Language teaching

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:

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Don’t talk about the weather

March 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ll soon be having a lesson with my Italian student who’s taking the IELTS exam in three weeks. His country went to the polls at the weekend. I watched John Oliver’s “explanation” of Italy’s political environment on YouTube because he was likely to make as much sense as anyone else. Like many young Italians, my 25-year-old student is a supporter of the Five Star Movement. It was a good result for them. I’m sure he’ll want to talk about the election in the lesson.

Two cancellations on Saturday meant I could go to Piața Badea Cârțan, my favourite market, in the morning. I was thinking, if I can’t do something as simple as this, it almost defeats the purpose of being here. I didn’t get very much: a few filled peppers, various hunks of rather chewy meat, and a sausage. Just one big sausage, as is the norm here.

Last night I spoke to my brother. He looked tired. Washed out. He’s currently in the middle of some kind of instructors’ course which, as he explained in no uncertain terms, he doesn’t see the point of. I imagine it reminded him of school, which for the most part he didn’t see the point of either.

On that note, my lesson with the near-ten-year-old boy on Saturday afternoon didn’t exactly get off to a rip-roaring start. I began by talking about the snow. He said to me in Romanian that “if we’re just going to talk about snow, I’ll die of boredom.” Right. Where do we go from here? I asked him if he wanted me to leave. He didn’t say anything. I then brought out my emergency pack of cards, and we played Last Card. He probably learnt a fair bit in those seven games: jack, queen, king, ace, the names of the suits, “pick up”, “put down”, and so on. He beat me 5-2 and mercifully the lesson was over.

That replacement watch strap I bought in January broke after just 41 days. I couldn’t find my receipt anywhere, quite possibly because I never actually got one (this is Romania), but thankfully they gave me my money back. Hopefully I can get one in Cambridge.

Three games of Scrabble at the weekend and three wins, although I failed to break 400 in any game. I’m sure my play was very sub-optimal.

It’s warming up a bit now.

Language teaching - Life :)

Flake news

March 3, 2018 by 0 Comments

I definitely didn’t come up with that pun. It’s been a white week here, and a massive departure from our otherwise mild winter. Yesterday it was minus 17 first thing in the morning, or if you’re American, one degree Fahrenheit.

I’ve had my fair share of cancellations this week, seven I think, which in the not too distant past would have annoyed the hell out of me. This week I’ve just felt tired and unenergetic and have had bouts of sinus pain, so the slight reduction in workload has been welcome if anything. On Wednesday I had a severe attack and somehow muddled through my second of four almost back-to-back lessons, feeling that I had a screwdriver rammed up my right nostril the whole time. More often than not it’s my left instead. The extreme weather probably isn’t helping me.

This week I’ve felt pretty happy with the standard of my work, or to be precise, how engaged my students have been, and let’s hope that continues.

 

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Brass monkeys

February 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

Thirty-six hours of teaching last week. That’s almost a whole page of lessons in my notebook, and it’s getting to be a problem. A nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. I need a day off occasionally. Time for myself. Time to sit in the square and have a coffee. Time to be served by that complete lunatic in the funny bar next to the market. Time to not have to think about time all the time. I see people fishing on the Bega and it all looks wonderfully relaxing. I’d like to take up fishing, but right now I know next to nothing about it.

For some unknown reason Ryanair have decided to close their Timișoara base as from 25th March, cancelling both sets of flights I’d booked to and from the UK (in early April and for my brother’s wedding in late May) in the process. My aunt and uncle from New Zealand were also booked on the flight from Stansted to Timișoara on 28th May. We’ve since rebooked all our flights with Wizz Air, going to and from Luton rather than Stansted. What a pain.

“Welcome to Romania. Please turn your clocks back fifty years.” Not if the availability of Bitcoin is anything to go by. The currency of the future is readily available in machines dotted around the city. So is Ether, another cryptocurrency. I had a play with one of the machines which had 2.5 Bitcoins available. How many would you like? Hmmm, 2.5? That’ll be 80-odd thousand lei, please. Ah. I’ve probably missed the boat there.

For a minute there I thought I’d dodged winter pretty much entirely, but we’re now in the grip of an icy blast. It is cold! The next day with a non-negative expected high is Friday.

