Language teaching

Thursday was Children’s Day. That’s actually a thing in Romania, and this year the government decided it’s enough of a thing to make it an official public holiday for the first time. Personally I think anything that encourages parents to spend more time with their kids is great, although I was dismayed to learn that the awful phrase timp de calitate – quality time – exists in Romanian. Religious festivals are also most definitely a thing here, and today is Rusalii which I think translates to Whitsunday or Whitmonday or is it Pentecost? Whatever you call it, it’s another public holiday, so millions of Romanians have bridged the gap between the two for a bumper five-day weekend. Children’s Day was a popular day for my kidless students to have lessons so it was relatively busy for me. In the evening there was a show at the bandstand in the rose garden and a big smoky barbecue outside. I had a scoop of anchovies (hamsii) and some mici.

Mum and Dad should be safely in St Ives now. They had a two-night stopover in Singapore and called me from the airport. They looked worn out. Mum will be 68 next week, Dad turns 67 at the end of the month, and long-distance travel is starting to become both tiring and stressful for them. Mum doesn’t help – she gets very wound up if the smallest thing goes ever so slightly wrong, and of course when you’re travelling long distances, things rarely do go exactly according to plan. Oh no, there I go again, slagging off Mum. In fairness to her, she’s been very supportive of my move to Romania ever since I suggested it, and she’s proud of me for having the balls to actually do it. I’m optimistic that I’ll get on perfectly fine with Mum when they come here in five days’ time.

I’ve now had my first two lessons with Cosmin. They were fine, although next time I must make sure we sit alongside each other rather than opposite. He had some print-outs from a Romanian-based website for learning English which were worse than useless, but unfortunately he seemed to treat them as gospel. They were full of spelling errors (“fourty”), phonetic transcriptions that encourage terrible pronunciation (tenc iu veri maci for “thank you very much”), antiquated greetings like “How do you do?”, and words and phrases (“daughter-in-law”; “degree”) that you simply don’t need to know when you’re just starting out. None of this was his fault of course, and it disappoints me how much crap is out there, peddled by people who don’t know any better (or worse, don’t care), that actively hinder the process of learning English for student and teacher alike.

I’d better go. Next time (later today?) I’ll post some photos.

Last week was a good one. I had 14½ hours of teaching, I had an interview (that wasn’t supposed to be an interview) at a language school, and it looks like I have a new student. Maybe this crazy Romania thing might work out after all. In a sense it already has worked out of course. I’m living in a city that I love, doing a job that I love, doing my thing, without all that mind-numbing nothingness that I experienced day in, day out, for years. I’ve totally revolutionised my life, and how bloody cool is that?! But for my own sense of self-worth and, let’s face it, bank balance, I needed more work (and still do).

For the first time in eight months I ironed a shirt, and at 2pm on Friday I turned up at the language school just over the river, supposedly for an informal chat with two relatively young women. “This won’t be an interview.” Great. I was pretty relaxed. The woman on the right dragged out a copy of my CV which had some words like “actuarial” underlined in pencil. Presumably she’d Googled them. She described my decision to teach English after all those years in technical roles as “odd”. I did my best to emphasise that I really, really want to do this job, even if my CV might suggest otherwise. That felt a little weird. I thought of all those damn interviews in the past where was I totally unenthused, or worse. She then asked me to describe a time when I’d had to cope with a difficult situation in my teaching. I then said, “But you told me this wasn’t an interview!” The woman on the left, who teaches both English and French, went a little bit easier on me. The, er, informal chat lasted 50 minutes. They said they’ll contact me in the next week or two and I’m hopeful they’ll have something for me. Perhaps I’ll be able to help out in the intensive courses they run over the summer. Dealing with a class of students instead of the one-on-one teaching I’ve done so far will certainly be a challenge for me, but it’s one I’m up for.

On Saturday night I met Cosmin, my new student (hopefully that’s what he is) at a bar in the square here. He’s about the same age as me, but is married and has a boy of eleven. He lives in Dumbrăvița, where I currently teach the nine-year-old boy twice a week. Cosmin is pretty cosmic; he’s tall, sports a beard and has tattoos down the length of both arms, and on Saturday he wore several bracelets and a T-shirt just like the ones you’d get in Cosmic in Cuba Mall. For a living he puts up shades and marquees, and he wants to move with his family to Australia in November. I asked him to rate his level of English on a zero-to-ten scale; he told me zero. He started school under Communism and learnt French, not English. I’ll have one hell of a job getting him up to speed in just a few months, but I’ll try. We must have chatted for over an hour, my longest conversation in Romanian yet. Wow, I’m sitting outside here on a beautiful evening in a beautiful city, drinking the local beer and speaking a totally awesome language that hardly anybody else learns. Dammit, this is cool! Cosmin’s wife and friends later arrived, and he bought me four beers in all. If things go according to plan, we’ll start a week on Saturday. It should be good for my Romanian as well as his English.

