Language teaching

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

“Customer service” doesn’t translate into Romanian

February 12, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ve got no real news, probably because work tends to get in the way of news. My most memorable lesson last week was one in which I complained about how Romanian banks (locally-owned or not) charge for everything: incoming payments, cash withdrawals, or even having just an account in the first place. Their commissions often run into several percent of the value of whatever payment you’re making or receiving, and many people must surely avoid the banking system entirely as a result (as I manage to do most of the time, because I usually get paid in cash). I expected my students to say, yes it’s bloody ridiculous, banks are just parasites that make far too much money, but instead they thought all the fees were completely justified. There’s a wider point here: by and large customer service in Romania is shit. Romanians are extremely used to it being shit, to the point where they don’t expect anything else but shit, so there’s very little incentive for anybody to provide service that’s non-shit. Except of course, when dealing with tourists. In her scrapbook, my friend described the “ice maiden” she encountered at the tourist office here in Timișoara; she might have been the same lady I dealt with on my arrival, who managed to be very aggressive and defensive at the same time when all I wanted to know was how the tram tickets worked. People’s customer service experiences in a new country have a huge bearing on how they view that country; Romanians don’t seem to have figured that out at all yet. (

I’ve got five lessons scheduled for each of the next three days.

 

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A potential problem I never expected to have

February 5, 2018 by 0 Comments

I taught for almost 32 hours last week, my busiest week to date. It wasn’t easy as I battled sinus problems, diarrhoea, and general feelings of lethargy. At the last minute, my students asked me to postpone this morning’s lesson, so I hopped on the number 7 tram and browsed the bustling Flavia market, but didn’t buy anything. I went there several times during my first winter in the city; at that time there was an entrance fee of 2 lei, but that’s since been bumped up to 5. I also went to Shopping City, as much as I dislike malls, and at the checkout in Carrefour was an old student of mine whom I failed to recognise initially. We had our rearranged lesson this afternoon.

I’m very likely to beat last week’s record in the coming seven days, and may even smash it, but I’ve got to be a bit careful here. As nice as it is to have heaps of business, if it becomes stressful over a prolonged period then the purpose of my coming here in the first place is mostly defeated. I won’t be able to enjoy the city because I’ll either be stuck at home or rushing to get to my next lesson, probably in Dumbrăvița. I’ll certainly need to take some time off every now and then (at least I’ll be able to afford to), and on that note I’ve booked a few days in the UK over Easter. Not Easter as I know it, but Orthodox Easter which is the following weekend.

The face of Timișoara, or at least some of it, is changing quite rapidly. A monstrous 1200-apartment complex, complete with three schools, is going up at a rate of knots on Bulevardul Take Ionescu. A nasty triangular corporate behemoth with M-shaped sides sprung up last year outside Iulius Mall. And on a smaller scale, premises that don’t seem to belong are popping up all the time. “Go Nuts 4 Donuts” operates from a twee pink caravan, and looks totally out of place next to all the refreshingly untwee kiosks and stalls of Piața 700. A few days ago a shop selling Scandinavian clothing brands, but whose products have almost certainly been nowhere near Copenhagen, opened just 100 metres from me. Before long shops like that will probably be the norm.

No, Simona didn’t win. I only saw the tail end of the second set, where she was in the ascendancy. What a titanic battle it must have been. I saw rather more of the men’s match, which never really scaled the heights despite going five sets. Cilic played very well, especially on the important points, and I thought at the start of the the final set that there was every chance he could pull off the upset that I was hoping for. Alas, the protracted games at the start of the decider all went Fed’s way, and that was pretty much that.

Language teaching - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Happy memories

January 27, 2018 by 0 Comments

Next week I could have over 30 hours of lessons, and that’s without that young couple with whom I had 12 hours a week until just before Christmas. They said that they’d be back shortly after 2nd February, when their exam session finishes. In other words, I face the imminent prospect of being totally knackered.