Three games of Scrabble today. My first was a loss on an extremely tight board that I’d prefer to forget (I had a tiny lead but went into overtime, costing me ten points, and forfeited the game a minute later after failing to find an elusive out play). I then had a close game, clinging on a bit in the end to win by 17. In my last game I managed to play my first nine-letter bingo on ISC: UNrESTING, a double-double through ES for 86 points. I won that game by 56.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

How low can you go?

February 19, 2018 by 0 Comments

Not much news since my last post. I’ve had 98 hours of teaching over the last three weeks. It’s a challenge coming up with new and interesting material for my students each time, especially now that my preparation time is limited. This morning I described the business of whether to use gerunds or infinitives after certain verbs as BBI: Boring But Important. Yesterday I had the usual business of my ten-year-old student asking me at regular intervals what the time was so he’d know how soon he could get rid of me.

There was another school shooting in America last week. Seventeen people dead. It’s all messed up there on so many levels. And now we have Trump tweeting that if the FBI had spent less time on the Russia inquiry they might have stopped the shooting. How low can you go?

I spoke to my brother tonight. He got completely the wrong end of the stick when I said I’d like to do something other than teaching. It was my own fault – I meant to say that although I enjoy my work immensely I’d like the occasional day off to travel and do other stuff. At the moment I have some lessons every single day. I will have a short break in early April as I spend a few days in the UK.

I’ve watched snatches of the Winter Olympics (officially the Olympic Winter Games, which doesn’t sound right to me). I read something online which suggested that much of the success of the luge is down to the name. Luge. It’s almost onomatopoeia. Wouldn’t it be fun to do the luge in Cluj? (Have you ever watched – or, heaven forbid, done – double luge? Now that is a weird event.) Several of my students, or their kids, have gone skiing in recent weeks, often in Austria. Yes, my students tend to have money.

I played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three by margins of 157, 171 and 201, and losing the other by just five points. My scores ranged from 422 to 492. My favourite word was COMiX, making CRAP at the same time, for 65.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Another terrific Tuesday

February 14, 2018 by 0 Comments

On the weird off-chance that anybody from Romania actually read my last post, I didn’t mean to have a go at your country, which I absolutely love. It’s more that I really want Romania to succeed, and an upswing in tourism (return tourists, in particular) would go some way to making that happen. The present standard of service frustrates me because most Romanians I’ve met outside the customer-facing world have been extremely welcoming.

Talking of frustration, the family who live in Moșnița Nouă cancelled both their lessons yesterday afternoon, less than an hour before we were due to start, depriving me of 160 lei. Their daughter “wasn’t in the mood”. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood either. I’ll have a chat with them if and when I see them next to let them know what my ground rules are. If they don’t like them, they can find another native English speaker in Timișoara to teach them. Good luck with that.

Today I had an early start with my beginner-level student. The clock ticked well past our 7:30 start time, and then finally the doorbell went. Phew. Waiting for that bell to go is the most stressful part of my job. I speak a fair bit of Romanian in my lessons with him. This morning we talked about our ancestors and where they came from. He was amazed to learn that it was summer in New Zealand and that people ski there, but not now. My next lesson was at noon: my 21-year-old female student has come on a lot. She knows how to learn, and that makes all the difference.

Next was the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I gave two of my students a test, as required by the training company I work for. They both only managed percentage scores in the forties, and today I had to hand back their papers. I tried to reassure them that their results really didn’t mean that much (they’re more a reflection on me than on them). I even suggested that as a team they got an awesome score, but I’m not sure how that went down. The third student took his test today and I’ve yet to mark that. From the company I trekked more than a mile, including that muddy, rubbish-strewn track; every time I squelch my way through there I can see it’s been updated with more household junk from people who don’t give a toss. I arrived at Matei’s place just after five. In his room he now has a tank with two freshwater turtles; watching them eat was strangely fascinating. Every week he has something new. Last time it was a Google assistant. As usual, we didn’t do an awful lot of intense English. We read two chapters of David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy. I have the book in English; he just happens to have the same book in Romanian. For the first chapter, I read a chunk (a half-page or so) out loud in English and he read the same chunk in Romanian, and we took turns until we reached the end of the chapter. For the second chapter we swapped roles. Matei suggested a modification to the rules of my Space Race game – some sort of bonus if you get all three of your spaceships in a row – and it’s certainly worth considering. At the start of my lesson with Matei I got a phone call from a prospective student and I’ve booked her in for Friday morning.