Language teaching

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

It ain’t coming home

July 13, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s staying right where it is. Football, I mean. I had a lesson last night from 8 till 9:30. The semi-final started at 9, and as both my students are big football fans (and play regularly), we decided to watch the start of the match. They predicted 2-0 and 2-1 England wins, while I picked a simple 1-0 England victory. After five minutes that was on the cards; England dominated the first half-hour or so and could easily have led by more than one goal. But in the end, after 120 minutes and an inexplicably long final period of stoppage time, they were beaten by a better side. Oh well. Making the semis, even with a kind draw, is no mean achievement, and hopefully it’ll be seen as such when everyone has calmed down a bit. England still have to play the third-place play-off (which, in Romania, they call the “little final”). Before last night’s match I would have picked France to be champions no matter who they faced in the final, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t expect Croatia to be hindered that much by having to endure all those extra time periods, effectively a whole game more than France have played.

If one or two of Colombia’s penalties had been placed an inch higher or to the right, England’s campaign would undoubtedly have been seen as a failure. Knockout football often hinges on such tiny margins. Grand slam tennis, on the other hand, can sometimes be a bit more clear cut. The scoring system tends to magnify small differences between two players, especially in the men’s game where they play best of five sets. Roger Federer cruised through his opening four matches, for the loss of 8, 9, 10 and 9 games. Yesterday, in his quarter-final with Kevin Anderson, he won the first set 6-2 and negotiated a tricky tie-break to win the second set. Anderson’s chances of coming back were incredibly slim. But he did. Even after facing a match point. I was glad to see a “Fedexit”, mainly because I really can’t stand his Wimbledon fan base, who are often disrepectful to whoever happens to be across the net from their hero. I also enjoyed Nadal’s match with Del Potro, where he just squeaked out a win in another marathon encounter. In three days Wimbledon will be all over, and my rekindled interest in sport will be snuffed out.

This morning I had a lesson with a guy who comes from Italy originally but has lived in Romania for 15 years. We talked about bike usage, or rather the baffling lack of it. Timișoara is almost dead flat, and almost perfect for bikes. But you don’t see very many of them. He said that in Romania, riding a bike is (increasingly) an admission that you’re a failure. Successful people drive cars. He told me about his friend in nearby Arad, who works in a fairly senior role in a large company, just 500 metres away from her home. Sensibly she cycled to work, on a smart and expensive retro-style Pegas (a revived Romanian brand, which in Communist times was all you could buy here). But she was told to drive instead, because her bike (any bike) didn’t project the right image. That attitude is what’s sending the planet to hell in a handcart.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

Vară în Timișoara

July 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s not a bad day to be in Timișoara. The temperature has dropped into the very pleasant low twenties. (That’s only a reprieve, surely.) Earlier this afternoon I was in Piața Libertății, reading the start of Tender Is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, when a man in his sixties came up to me, impressed that I was reading a book in English. Then the mayor, and presumably his wife, walked past. They were eating an ice cream. Walking alongside the School of Music at the northern end of the square, on the other side of the tram tracks, I was treated, as always, to the sounds of vigorous practice in just about anything you can strum or tinkle or blow into.

I read that the boats (vaporașe) on the Bega, which they were trialling when I arrived here 21 months ago, will finally be put into action. There had been some bureaucracy emanating from Bucharest that threatened to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

This morning I had a lesson with my Italian student, taking my total for the week to 20 hours. After all those interruptions, I’ve lost some momentum, but I’m relatively confident I can build it again, even if August (the big getaway month) is only one month away. As my student and I completed an IELTS writing exercise, I saw the man with no legs ride his hand-cranked wheelchair to the cathedral, park it beside the steps, and painstakingly clamber up all twelve of them. For god’s sake (literally), can’t you build a bloody ramp?! Some things about Romania make me angry.