My travel companions from four months ago have sent me (as a present) a quite wonderful scrapbook of our trip, full of photos and diary entries. It must have taken several hours to put together. So many wonderful little things happened; I’m so glad that someone had the presence of mind to record them. I can’t believe how much I’d forgotten, like the time the car-hire man told me to maintain a good distance from the vehicle in front because the brakes might not be up to it, or the rubbery omelettes we had for breakfast, or the huge wedding party, out of the blue, at 8pm in a primitive village. And of course, just the wonderful scenery, pretty much wherever we went.

Twelve hours from now, another big opportunity to snatch her maiden grand slam will come Simona Halep’s way. I only saw her semi-final with Angelique Kerber from 2-2 in the final set because I had a lesson, but I was grateful to see what I did. For me it was literally edge-of-the-seat (and off-the-seat) stuff. Halep played noticeably more aggressively than I’m used to seeing her, and that bodes well for the final. Perhaps the fact that her very participation in the tournament has so often been hanging by a thread will relax her for the final. Wozniacki, her opponent in the final, has had a very precarious path too. In fact the two players have faced a whopping seven match points between them, including five for Simona in two separate matches. I’ll miss most of the final, or perhaps even all of it if it’s a quick one, because I’ll be working.

Language teaching - Scrabble - Tennis

Workload update

January 22, 2018 by 0 Comments

I decided to actually count how many students I have. It’s 24. That number includes four couples (well three actual couples, plus a brother and sister), and two students (Matei and Timea) whose first names are anagrams of each other. I also have an initial Skype meeting with a potential 25th student tomorrow night. In other words, things are likely to get pretty crazy. I had a difficult session yesterday with a ten-year-old boy who described just about everything as nașpa, which is a slang word meaning “crap”. School was nașpa; learning English at school was total nașpa. I’m sure my lesson was nașpa as well.
My cousin said I should think about bringing somebody else into my “team”, but that would take things to a whole new level, and who would that person be exactly? (My point of difference is that I’m a native speaker. Where would I get another one from?) It’s something I could maybe consider in a couple of years, but right now I think it would be stress on a stick, which is precisely what I wanted to avoid when I came here.

I’ve only caught snatches of the Australian Open – I’ve been too busy to give a whole match my full attention – but much of what I’ve seen has been compelling. I didn’t see any of Simona Halep’s 3¾-hour match with Lauren Davis in the searing heat, but it must have been something. Women’s matches that go deep into an extended final set are a rarity, because of the relative lack of service dominance in the women’s game, so they’re invariably a treat when they do get that far.

I played two games of Scrabble this evening, winning them both. The first I won 462-331. I got rubbish in the early stages and swapped tiles twice, but I found three bingos in the second half of the game to run out a comfortable winner. In the second game (14 minutes, so some time pressure) I benefited from high-scoring tiles at the beginning, so when my opponent played a bingo I still held a slender lead. I was slightly fortunate that he provided a spot for a bingo of my own late in the game, and I won with something to spare, 375 to 299. My rating has reached 1101 (a new high) but if I do climb the rankings it’ll take a while – I don’t get to play all that often.

Language teaching - Scrabble

Monopoly (and a bit of Scrabble)

January 13, 2018 by 0 Comments

I put up some more ads about ten days ago (online and at the university) and I’ve now got half a dozen new students, more or less, depending on how you count them. As for how many students I’ve got in total, I haven’t a clue. As far as I know, I have a monopoly – I’m the only native English speaker in Timișoara giving private lessons. It’s a mad situation to find myself in. As I recently mentioned, I did put my prices up, but perhaps I was a bit conservative.

