less. The real negative for me is living alone. In the summer I have the air conditioner going full blast because the heat would be unbearable otherwise. A big plus, however, which the site didn’t take into account, is that I have zero kids. My parents must have an enormous footprint, emitting 8 tonnes last year on their flights alone, and I’d dread to think what my Wellington-based cousin’s figure would be (I might send her the link). As for me, I’m trying to make 2019 my first flight-free year since 2002.

Yesterday was a pleasant day. On the way to my lessons in Strada Timiș, I intended to go to the offices of insurance company to arranging a CT scan for my sinuses, but realised the offices weren’t exactly on the way so I wouldn’t have time. That meant I arrived at Strada Timiș a little early, so I sat in the nearby Parcul Dacia, where old men were playing backgammon, rummy and a traditional card game. The lessons went reasonably well. I played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with my 17-year-old student, who did rather well in the end, despite starting out deliberating whether Sweden or Switzerland was part of the UK.

Language teaching - Photos - Scrabble

Headless chicken

April 15, 2019 by 0 Comments
Read More

I spent most of last week running around like a headless chicken, trying to organise lessons at the last minute, wading through the disorganised piles of crap on my table in the process. At the weekend I took advantage of the iffy weather to restore some kind of order, and feel much more relaxed now. This morning I had a short coffee meeting with a new student, who will be starting Skype lessons with me tomorrow. She lives in Timișoara but I guess she feels Skype is still a time-saver. Yesterday (yes, Sunday, which I prefer to keep free) I had my first lesson with another new student, who works for a coffee machine-making company. She asked me two questions I get a lot: “What the hell are you doing in Romania?” and “Obviously you do some English teaching, but what do you actually do for a living?”

A problem lately has been long preparation time. I hand-make a lot of my materials. I’d go as far as to say the slightly offbeat homemade-ness is part of who am I as a teacher, and my students seem to like it. “We don’t get this at school,” they tell me, or “My Romanian English teacher just used grammar books.” But all that thinking and writing and printing and cutting and sticking takes time.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news. I thought I’d mention another of my experiences on the ISC Scrabble site, which unfortunately seems to bring out the worst in people. On Saturday I played seven games, winning four, but they were mostly against people rated lower than me, so my rating actually dipped a little. Not to matter. I then fired up game number eight, against someone I’d never played before. It was me to go first, and I had this rack: AEIUTZ and a blank. Hmm, there’s probably a bingo here, and it’ll score a lot. This was void, which means it’s perfectly fine to try words without penalty. Is ‘azulite’ a word? It rang a bell (a blue stone, something like lapis lazuli, perhaps?) so I try it, but no go. Perhaps it’s ‘azurite’ I was thinking of. I changed the blank to an R, and hey presto, 100 points. I felt a bit guilty at my unprecedented stroke of good fortune, but didn’t expect what happened next. He accused me of using a word finder, promptly aborted the game (doing the online equivalent of tipping the board up and letting the tiles fly across the room), then put me on his no-play list. I contacted the site’s help desk, saying that this sort of behaviour detracts from what should be a friendly game, but was told in no uncertain (and sarcastic) terms that if I wanted a friendly environment I should go elsewhere. It’s sad that basic civility seems to be in such short supply.

The Easter market from my window
Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

I need to get out more

April 8, 2019 by 0 Comments

I haven’t written for ages, because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. Work is absolutely fine (and that’s a big thing to be absolutely fine) but it would be nice to have a bit more of a social life. Spring has sprung and I can hear the pleasant ping of fluffy yellow objects hitting strings on the nearby courts, but I don’t have anybody to play with. (The concept of a club which you join and instantly have a playing partner or three doesn’t exist here. Not unless you’re willing to pay the earth, anyway.)

It’s safe to say that it’s all over with S. Lately she’s had to look after her grandmother who is nearly 90 and not in the best of health, but regardless of that, it’s obvious that she’s got better, more important things to do with her time than spend it with me. And soon she’ll be leaving the country to go on another of her grand tours.

As well as meeting people and getting out on the tennis court, I’d quite like to travel. There are extraordinarily beautiful regions of Romania that I haven’t yet been to (like the north-east of the country) or have been to but haven’t properly explored (such as Maramureș). So I plan to take at least a couple of weeks off in August, and perhaps a few days before then too. My friends from St Ives had planned to come over around now – we’d had the idea of going to the Danube Delta – but for various reasons they’ve had to knock that on the head.

A few of my students have said that I get quite animated in my lessons, in contrast to their experience at school or with a non-native tutor. They seem impressed at the various games and activities we do, even if continually coming up with new ones presents a challenge for me. I think I come alive in my lessons in a way I struggle to in “normal life”.

I’m finding Brexit compelling and exasperating in equal measure. Most British politicians are not arseholes, but the arseholes – the hardest of the Brexiteers – are certainly getting their moment in the sun. They are like bullies at school (and quite possibly were bullies at school), and make ridiculous comparisons between the Brexit crisis and the Second World War. The most likely outcome now would seem to be a long extension, but there’s a chance (15%?) Macron et al veto such a delay, the government refuse to revoke Article 50, and Britain are out of the EU on Friday night. In that case, Scotland will very likely exit the UK in short order.

I’ll post some photos of the very Eastery scene outside – the market started up over the weekend, and with temperatures soaring to 23 degrees, it was heaving out there.