My student was disappointed that France beat Argentina yesterday, citing the number of black and Muslim players in the side. How bigoted. He also unashamedly cheats in his exams. But he has a lot of lessons with me, so I don’t complain too much. Friday was my best day of the week – four lessons, including one with three people. For that lesson I sat on what is probably called an ottoman, because I only have three chairs.

The World Cup continues to delight. Both of yesterday’s matches were crackers. Long may it continue, while the spectre of 2022 looms darkly in the form of Qatar Airways advertising hoardings surrounding the pitch. From a personal viewpoint, there is some well-founded optimism this time in the England camp. For once they have a non-Delboy-like manager with a good tactical brain, who hasn’t had to be imported from Sweden or Italy. On Tuesday they face Colombia, who (like four years ago) have been one of my favourite teams so far. I’d quite like to visit Colombia, if this 1997 video of the song Demons by Super Furry Animals is anything to go by. In the same original group as Colombia, I was disappointed to see Senegal go out by virtue of accumulating two more yellow cards than Japan, after both sides had amassed four points, scored four goals, conceded four, and shared four in their head-to-head encounter. Yellow cards are dished out too subjectively to be a good tie-breaker. If some sort of play-off game is unfeasible (and I don’t totally believe it is), flipping a coin might actually be better. As for the Mannschaft, which still sounds like part of the male anatomy, they just weren’t quite good enough. The victims of very un-German complacency, perhaps.

Fishing. One day I’ll know what I’m doing enough to spend a pleasant, relaxing morning by the water. One day I’ll even catch a fish. But today is not that day.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

You must be looking forward to it

May 14, 2018 by 0 Comments

One day I’ll ride to Serbia. Yesterday I got a bit further along the track that leads there, going just beyond the village of Utvin and almost reaching the town of Sânmihaiu Român. I did about 23 km in all, with the ribbit of frogs and the call of cuckoos in the background. Those endorphins certainly kicked in afterwards. Heavy-ish exercise: now that’s something I need more of.

Last night I managed to see România Neîmblânzită (Untamed Romania) at the cinema. The screen downstairs seems to have closed down, so it’s now impossible to see a film in Timișoara without visiting a bloody shopping mall. The film was great though. How often do you see nature documentaries at the cinema? It was all in Romanian, obviously, and at a David Attenborough-esque pace that I could mostly handle. The film showcases Romania’s incredible biodiversity throughout the regions and the seasons, and also serves as a warning: shit, if we carry on like we’re doing, look what we’ll lose. I must visit the Danube Delta. Perhaps that’ll happen next year if I can persuade my friends from St Ives to join me.

My brother’s wedding is almost upon us. Twelve days away. You must be looking forward to it. Aarghh! Seriously, I’m so happy for my brother, and when I look back and think how he nearly married a complete arsehole a few years ago, I’m even happier. His fiancée, almost my sister-in-law now, is just lovely. But as for the wedding itself, it’s an event with lots of people, 85% of whom I’m not going to know. And because I’m, y’know, his brother, I won’t just be able to slink into oblivion. So me being me, of course I’m not looking forward to it. In a way, it’ll be a test for me. I’m more comfortable in my own skin now, and hope I’ll be able to relax a bit more as a result. My one duty on the day is to read a poem taken from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a book I started but never finished.

Yesterday I spoke to my cousin. She regaled me of their recent family trip to Tonga (which did sound fantastic) and the kids’ many extracurricular activities, including, of course, underwater hockey. Do they ever televise that, and if so, how? Somehow she seemed more than 11,000 miles away.

Last week was quite full-on: I had 35 hours of lessons. On Wednesday I caught up with someone from the training company who lives in Bucharest but happened to be in Timișoara. We met at Starbucks in Iulius Mall – why you’d ever go there is beyond me – and she wasn’t in the mood for much of a chat.

The weather is still fantastic. Let’s hope it’s a while before it gets too fantastic (i.e. too hot).