Today I had only new students. I had my first appointment at 9am with a couple in Moșnița Nouă, one of several towns or villages that are officially outside Timișoara but, thanks to recent development, have now joined up with the main city.  I went to see them; getting there was a bit of a mission. There’s no bus or tram that gets particularly close. At about 7:55 I took the number 4 tram from Piața Libertății to the end of the line, which was even further from my destination than I thought. I traipsed along a main road, in the mud, past urban chicken coops, urban sheep pens, the milestone (or kilometre-plastic to be more accurate) telling me that I was 5 kilometres from Timișoara and 54 from Lugoj, then the one that said 6 and 53, and I wondered whether I’d ever find this place, even with the map on my phone. Maybe I should just walk to Lugoj. Streets were unnamed, houses un-numbered. Relieved, I arrived at 9:01. Not only were the couple present but their children (21 and 17) as well, all four of them in an upstairs study. We really just chatted. Next week I’ll have two lessons with them: one with the parents and one with the children, who are at a higher level than their mum and dad. Their dad drove me home, and said he’d pick me up in future. He told me that I might be able to get a new watch strap at the Bega shopping centre. I went there before my next lesson, and they did indeed have a leather strap that fitted my Swatch. It was pretty damn expensive: 80 lei. But I guess that’s to be expected when, as far as I know, they’re the only place in Timișoara that does Swatch straps.

At 2pm I had a lesson with an older man who said he was a quantum chemist. He came with a fairly long text about Hans Hellmann, a German quantum chemist who was executed in the Great Purge. My student wanted to practise reading a complicated text, and it was certainly that. I also think the piece had been slightly awkwardly translated from German. Then at four I had my first session with a 25-year-old Italian guy called Luca who works at the main hospital in town. When he phoned me earlier this week, he said, “My name is Luca.” I wanted to ask him if he lived on the second floor, but thought better of it.

I’m trying to learn the three-letter Scrabble words. There are 1300 of them, and because they’re only three letters long, they’re hard to distinguish from one another. It isn’t that easy to remember that KAM is a word but FAM and VAM aren’t, or that RET is acceptable and DET isn’t. But as much as I hate learning short strings of letters that someone has arbitrarily decided are playable, unfortunately they come up all the time so they’re vital to your success or otherwise.

Language teaching - Romania

A brief (but welcome) change of scenery

January 10, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Sunday morning I still didn’t feel wonderful. After the lesson I joined my students for a drink at Porto Arte, a bar by the Bega, five minutes’ walk from here. After sitting there for nearly two hours, I was prepared to go home. But then they asked me if I wanted to go to Herneacova, a place I’d heard of but knew nothing about and wouldn’t have been able to locate on a map. I said yes but my head was in a spin: I hadn’t mentally paced myself for spending who knows how many extra hours with people. Just how far away is this place? I was also dehydrated. If I hadn’t managed to get a bottle of water at Recaș, I’d have been really struggling. Herneacova is a fairly poor but typically picturesque Romanian village, while two kilometres outside the village is an arena which holds international equestrian events, and a domain (in New Zealand terminology) which is popular with families. The highlight, apart from the few horses, was probably watching somebody’s radio-controlled car being chased by a small dog. It was a beautiful day—it felt like spring—and when I did get home I was very glad that I’d accepted their invitation and got out of the city.

I guessed there were a million Johns or variations thereof who were celebrating their saint’s day on Sunday, but the number was actually two million, or one in ten Romanians. That day really marked the end of the festive season; yesterday, after being a fixture in the square for 5½ weeks, the Christmas market sheds were dismantled.

I now realise that teaching kids can be both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. My first lessons with those two new kids yesterday were definitely both in the latter category. I ran out of material both times, for completely different reasons, and because I wasn’t at home I didn’t have any emergency supplies. The 13-year-old girl (90 minutes with her) was even better than I’d anticipated, so we she got through everything (a lesson on London, where she’d like to go) in double-quick time without her really being challenged. The 10-year-old boy was mostly unenthusiastic and didn’t really want to speak English, but I actually think he’ll be easier to teach in the long run, because I already have material I can use with him. With her, I’ve got to come up with stuff that’s at an upper-intermediate level and is age-appropriate and doesn’t bore her: although she seems motivated to learn, that’s no easy task.