Last week I had three lessons with my Skype student, but only one of those was an English lesson. She wanted some help with statistics, which is a requirement of her psychology course. The stats wasn’t too hard, but it was all in German so I was frantically Googling terms that, being German, ran to twenty letters or more. I was glad that I was able to help her.

Last weekend we had a flower festival that brought people out in their droves, even if the weather was kind of meh or however they say that in Romanian. The Philharmonic Orchestra played on a stage in Piața Operei (the other end of the square where I live) and they were bloody good. Since the long weekend the weather has gone from meh to persistently wet.

Some good news: my Skype student is back, after I’d almost given up on her. My faith in humanity has been partially restored. The bad news is that she’s as unreliable as ever. I didn’t have any lessons as such with her last week, but on Tuesday I spent two hours reading a pair of old academic texts on sociology that she sent me at short notice, and another two hours going over them with her on Skype. I worked 7½ hours that day out of a total of just 11 for the week including a lesson I’ve got later this morning (I feel safe to count that; I trust him). I still need more work. I’m extremely bad at making connections, promoting, marketing, all of that stuff. Online seems a waste of time. I have a website and a blog now (yes another blog) that I regularly update, but I’m buggered if I know how you’re supposed to get people to see it. I’ve even created a Twitter page which now has, wait for it, twelve followers, but I find it really hard to be arsed with social media. Communicating with dozens of people all at once doesn’t appeal in the slightest, and as for Facebook, I find that as creepy as all hell and have to force myself to check my account every other day or so. My friend who I saw in London last month has over 500 Facebook friends and nearly 1000 Twitter followers (how?) so he clearly doesn’t have any of the problems I do.

I still also need to meet more people. It’s tough. The problems I faced elsewhere in the world haven’t magically gone away here. To make and keep friends there’s obviously something that you’re supposed to provide socially that goes beyond a cup of tea, an inoffensive chat and maybe the odd joke, but in 37 years I still haven’t figured that out and I probably never will. The guy I played tennis with in December, who called me on a regular basis back then, now wants nothing to do with me or so it seems.

Next week I must get out a lot more, as I said I would last week but the public holiday and busy Tuesday and crappy weather and general lack of motivation on my part intervened. Teaching is great and I bloody love Timișoara, but my experiences here could still be so much fuller and richer and better.

Here are some pics from the long weekend. Hope you like them!

Just like in New Zealand and the UK, pedestrian crossings have a red and a green man. There must be penalties for jaywalking here, because people are remarkably obedient when it comes to the red man considering how unbothered they usually are by authority. Anyway, red man, green man, easy (once I’ve got out of the habit of looking the wrong way). But this week I saw a flashing orange man. What do I do here? I was stumped. All that Romanian I’d painstakingly learnt, and none of it was helping me translate flashing orange man.

And I’m running into flashing orange men everywhere I go. On Monday I went to the library. A bit of background: Romania consists of forty-odd județe, which are like counties. This library is the central library of the Timiș județ, so it’s a bit like Wellington Central Library in NZ, or Cambridge Central Library in the UK, or any number of pretty big libraries. Or so I thought. The library is conveniently situated in Piața Libertății, one of the main squares in the centre of town where people hang out and relax. I always thought it was weird how I rarely saw anyone go in or out of the library entrance, but maybe there was some tradesman’s entrance that I didn’t know about. So I popped in. There was a guard at a desk. “Um, library? Er, this way?” Yes, he assured me. I went upstairs and downstairs, four fairly decrepit floors in all, and the only thing I found was a reading room with a solitary woman, well, reading. And that was it. Bemused, I walked back to where the guard was. “Er, so where are the books?” He pointed. Ah. In a small room to the left, on the same floor. I walked in, or tried to, but was stopped by another man, this time at a window. “Spuneți, vă rog.” Speak, please. But what was I supposed to say? He then said, “English?” No, not this again. This isn’t a language barrier, this is a flashing orange man barrier. I said in English, “I just want to look at some books,” but then gave up and walked out. I’d expected to see a whole shelf devoted to Mihai Eminescu, a kids’ section with beanbags and “storytime”, a selection of DVDs, a bank of computers, maybe even a coffee machine, but it felt like I’d been transported back a hundred years. I could see why hardly anybody ever went in.

Talking of tradesman’s entrance… I was starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of work, when on Thursday morning I got a call from someone supposedly wanting a lesson. I was pleased to hold the conversation together in Romanian, and delighted when he wanted to come at 2pm that same day. He then switched to English, and asked me how old I was. Then he asked if I had a boyfriend and whether he could get to know me better. Alarm bells were ringing. He didn’t turn up at 2pm and I was reasonably grateful for that. He does however still have my address.