Language teaching - Life :)

Some spring snaps

May 7, 2018 by 0 Comments

We’ve had July-like weather for the last two to three weeks; Timișoara has really come alive. It’s a beautiful city and I still feel extremely lucky to have landed right in the middle of it. After practically a year and a half, I’m in no way blasé about that. Today I’ve got four lessons scheduled in quick succession between 2 and 9:30 pm; there’s a fair bit of preparation to be done yet. One of my lessons is with a new pair of students, my 39th and 40th people through the door since I began this venture, assuming they turn up. I quite like teaching couples: there are more possibilities for role-plays, games and exercises with the extra person. I don’t have to talk as much either (that can be a little exhausting). And I get paid more.

Last night I went to Cinema City in Iulius Mall to see the documentary film România Neîmblânzită, or Romania Untamed, at the advertised time of 7:10, but in this wild land advertised times don’t mean a whole lot. I’d have needed to wait another two and a half hours, so I did my shopping instead. Mum asked me recently if the people at the checkouts know me yet. I do my grocery shopping at about ten different places, depending on where I happen to be at the time, so I’m still almost totally anonymous. At Piața Badea Cârțan, one of the female cheese mongers or merchants or whatever you want to call them does know me, as does one of the blokes at the dive in Piața 700 where I get whatever soup is on offer as long as it’s not tripe, but that’s about it.

Here’s a picture of the first of those two snakes that appeared in my lesson. I didn’t get a snap of the second snake because all hell broke loose as soon as my student saw it; she wouldn’t have appreciated my taking a photo.

Here are some photos of a monster flying beetle that landed at my feet as I was reading in a nearby park yesterday afternoon. The coin is a 50 bani, the largest of the few coins we have, almost an inch across.

And here are some snaps from Timfloralis, the recent flower festival:

Language teaching - Life :)

Winding up

April 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

Last week was lighter than usual. My biggest job, which took several painstaking hours, was creating a test for the people at the lolly-stick company: something that covered a good chunk of the course and had listening, reading, writing and speaking components and could be completed in 90 minutes and was fair and gave them a good chance of passing despite the ridiculously high pass mark of 75% which I had to enforce. In practice, this meant marking the subjective parts of the paper (speaking and writing) generously: saying or writing anything vaguely on-topic would have given them at least 8 out of 15 for each part. My students got 89%, 81% and 77%; had any of them fallen just short of 75% I’m sure I could have eked out an extra mark or two somewhere. They’re all lovely people, as far as I can tell, and I really wanted them all to pass. (This must be an issue that school teachers face all the time.) On Thursday our 40-session course came to an end, but they all seemed keen to do another course with me. There’s one snag however: the company I work for isn’t paying me nearly enough. To begin with I was happy to do it for the experience, in spite of the rubbish pay, but I’m past that stage now. I’ve asked for a 60% pay increase and will see what happens.

More of my students (mostly in their twenties or early thirties) want lessons in business English. I’m happy to oblige, but it isn’t my favourite discipline. I left that world behind ages ago. One nice thing about business English is that it’s fairly “by the book”: I can just dip into a textbook, including the one I used for the lolly-stick people. Occasionally somebody wants words and phrases specifically related to their line of business (such as construction or car parts) and that’s actually way more interesting.

I had quite a funny lesson last Monday (for me; not so much for my student). It was a balmy evening and she wanted to sit outside on the bank of the Bega. Great. We were sitting near a bar and she offered to buy me a beer. Fantastic. While she was away a small grey snake, perhaps nine inches long, appeared on the bank. It was almost camouflaged by the stone. I pointed the snake out to her when she returned, and she just about freaked out. When she recovered we moved down the bank a little way, to an area that was hopefully snakeless. But lo and behold, a larger black snake, nearly two feet long, swam towards the bank. That was it. Seeing that second snake was a truly traumatic experience for her. We moved away from the Bega altogether, and after about half an hour she was in a fit state to read the article from the Sun that I’d prepared. Where does that intense, deep-seated fear of snakes, rats, spiders and other creepy-crawlies come from?