My students, or their parents, are often in a different financial league from your average Ion or Ioana. It’s extremely noticeable in my lessons with the kids in Dumbrăvița, just as it was in Auckland all those years ago when I did a spot of maths tuition, often in suburbs like Remuera. Last night my student wouldn’t shut up about both her and her husband’s German cars. I had a much more interesting discussion of cars with a student last week: the Yugo, the Trabant (with its two-stroke engine), and the various incarnations of the Dacia, such as this hopelessly unreliable one (the Lăstun, which means “housemartin”) with a 500 cc engine, which was built in a factory right here in Timișoara. It’s sporting a Ceaușescu-era Timiș County number plate.

My Romanian is still in need of some massive improvement. More on that next time.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Inevitable

January 6, 2018 by 0 Comments

It was going to happen eventually, wasn’t it? The last few days I’ve been feeling a bit down. Not depressed as such, but just this general bleeugh feeling. I’m sure I’d be fine now if I’d managed to get away for a day or two and spend several hours reading a book on a train, but my illness put paid to that. Last year Timișoara was all new and fun and mad and exciting; it hasn’t stopped being all kinds of awesome, but it’s still a biggish city that I need to get away from every once in a while to break up the routine. I was thinking that if I’d gone to the UK and endured what would surely have been an absolutely awful Christmas and New Year, I’d probably be fine now too. This morning there was a tell-tale sign that things weren’t right: I had no recollection of having made myself a cup of tea two minutes earlier. That’s how life used to be week in, week out, doing things like grocery shopping and, um, trying to hold down a job, with a similar memory span to a fairly retentive goldfish. The good news is that I’ll soon have a lot more lessons again, and so far there has been a very strong positive correlation between how much work I have and how I feel.

The couple who bought me that hamper won’t be having any lessons until 2nd February. That’s a bugger. But I do now have some new students. A brother and sister (he’s 10, she’s 13) will have their first lessons with me on Monday. They live in Dumbrăvița, five doors down from the ten-year-old boy I started with in October. I’ve also got a new bloke starting on Thursday. Yesterday I had a call from a woman who I really struggled to understand. She talked so quickly and at such a high pitch that she reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d mess around with Dad’s record player, putting one of his 33s or 45s on 78. She seemed to think I knew what she was saying, but I could hardly understand a bloody thing. Cât costă? How much is it? Phew, a question I understand. On that note, I’ve had no choice but to put my prices up. In my first few months here it felt like an inflation-free zone, but in the last six to nine months everything has gone up. The leu has weakened somewhat against the euro, and oil prices have shot up. Just around the corner is a kiosk where they sell shawormas (I’ve seen about five different spellings for shaworma, which is a bit like a kebab). For the last few months I’ve been waiting for them to increase their price of a large shaworma from 11 lei, and finally on Wednesday I saw they’d put them up to 12.

Today is Epiphany, or as they call it here, Boboteaza, which to me is a funny word. Right now there’s a snaking queue of at least 100 people around the cathedral, waiting to get their hands on water that is supposedly even holier than bog-standard holy water. Tomorrow is St John the Baptist’s day, which probably a million Romanians called Ion or Ioan or Ionuț or Ioana will celebrate. People here often celebrate both their birthday and their saint’s day, if they have one. Slightly confusingly, the expression “La Mulți Ani” is used on someone’s birthday, their saint’s day, and for New Year. Just like last year, although this time I was in the middle of a lesson, the local priest and his accomplice dropped in and blessed me and this flat. I gave him 8 lei, up from 6 last year.

My watch strap is broken, and because it’s a Swatch I can’t replace it anywhere in Timișoara. Believe me, I’ve tried. Even the shop that sells Swatches couldn’t do it. When I leave the house without a watch I feel just about naked. I know my phone shows the time in quite large digits, but it doesn’t compare. Yesterday I tried to find a cheap watch to use as a stand-in until I get the Swatch strap replaced, with no luck.

The weather is incredible for this time of year. Our expected high today is 13. And I feel a bit better now.