Yes, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit frustrated at the moment. The worst thing is that my Skype student, who provided about half my business, seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. She still owes me 80 euros, not a lot in the grand scheme of things I suppose but it’s still more than a week’s rent. At this point I’d say it’s less than 50:50 that I’ll ever hear from her again. I did 8½ hours last week; that isn’t nothing but it’s a third of what I’d like. Marketing myself is proving damn near impossible in the absence of lamp-post ads (I saw today that one of the Donald Trump ones I put up outside Piața 700 in November is still there). Adverts in shops just aren’t a thing here, with the exception of the notice board in Kaufland, a large supermarket. I’ll knock on the doors of six or seven language schools next week, armed with business cards and my CV full of unrelated jobs. I’ll also pop into the offices of some publications here. Some of them have English content geared towards expats (or, more accurately, immigrants) like me, but it isn’t English as I know it. Perhaps they’d appreciate a hand (or perhaps not). The biggest thing I can do is get out much more in the daytime like I used to, because heck, it’s a cool city to wander around in, and the money I’m saving by always having my lunch at home is surely outweighed by the health (and who knows, financial) benefits of being outside and in contact with people.

All three of yesterday’s lessons did materalise, and all in all it was a bloody good day. Going to another part of the city, or strictly speaking a suburb just outside the boundaries of the city, makes the whole experience that little bit more interesting. To get to Matei’s place I hop on the M14 bus (I now know definitely not to get on the 14, without the M, that comes just a few minutes before) and get off 20-odd minutes later at a stop called Fropin, just outside a Lidl supermarket. From there I walk through a new and quite visually pleasing development before turning right onto Strada Platinei. (The street on the left is Strada Superba. Superb.)

Matei and I spent a large part of yesterday’s lesson talking about our families. He’s an only child, and was surprised that anyone could have as big a family as my mum. (She’s one of seven, her mother was one of six, and her father was one of eight. Yeah, Irish Catholic.) I learnt that godparents are a far bigger deal in the Romanian Orthodox church than they were for me. Matei did much better this time on Millionaire. I managed to persuade him to phone his taxi driver friend rather than lock in the answer “tab” for “What is another word for a taxi?” This time he trusted his friend. His general knowledge is pretty damn good though. He walked away with £32,000 having made use of all his lifelines; he finally came unstuck on the £125,000 question when he thought Hamilton was the capital of New Zealand.

My main concern right now is that I’ll be hit massively for tax while I’m here. For a minute I thought I might be able to avoid tax entirely, but there are only two things certain in life…

I said I’d post some photos but it’s past my bedtime. Next time I promise. And I see it was six months today that I lay on my bed in the hotel here in Timișoara after my two-day train trip and thought, wow, I’m actually in Romania now, how cool is this?

As I wrote that last post my sinus pain worsened and morphed into a full-blown attack, just like I had in 2008. The pain was excruciating and I didn’t properly recover until the evening when I had two lessons. Just as well I was free until then. I haven’t had any further attacks since then, but Monday’s appointment with the ENT specialist can’t come soon enough.

Yesterday I had my first ever lesson with a kid. Yes it was a nine-year-old boy (actually he turns nine in a couple of weeks). His parents aren’t short of a bob or two, that much was obvious, although it was his grandmother who greeted me at the doorstep. The boy’s room was remarkably tidy. He showed me his Playstation games and told me all the countries he’d already been do. He told me all about London and Madame Tussauds. Sometimes he would speak English – his English wasn’t bad – and other times Romanian, which wasn’t easy for me because he flitted between subjects at will, as kids of that age do, so I was unable to “tune in” to a subject. There were two amusing moments. The first was when he said I was a bit young to have white hair. The second was when he proudly declared that he had a knife. In fact he had several knives including old army knives and a very beautiful Arab dagger. I survived the two hours without a scratch, and so did he, but it was really just a glorified chat. I’ve got two more lessons coming up next week, and keeping a young kid awake for that length of time while actually teaching him something will be a challenge. I’m up for it though.

My biggest challenge yesterday was getting to the place. Dumbrăvița is officially outside Timișoara, although it’s basically just a northern suburb of the city. The boy’s dad told me to take the M11 bus, but it was obvious to me that I needed the M14 instead. I jumped on a bus numbered 14 outside Iulius Mall, not knowing what the M (or lack of one) meant. The bus went the right way but came to the end of the line two stops before the stop I needed, so I had quite a walk. Trying to read a map on my phone is no easy task and something is draining the battery. By the time I got there, my battery was well into the red. I saw the return bus (with an M on it!) go by, and instead of waiting an age for the next one I walked home. It took me over an hour. As always it was interesting to visit a new part of town.

I read an article recently about the ten most loved and ten most hated jobs in America according to a 2014 survey. Nine of the top ten jobs either (a) created a product (and by that I mean a real, tangible product, not a so-called financial product), (b) helped people, or (c) engaged the senses, or some combination of the three. The odd one out was financial services sales agents, in ninth place, and I guess some people do just love making money. The rest included firefighters, teachers, special needs teachers, artists and even the clergy. Most of the bottom ten jobs did none of those things and instead involved staring at a screen. So many office jobs these days are soul-destroying, and so many companies try to motivate their employees by using team-building sessions or turning the whole experience into a game (let’s see who can get the most gold points this month!).

P.S. Have you always been able to play Pac-Man on Google Maps or is it a new thing?