Language teaching

After six days of feeling run down, I’m suddenly feeling really good.

We had our first post-restructure team meeting today. That meant a new team. Prior to the meeting I didn’t even know who was in my team, or why. That’s probably bad. On Friday we visited a water treatment plant, in a beautiful location it must be said, not far from work, and not far from where I used to do some of my day tramps before tennis sort of put paid to them. Even though I was feeling like crap, it was great to get out of the office. We even got to go on a jigger – a small train – that runs alongside a water pipe through a two-mile-long tunnel. That was a lot of fun. Unfortunately most days at work (such as today) aren’t like that. The highlight of today, undoubtedly, was the ten minutes I spent at the language centre at lunchtime – I dashed in there to get some material for my student. The staff were so helpful – they even knew which sounds people from Burma tend to struggle with.

Last night I tried to stop my student from calling me Teacher – endearing as it is – and asked him to call me by my first name instead. It’s commonplace in NZ even for schoolchildren to call their teachers by their first name. My mum has always asked her kids to address her in the traditional “Mrs Smith” way, even in NZ, and asks their parents to do the same. I’m with her on this. Teachers should be respected.

First, I saw this piece about autism in the Guardian last Friday. A wonderfully written piece that moved me to tears.

My cousin put me in contact with a Romanian lady; last night I got the chance to talk with her. We chatted for over an hour on the phone, almost entirely in English. She did most of the talking. Food and gypsies were her hot-button topics. I can’t wait to try Romanian food. I’m always thinking about food at the moment.

I bumped into my other Wellington-based cousin at the market on Saturday morning, the cousin that I have so much in common with, you just wouldn’t believe. We’re less than a month apart in age, we go to the same market, we even support the same baseball team. He was sporting a Boston Red Sox cap that he said he picked up in Rebel Sport. Guess where I got mine, I happily said. He gave me the news that he’d just become a father for the second time – another daughter to go with their two-year-old.

My flatmate’s phone calls to Liberia added up to $82. I was worried they might have been more. I’m sure they would have been more if I hadn’t overheard him spell out his very common name and asked him about that. For all my previous flatmate’s faults, he’d always pay me promptly, thanks in no small part to his dad. Things are a bit harder with this guy even if I do get the money eventually.

With this bloke, food shopping is extremely stressful because he wants to spend almost bugger all on it. Every week I make a ridiculously small list. He vets the list, queries items that he doesn’t think should be on it, and puts asterisks next to the things that he doesn’t eat, lest I charge him for them. I go to Pak ‘n’ Save and come out through the 15-items-or-less lane with less shopping than I did when I lived alone. The first time I did the shopping after he moved in, I just, well, did the shopping. He didn’t like that one bit, and pulled everything out of the cupboard complaining that I’d already got three jars of this or four packets of that, jars and packets that I’d bought with my own money. Now the cupboard is virtually empty. I’m eating a lot more pies at lunchtime than before. I used to struggle to eat the BBQ pork fried noodles I sometimes get from the takeaway next to McDonalds on Adelaide Road. Now I wolf it down.

I wasn’t too happy with my English lesson tonight. I made the classic mistake of trying to pack too much in, too much vocab especially. I’m still learning.

I reached the top of the mountain over the long Easter weekend. Nine weeks of living with my flatmate, nine more to go. I’m so glad I had a chat with him earlier this month, hard as it was. I really don’t know where I’d be now otherwise.

I’m living in a state of perpetual fatigue. A good night’s sleep, when I get it, does little to energise me. Walking up to the top of Mount Vic on Friday was a major effort. Even just walking into town is a struggle – I watch people stream past me when I’m used to it being the other way round. Tennis on Sunday was a case of dragging myself onto the court. After the game, which was borderline embarrassing for me, I went to see Batman v Superman at the Embassy with a bloke from the club. He’s gay. He thought I was. I’m not. Before the film we ate at the Chinese place nearby. My meal was extremely good value. I’ll get number 98 again the next time I go there. The film was never going to be my thing. Given the name I use for this blog, I guess I like my superheroes to be extraterrestrial.

On Friday night my flatmate’s parents invited him and me over for dinner at their rather nice place in Kelburn. That would suggest that neither my flatmate nor his parents hate my guts. His scheduled exit in late May didn’t get a mention. Instead we talked about the flag referendum. The three of them, plus exactly 1.2 million other Kiwis according to the preliminary figures, voted for the status quo. I voted for change, but I wasn’t too bothered either way. His parents are very nice people. So is he, for half an hour, down the pub, every other week or so. No really he’s fine. Honest. OK, there’s the small matter of the calls he made to Africa on my landline…

I read an article in the Guardian soon after the flag referendum result was announced. There were hundreds of comments, most of them coming from people whose knowledge of New Zealand ended at sheep and rugby. “The hard left who hate the flag and hate the country have been defeated! Hooray!” That’s fact-free crap, and they would have realised it was crap if they’d bothered reading the article, but it’s also crap that taps into the zeitgeist, and therefore gets plenty of upvotes. That’s the world we live in now unfortunately: people writing whatever is most likely to be plussed, hearted, thumbs-upped or up-arrowed, facts be damned. I know, I should avoid reading comments altogether.

