Month: November 2017

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.