Yesterday the temperature must have been pushing 30, but there was a pleasant breeze. I didn’t have any lessons. I rode my bike down to the frog pond, not that far, and just sat there for a while. It was very peaceful. The centre of town was heaving with people all weekend, with long snaking (!) queues for the Mr Whippy-style ice cream. The Timfloralis flower festival was in full swing, and because Tuesday (1st May) is a public holiday, many people are making a four-day weekend of it.

Language teaching - Life :)

On my bike

April 2, 2018 by 0 Comments

I gave my bike its first proper run today, and yes, it does work! I rode to the end of the Timișoara cycle track, which morphed into the 37 km Timișoara-to-Serbia route that was opened three years ago. It was lovely cycling along the Bega, and I felt great afterwards, so biking is something I’ll want to do a lot more of. This time I turned back just two kilometres up the Serbia track, but next time who knows?

On Monday I had a session with Timea, not at home but at Scârț Loc Lejer, a hippie hangout (yes, we have them here) that I’d read about in 2015 but had never dared go to before. Its walls are covered in all kinds of Communist-era memorabilia. When the weather is nice you can sit outside on a bench or in a hammock. The guy who runs the place has his fingers in two other pies: a theatre company called Auăleu which tours the country, and the Museum of Communism. So hopefully I’ll go back there.

Tuesday’s lesson with Timea’s anagram-mate Matei was hardly my finest hour (or two) as a teacher. He said he was going on holiday in Dublin with his parents, on the same day that I go to the UK. I asked him what he’d be doing and seeing there. He had no idea. I had my laptop with me, so I played him a Youtube video of the top ten Dublin attractions, or tried to. “This video is boring me! Turn it off!” You ungrateful little shit, I said. I immediately regretted that, of course, even if it was accurate. It’s not exactly becoming of a teacher, is it? Matei is a nice kid really, and quite sensitive. The problem is that his parents are wealthy by Romanian standards, and he’s an only child, so he gets everything handed to him on a plate. That includes extra English and German lessons (and French too, perhaps) that he might not actually want. This was my 63rd lesson with him.

Earlier on Tuesday I had my hair cut. A lot. Er…just the back and sides…but before I knew where I was, zzzzz, and it was too late. When we spoke on FaceTime, Mum said I looked more Romanian. Mum and Dad were about to head to Dunedin to see Ed Sheeran. It’s not their thing at all but there were some spare tickets going.

I spoke to my aunt this morning. She seemed pretty lucid (she doesn’t always). She said I should create a blog about Timișoara, or as she calls it, Tiramisu. I don’t think she knows about this one.

Three games of Scrabble this weekend, and three wins. My rating has nudged over 1200 for the first time. But if I’m serious about improving further, I’ll have to actually learn words, something I’m not keen on doing.

Some teaching stats: I had 371 hours of lessons in the first quarter of 2018, with a cancellation rate of 16%.

 

Films - Language teaching - Life :)

New set of wheels (only two, so don’t get too excited)

March 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

Today I bought a second-hand mountain bike from Mehala, the market in the west of the city. It cost me 200 lei. The bike is made by Professional, a UK company. Its previous owner’s name, Allen (first name or surname, I can’t tell) is scrawled all over it, but you only notice that if you’re up close. I rode it home, so at least it works, but there are still bits and pieces I could do with getting. A good lock, for one. The best thing is that if the bike falls apart on me, 200 lei isn’t the end of the world.

Last week was a pretty good one. Articles on Stephen Hawking, games of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a piece on the oldest man ever to ride a rollercoaster, some construction-based vocabulary, my Space Race game, practice IELTS speaking tests, Simon Says, and Canadian driving theory test questions all made at least one appearance. The difference between last week and the sense of complete barrenness I use to feel every week, year in, year out, is almost indescribable. Of course I felt knackered by the end of it, as always. At one stage I had 15 lessons in just two and a half days, and I finished at 9:30pm every day from Monday to Friday.