Yesterday I met up with a friend at the Southern Cross. We then went to Ekim, a bohemian-looking burger joint just opposite. Ekim backwards is the owner’s name, and he was semi-famous last year for this Facebook rant (which I can view even though I’m not on Facebook, and no I didn’t read the comments). Mr Ekim sounds like a right reknaw. The hospitality industry does attract such people. (And tips? Huh? This isn’t America and we should be very grateful for that.) Still, we both would have given our burgers at least four stars and neither of us came down with food poisoning, so they’re doing something right. They even played Paul Simon’s Call Me Al and that gets an extra star from me.

Last Monday I met my English language student for the first time. He’s a Burmese refugee in his early thirties. I also got to meet his wife and seven-month-old daughter. His wife also has a tutor. I was struck by how happy he was. He smiled pretty much the whole time I was there. They live in an apartment block in Berhampore. His daughter’s name begins with the “th” sound as in “thin”. Burmese must be one of very few Asian languages to have that sound in its (to use a technical term) phonemic inventory. Normally you have all kinds of fun and games trying to teach that sound, so at least I’ll be spared that. Burmese lacks the “v” sound, however. My student seems to have a reasonable vocabulary but lacks confidence in speaking. When presented with my name on a piece of paper, he spelled out the letters rather than attempting to say the words. I expect I’ll find the teaching extremely rewarding and I can’t wait to crack on with it.

The restructure at work hasn’t gone away. On Thursday I should find out whether I still have a job.

My parents have got the keys to their house in Moeraki. I can only see positives in this. It gives them both a chance to get out of (as Dad put it) fucking Geraldine, it’s close to the sea, Dad will be able to fish (he hasn’t done that in ages), and it’s not far from Central Otago which is its own amazing world. I initially thought they were crazy for buying a fourth property (two in the UK, two in NZ) but this seems a great buy, for their own well-being as much as anything.

I feel run down again. I will get this place to myself (I hope) at the end of May, but I can’t just count down the days. I actually have stuff to do before then.

The Ethiopian student I was supposed to be teaching got sick. He still wants to go ahead but doesn’t know when he can start. The organiser knew I was keen to get make a start, so I’ve now been assigned a Burmese refugee in his early thirties. My first session with him will be on Monday. Apparently that’s the only day of the week he can do, and to avoid delaying the start of the teaching (and possibly my move) by two weeks, I’m missing an important body corporate meeting where the earthquake strengthening will be discussed and voted on. Bugger. I’m also losing my voice when (unusually for me) I’m going to need it.

As I see it, after Super Tuesday II, Trump does now have one hand on the nomination. It was interesting watching the results come in, having been to three of the five states that voted, but just about everything is wrong with the process. There are still the best part of eight months until the election itself, and billions of dollars will be blown on the campaigns between now and then. What a waste.

Paul Daniels, the British magician, died yesterday. Most people in the office hadn’t heard of him, but he was on TV all the time when I was growing up. I even had a Paul Daniels magic set.

Tomorrow morning will be my ninth and final interclub outing this season; I’ll be sure to write a report later.

The English teaching course was fantastic. It was very thought-provoking. I won’t just be teaching English, I’ll be teaching a whole new way of life: supermarket shopping, making doctor’s appointments, catching buses, things I take for granted. There’s much much more to it than I ever imagined. I don’t yet know whether I’ll be matched with a migrant from China or Korea, or a refugee from Somalia or Ethiopia (who will have come through enormous challenges already – dealing with me might be the last straw). I’ll be focusing on practical English. I won’t be discussing nouns and adjectives, and I doubt I’ll be using expressions like “the last straw”. I will talk about pronunciation, but not as a planned topic. (If lots of “wh” words crop up and my student is struggling to pronounce them, I’ll mention that “wh” is usually pronounced just like “w”, and maybe talk about Maori placenames if I sense he’s in the mood.)  I’ll make use of maps, photos, bus timetables, junk mail, perhaps even music. This will be a huge learning experience for me too: I’ll be learning about my student’s culture and learning how to teach. I’m so glad I’m doing this before I go to Romania.

There were thirty of us on the course. Probably half were born outside New Zealand and a good number had English as a second language themselves. The best bit was on the second morning when our Bosnian coordinator greeted us all with “Zdravo” and gave us all Cyrillic name tags. She then proceeded to give us a 45-minute lesson in Bosnian using pictures of faces, her own facial expressions and gestures and nothing else. No English whatsoever. It put us in the shoes of our learners (we’ll usually have no knowledge of their first language) and was amazingly effective. It was engrossing, it was simply fun. And you never know, Bosnia isn’t too far from western Romania, it might come in handy one day…

Won’t it be great to be helping people by doing something that interests me? With lesson plans I’ll probably spend four hours a week on this, but forty in my day job. I wish it could be the other way round.

My brother and his girlfriend will have just touched down in Christchurch – they flew with China Southern, via Guangzhou. Cheap but tiring. I’ll be seeing them on Friday – hopefully they won’t have already pushed off somewhere by then. They’re here for three weeks.

Mum and Dad have booked their accommodation in Romania. They’ll be flying from Milan to Timișoara where they’ll spend four nights, then taking the train to Sibiu (four nights there), before moving on to Bucharest (three nights). I saw my cousin last night and she said it was terrible of my parents to “steal” my adventure by going there first, and to the exact two places that had excited me. She then said they might go skiing in Romania next January and catch up with me.

I did the 6.5 km version of Round the Bays yesterday, although I certainly didn’t run it all. I treated it as a long walk – I walked home instead of taking the bus. I played tennis after that so it was quite an active day for me.

Things have improved a bit since my last post – I haven’t given him an ultimatum or anything of that sort – but gosh, it’s just too hands-on, too much interaction. I need a break.