Language teaching - Life :)

Space Race

December 7, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’m having a slightly frustrating week thanks to all the cancellations I’m getting, but if I’m lucky I’ll still hit the 20-hour mark. These days I seem to have temporary frustrations, and isn’t that great? At the sprightly hour of 7:30 this morning I had a lesson with a beginner who intends to move to Edmonton in Canada next year. It’s a pleasure to work with him, but it’s always interesting getting him to read. What comes out of his mouth is at times independent of what’s on the page. It reminds me of Mum trying to teach my brother to read, or this bit from the Royal Variety Performance a couple of years ago (fast forward to 4:24, or alternatively watch it all – it’s pretty funny).

Last week Octavian, my ten-year-old student, told me that as much as he loved Crazy Rabbits (the board game I made), he’d quite like to play something else next time. That meant I had to make another, probably more complex, game (or buy one, but that would be more expensive and less fun). I had to make something that would stand the test of time. I thought of making a space-themed game, and found a fun-looking spacey board online which was supposed to have 100 spaces but only had 94. It was also watermarked, meaning I’d need to pay a subscription (no thanks) to download the unadulterated version. I painstakingly removed the watermark as best I could using a slightly better (and free) version of Paint, and squeezed in an extra six spaces in such a way that you wouldn’t notice. I numbered the spaces in fives – each space represented five light years – and then I had to figure out the mechanics of the game. The goal, I decided, was to be the first to drive all three of your spaceships the 500 light years from start to finish. The skill, such that it exists, is in choosing which ship to move on which turn – you have to decide before you roll the dice. Some spaces give you extra turns or get you to draw cards that make good or bad things happen to either you or your opponent. I tested the game on Tuesday with Matei – it was my 51st lesson with him, so the risk that he wouldn’t want to see me again if he hated the game didn’t seem too great. He liked it but found some of the rules a bit counterintuitive (move 25 light years – five spaces – if you roll a four, for instance) and wished we used two dice instead of one. So I added a second die and simplified the rules quite a bit, and played it with Octavian yesterday. Space Race. He seemed to be a fan.

Something has been puzzling me. I followed one of the Cambridge textbooks with my Skype student (ex-student, thankfully), and one section was on travel. It gave a list of the “fifty places you must visit before you die”, of which my parents live in number four, and asked the student to pick his or her must-see places from the list. To my surprise, my ex-student put Dubai at number one. Last week I reached the same section of the book with another student, and once again Dubai was top of her list. Seriously, what is the fuck is going on here? The probability that they’d both choose Dubai at random is 0.04%. All-out nuclear war in the coming year is far more likely than that. I can understand why you might want to work in Dubai for a limited time (to make loads of dirhams), but not everyone goes to Dubai for work, or to visit friends and family who are working there, or even as a stopover to break up the journey between two places that actually have human rights. No, significant numbers of people go to Dubai to go to Dubai, to lurch from one soulless air-conditioned shopping mall to another, and then come home. How bizarre. I mean, I know bits of Timișoara are a bit shit, but at least they’re real shit.

The Christmas market is in full swing, and the pungent but pleasant whiff of mulled wine fills the air. Last night some young women in traditional Romanian dress were singing what I imagine were traditional Romanian Christmas carols.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

La mulți ani, România!

December 1, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve been absolutely bloody hopeless with this blog thing, and for that I apologise. Last week was another busy one for me: 29 hours of teaching, and that was without any at the lollipop-stick-making company. This week I’m looking at 24 or so.

Right now we’re in a middle of a four-day long weekend. Yesterday was St Andrew’s Day; today is Romania’s national day, the 99th anniversary of Romania in its current format. Before the downfall of communism, the national day was celebrated in August instead, for some reason unknown to me because my knowledge of Romanian history is shamefully crap. The parade of military vehicles will start at eleven so I’ll pop down for that. Last year my feet were like ice blocks after standing around in zero degrees, so I might put on an extra pair of socks. Tonight there will be a firework display in the square. I asked one of my students what might be in store for next year’s centenary, and he said possibly an extra tank, and maybe they’ll add a screamer or two to their pyrotechnic arsenal. He said the parades of aging vehicles, which should be in museums, demonstrate what a joke Romania’s military is. I said, yeah, sounds a bit like New Zealand. Some people will be going to Alba Iulia for the day. I visited that city in August. In the middle of the citadel is where the declaration of unity (or whatever they call it) was signed in 1918, so it’s effectively Romania’s Waitangi. Today there will also be protests, timed for maximum visibility.

The Christmas market has just started in the main square, and will run until about 10th January. There will also be two smaller markets in the other squares that weren’t a feature last time around. It’s slightly weird that I’m now talking about last year. Everything is coming around for a second time – how did that happen?

The weekend before last, one of my students took me to the winery in Recaș, and we filled bottles of wine straight from the tap. She filled five-litre bottles. I can’t possibly drink those sorts of volumes by myself (although when I lived in France I did just that), so I just filled three two-litre bottles – two reds and a white – at between 13 and 15 lei a bottle, which is extremely cheap. When I showed the bottles to my brother last weekend on FaceTime, he thought they were hilarious. “Are you sure that one isn’t piss?” But I’ve almost finished the dry red which has been the best wine I’ve had since I arrived here.

I still play Scrabble, or more accurately Words With Friends, on my phone. I’m now leading my cousin by 52 games to 24, with one draw. Against a complete stranger I just played EQUALiZE across two double word squares for 143, my highest-ever score on one turn. I do find Scrabble fascinating from a tactical perspective, and I’m thinking I should take the plunge and actually attempt to play it seriously, which of course means learning those god-awful words.

Language teaching - Life :)

Testing times

November 14, 2017 by 0 Comments

I’ve been struggling a bit with my sinuses today. When I was in one of the electronics shops in the mall, trying to find some ink cartridges that of course they didn’t have, I realised that with all the visual and auditory stimuli (such painful music!) I wouldn’t survive more than five minutes working in an environment like that.

As a private teacher I get through ink on an almost industrial scale. The stuff ain’t cheap. For a long time I didn’t have a printer at all, and would go to one of the many printing shops in the city almost every day, but that became too time-consuming.

It feels funny to say that I’m a teacher, public, private or anything in between. Years ago when I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, Mum would ask me if I wanted to get into teaching purely as a joke: she knew the answer would be an emphatic no. Seeing the effect that full-time teaching had on Mum for pretty much all of the nineties was enough for me. It was incredibly stressful for her, and on Sunday nights you could cut the atmosphere in the house with a knife. Having a completely dysfunctional head at her school didn’t help. Around the turn of the century the demands on teachers were ramped up yet again with even more assessment (not just for pupils but for teachers too) and an unhealthy obsession with “literacy” and “numeracy” at the expense of making or experimenting or investigating. I thought it was bloody ridiculous that Mum’s eight-year-olds had to learn “literacy”: why does a kid of that age even need to know the word? I still remember reading something one of Mum’s pupils wrote: I like reading and writing, but I don’t like literacy. That said it all. Since Mum left the UK teaching world behind in 2003, things have continued to go backwards. Teachers are now hopelessly underpaid, overworked and undervalued. The people who would make the best teachers are avoiding the profession. Standards of education will inevitably fall regardless of how many double-A-stars kids end up with.

Luckily I don’t teach in a school. Put me in a maths class in front of two dozen or more fifteen-year-old boys as big as me, at least half of whom don’t want to know, and I wouldn’t last long, even before you factor in everything a teacher has to do outside the classroom. The only classroom I teach in, as such, is the one at the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I had to give both (!) my students a test, as I’m required to do every tenth session. I had to devise the test myself, complete with listening, speaking and reading comprehension components. This was no easy task: creating tests is relatively easy but there’s a lot of skill in making good tests. Unlike the final test, this one had no bearing on whether my students pass the course. I marked the subjective elements of the test fairly generously and they got scores of 65% and 68%. The final test has to have a pass mark of 75% which I think is ridiculously high: I prefer to stretch my students, which you can’t do with that kind of pass mark. I’ll have no choice but to make the final test a bit easier.