Our clocks went forward last night. Yes, we’re now on summer time. After the unseasonably cold weather we’ve had over the last week to ten days, with snow blanketing the city, “summer time” sounds like a bad joke. The EU stipulates that all countries must change their clocks at the same time. In the UK, Ireland and Portugal, this means that 1am becomes 2am; for central Europe 2am becomes 3am; and for those of us out east, 3am becomes 4am. I happened to be awake for the switchover, and I lay in bed wondering just what the cathedral clock would do. Would it strike three or four? Surprisingly it did both, and even more weirdly it did the four first, then the three. I looked at the clock which clearly said 4:00, so who knows what those bells were playing at.

The change of clock did bring with it a change of weather and a palpable change of mood in the city today. Hopefully winter is finally over. Unfortunately, unlike last year, it looks like being a bad year for fruit.

Last night I watched Metrobranding, an interesting documentary on Romania’s manufacturing industry. Factories that employed thousands in Communist times have since mostly fallen into disuse. The documentary was in five parts, covering sewing machines, bicycles, tennis shoes, mattresses and light bulbs.

 

Books - Language teaching - Life :)

The snap is back

March 19, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Thursday evening a miracle occurred. The books that my parents bought me for Christmas actually arrived. Who was to blame for the ridiculous delay we don’t know, but they’d been to Timișoara at least twice prior to last week, before making a bizarre detour to Réunion, perhaps because it has the same initial letter and the same length as Romania. I’ve just made a start on Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The best title of the books I received is clearly Fucking Apostrophes.

Only 29 hours of teaching last week. Perfect, really. I haven’t done much this weekend and I don’t feel particularly guilty about that. Yesterday I had my only lesson of the weekend – the best moment was when I showed my student the synonyms for “happy” in an online thesaurus. What’s gay doing there?!

Today I had a look at second-hand bikes at Aurora, one of the weekend markets, but they only had a small selection. I’ll have a look at Mehala, another market (supposedly famous for being where stolen bikes end up) next weekend, if I get the chance. I really need the exercise.

Stephen Hawking’s passing is sad, even if he lived half a century longer than his prognosis gave him. He was something of a local hero for me.

And it’s cold and drab again. Not a ray of sun in the forecast for the next five days.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Romania

Drained (and our cold snap)

March 11, 2018 by 0 Comments

I need a break. A day off. Even a week off. For the first time I’m really feeling it in my body.

It’s time I stopped saying yes to everything and started blocking out days in my calendar. My last day off was 13th January, eight weekends ago. There’s a certain irony that this week I was missing the hours and days I spent last spring and autumn roaming the streets of this beautiful city, putting thousands of adverts in people’s letterboxes. The weather is far too nice now to be stuck inside all the time, or to venture outside only when I have a lesson to get to. It really hit me on Friday when someone rang me up asking for lessons. Of course I said yes, and my new student came over yesterday morning. We had a productive session, but it meant I no longer had a block of free time in my Saturday. In the afternoon I had back-to-back lessons in Dumbrăvița with the brother and sister who are both hard to teach for very different reasons. Their mother provided me with food – celeriac soup, chicken and rice, and even though it was delicious, I’d earlier grabbed a pleșcavița from one of the kiosks in Piața 700, so I felt quite bloated after that. I had another lesson in the evening – this time on Skype – and I muddled through despite my inadequate preparation.

I still love my job and wouldn’t go back to some god-awful insurance company for all the tea in China, but I’ve got to remember that I’m the boss here (that’s kind of the point!) and the extra money I make by saying yes all the time isn’t worth it. At the end of the week I have a healthy brick of lei in my hand, but in pound or dollar terms it might as well be Monopoly money, and at the moment I’m not even getting the chance to spend it.

Here are a few pictures of Timișoara during our late-winter blast of cold weather: