Language teaching

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.

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.

I thought I’d describe yesterday, a typically terrific Tuesday in Timișoara, while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind.

I got up at 7:30; these days I rarely get up much earlier than that. I didn’t have any lessons until 12:30 so I made a trip to the supermarket and did some preparation, printing off Halloween and Guy Fawkes-related worksheets for my younger students. For Octavian, the ten-year-old, I added a few “squares that do things” to my Crazy Rabbits board game, trying to avoid the absurdity of squares that direct you to other squares that direct you to other squares, or worse, squares that send you back to where you came from, sending you into a vicious never-ending loop. I loved making Crazy Rabbits. The point of the game is to get the kid to recognise numbers written in words: “The farmer is coming. Go back to twelve.”

I grabbed lunch at twelve, then had my lesson with the young couple. I use one of the Cambridge courses for them, rather than creating everything off my own bat. The subject of this lesson happened to be online dating, but really it taught you how to say what you have in common (or not) with another person. We finished with twenty minutes to spare and I just played Hangman with them until the end of the lesson. This situation is likely to come up frequently (we have four lessons a week), so I’ll need some better filler exercises. They’d been badgering me to choose a suitable grammar book for them (they’re the sort of people who like rules), so yesterday, after some research, I suggested they get English Grammar In Use, another Cambridge-published tome. To my surprise, he bought it there and then using his phone. After the lesson I had to catch the bus to Strada Ion Ionescu de la Brad for my session with the lolly-stick-making company. As I reached the bottom of the stairs I realised I’d forgotten to take my sweets for Matei’s lesson, and all that extra faff meant I had to jog to ensure I made the bus. The bus was crowded, so crowded that I couldn’t reach the card machine without scrambling over people, so I didn’t even pay.

At the lolly-stick factory, two people showed up. One turned up late due to a meeting; they both left ten minutes early thanks to another meeting. We talked about the various ways of asking questions. Object questions (Where do you come from?), subject questions (Who comes from Romania?), yes-or-no questions (Do you come from Romania?), rising-voice questions (You come from Romania?), tag questions (You come from Romania, don’t you?) and probably some others. I was asked why you need to know that object questions have an auxiliary verb while subject verbs don’t. Why does it matter? Ah yes, that tricky question again. Why does it matter? How the hell do I answer that? A month ago I didn’t even know it was true, let alone that it mattered. I told them that at B2 level you’re expected to think about these things, but that probably wasn’t the right answer.

Finishing ten minutes early was a great help, because it meant I could get to Matei’s lesson on time. Just after the abandoned beige Trabant, I followed a track that took me from Strada IIDLB to the edge of a housing estate on the border of Timișoara and Dumbrăvița. The track is strewn with rubbish, and you sometimes (as I did yesterday) see people there who look a little unsavoury. In two weeks it’ll be dark when I walk along there. At a brisk pace it takes me twenty minutes to walk to Matei’s place. When I arrived at 5:30, he greeted me with a “boo”. His room was all Halloweened up, with fake blood splattering his door and walls. Halloween has no business being within 1000 miles of Romania’s borders, but if it makes a nine-year-old boy happy I’m not too bothered. I now always have my laptop with me when I see Matei, because I use it at the lolly-stick factory, so we watched some cartoons on YouTube, including one of the old Popeye cartoons (which I think are great) and some modern crap that Matei likes and I can’t remember the name of. We read some Captain Underpants, played a Halloween board game, solved a few dozen puzzles on my 4 Pics 1 Word app, and at then it was time to go.

I then had another twenty-minute trek so I could catch the only bus that would get me home in time for my final lesson of the day. I got back at 8:25, five minutes before our scheduled start, but my students were already waiting outside. We talked about festivals (traditional Romanian ones as well as imported ones such as Halloween and modern ones like Children’s Day), then I got them to match a total of 64 phrasal verbs (eight groups of eight) with their definitions, not an easy task. When we’d finished that, we had ten minutes left, so I brought out my handmade Taboo cards (describe a carrot without saying eat, vegetable or orange, that kind of thing) which made for (I think) a successful end to the session. At ten o’clock my work day was over.

Last week I passed a billboard advertising jobs at McDonalds. It showed the salaries for both burger flippers and trainee managers. I’m now earning more than a trainee manager at McDonalds in Romania. I’ve made it!

I’ll never make a ton of money at this job, but I’m now supporting myself now, just about, without having to rely on my rental income. And it’s extremely satisfying work. When I’m reading chapters of The Twits or Captain Underpants to my junior students, it doesn’t feel like work at all. Yes, Mum very kindly ordered some kids’ books for me – they turned up last week. My teaching job has given Mum and I something to talk about, and our relationship has improved as a result. The benefits of my job seem almost endless.

In previous jobs I’d show up on a Wednesday, and I’d have literally no recollection of what I’d done on Monday or Tuesday unless I’d written it down. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what I’d done two minutes earlier. My memory was dangerously bad. A big part of that was my depression, plus the fact that I didn’t give a toss, which is part and parcel of the same thing. Now I continually amaze myself by how little I forget. Matei is on £16,000 with his phone-a-friend lifeline remaining; Elena wants to learn about phrasal verbs involving ‘get’; I’ve got a lesson on body parts planned for Oana and Cătălin; I’m just about to start Chapter 6 with Luminița; and so on. Neither do I forget (touch wood) the lesson times themselves, although I keep quite meticulous records of my past and future lessons.

It’s a cool, crisp, cloudless autumn morning here in Timișoara, similar to the mornings you get in Geraldine. My parents currently have Mum’s younger brother staying with them. He’s 66 and has recently given up the monotony of selling insurance. (He’s very quick-witted and would have made a great teacher.) I’m sure he’d like to give up the monotony of his marriage too. His wife never lets him do anything, apart from play golf and watch sport on TV. He’s never been further than Australia. But now he’s surprised everybody by booking a trip to Europe to attend my brother’s wedding. Good on him. He’ll travel around the UK with my aunt, Mum’s older sister.

New Zealand has a new government. I didn’t vote in the election, but would have voted Labour in a heartbeat had I done so. (I wouldn’t have voted Green except perhaps as a tactical vote; they’ve lost their way a little ever since Russel Norman left.) I’m happy, albeit surprised, that Labour were able to form a government. National were competent enough, but I was never convinced that they really gave a shit about people. Maybe Jacinda Ardern’s new government will work out, maybe it won’t, but we all need to keep an open mind.

Both Mum and Dad now think I’ll never come back to New Zealand. Never is an awfully long time, and I’d feel terrible about abandoning my parents in their old age, but they’re right that I won’t be leaving Romania any time in the near future.

I haven’t written for absolutely ages, and that’s for two reasons. One, I lost my internet connection. Because I hadn’t paid. In Romania they give you no warning; they just pull the plug. I felt a bit silly when I eventually found out the reason, but also relieved; I paid them for two months (just to make sure) and I was reconnected within minutes. I’m not sure the concept of direct debit has arrived in Romania yet, and I now realise there’s no use relying on my memory to keep track of all my manual payments – I have to actually write them down. The other reason is work. In the last three weeks, my workload has rocketed into orbit. I now have roughly 30 hours of lessons a week. It can be tiring at times, when you consider all the necessary preparation, but it’s awesome. Really. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, or do anything else. Being my own boss is the best feeling in the world. Freedom!

So in case you were wondering, I’m still alive, but I have to sign off because (guess what) I’m about to have another lesson. Hopefully I’ll write a proper post tomorrow.