Month: September 2018

Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Pigman

September 28, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday morning I got an email from one of the owners in my apartment block in Wellington. She asked me to tell my tenant to move his car from the car park, so that the cherry-picker could get access to the windows for the six-monthly clean. She knew I was in Romania, so I don’t know what she was thinking. I have no direct access to my tenant anyway. But we did get into a discussion about the earthquake shit, and it certainly is shit. I’m glad to be on the other side of the world.

Later on Tuesday I saw my eleven-year-old student in Dumbrăvița. He’s a lovely boy; it’s a pleasure to teach him. We now have two-hour sessions. Perhaps because he used to be the top-ranked chess player for his age in the county, he has no concentration issues in a stint of that length. Three or four sessions ago, I gave him a crossword that I’d created: it was one of a series of puzzles I’d made (and am still making) with a mixture of picture and definition clues. They’re mostly 11×11, but I sometimes use different grid shapes and sizes to liven things up a bit. This particular puzzle had “pigeon” in it, with a picture of the bird as the clue. He didn’t know the English word so I helped him fill it in. As soon as he saw “PIG” and the final N, he shouted “Pigman!” For some reason, the idea of a half-pig-half-man creature sent him into hysterics, and he said it would be awesome to find a puzzle where “pigman” actually was the right answer. So on Tuesday I surprised him with a “pigman” crossword, with a slightly grotesque hybrid beast sourced from Google Images as the clue. He didn’t see it right away, but when he eventually clapped his eyes on 12 Down and realised what it was, he got pretty damn excited and gave me a high-five. He even glued the completed puzzle to the cover of his English folder. After a few more sheets and games, we reached the end of the lesson, at which point I asked him (as I always do) if he enjoyed it. He said, yes, and the last one, and the one before that, and all of them! It’s a great feeling as a teacher to get that kind of response.

Baseball is weird, or to be more accurate, it’s very random. Last night I finished work at 10pm and then tuned in to the Red Sox game at home to the Orioles. The Orioles have had a terrible season, winning barely a quarter of their games, and are guaranteed to finish with the worst record in the Major Leagues. Boston, on the other hand, are sure to finish with the best record, giving them home advantage throughout the play-offs. When I started watching, Boston were already leading 10-3 in the bottom of the fifth inning. Their bats continued to explode as they added another nine unanswered runs. A complete blowout in other words. And it was first against worst, so that was to be expected, right? Well, the two sides met again just a couple of hours later (it was a doubleheader caused by a rain postponement the previous night) and in that second game, the Orioles won 10-3. In baseball, that sort of reversal, even on home turf, even against the worst team in the competition, is by no means unusual. That also means that come play-off time, when teams are of a similar standard, all bets are off.

I played an extraordinary game of Scrabble last weekend, slapping down two bingos to my opponent’s ridiculous four, and I lost 521-445, the highest-scoring game I’ve ever been involved in. And talking of Scrabble:

Language teaching - Life :)

Muddling along

September 25, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got a cold, and it’s bad enough that I’d have taken sick days in my previous life, but in my current incarnation I can sort of just muddle along unless I’m really sick. In fact, work helps matters. Yesterday I had four lessons, including one on the seventh floor of an apartment block on Strada Timiș in the Dacia area of the city, with the boy of nearly nine whose big sister I recently started with. To begin with I wasn’t optimistic – he was rolling around on the sofa in the living room, saying he didn’t want to do it, exhibiting (when I think about it) the sort of behaviour you sometimes see in autistic kids. But it turned out he was a fairly standard kid who liked basketball and pizza and Fortnite and Roblox, whatever the hell those last two are. He’s close to bilingual – Romanian and German – and sometimes he’d throw me by slipping in a few German words. The first lesson is always tough because you never know what they know, or whether they might decide they just hate you, but we only had an hour and I muddled along.

On Saturday I had my second lesson with his older sister, but it was more therapy than anything educational. She talked, at some length, about the difficult three months she recently spent in a school in Vienna. Her stories reminded me of the time I spent at that school in Temuka at a much younger age. All my reading and grammar exercises swiftly went out the window, and before I knew it our 90 minutes were up. From there I walked to Mehala market to look for a bike, and found an old green single-speed German one, probably dating from the late seventies or early eighties. It seemed in good nick. Pretty cool, I thought. I bought it for 250 lei and have already found it way more fun than my mountain bike. It’s also a good deal more practical – and faster – when I just want to get around an almost flat city. It only has a front brake and that will take a little getting used to.

On Friday I met my Tinder friend (from now on I’ll just call her X) and a café on one of the side streets off Piața Libertății. It wasn’t my kind of place – it had English signs everywhere and I usually avoid those kinds of places like the plague. I bought a flat white (only those kinds of places offer that) and when I was about to put sugar in it the barista stopped me in my tracks. You need to taste it first! I was given a piece of paper showing the origin of the beans: Cajamarca in Peru, which happens to be a place that featured in a lesson early this year and would be incredible to visit. Anyway we chatted, mostly in English this time, and she invited me to a board games session on Sunday evening at the apartment of her brother and his wife.

I was kind of looking forward to the board games night, because how scary can board games be? But the answer to that is actually quite scary when you’re playing with frequent gamers who even speak a different language to me. They did speak good English, but that was more of a hindrance than a help I think. We played Ticket to Ride, which I’d played years ago in Wellington, just twice if memory serves, and the mechanics of the game had long been forgotten. I took what to them must have seemed an eternity over my moves. “Oh, it’s my turn again. How did it come round so fast?” My strategy was far from optimal. After that we played two rounds of some head-messing Monty Python-themed game, one of which I won without even realising it. X’s brother and sister-in-law lived in a new apartment block in the south of the city, and their flat gave off a whiff of sophistication. Even modern-style board games are the domain of a certain type of person; by Romanian standards they’re expensive for a start. X’s sister-in-law had a habit of dropping English words into Romanian sentences, perhaps to sound sophisticated. I found that bloody annoying, I must say. Interestingly there were a lot of homemade alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, some of which I tried, as well as hand-knitted bits and pieces dotted around the place. Next time I go there, if there is a next time, I hope I’ll be a bit more relaxed. The experience did however make me a bit nervous about ever showing X my place.

After an incredible Indian summer, autumn is well and truly here now.

Language teaching - Life :)

Match report

September 21, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Like any other app or site whose main purpose is to connect with people, Tinder is a bit scary for me. Scary enough that I started scheduling time each day to ensure I’d actually use it. Monday: an hour of Romanian practice, then my lesson at nine, then coffee, then shopping, then Serbian study for an hour, then lunch, then an hour of Tinder before I prepared for my evening’s lessons. Only I didn’t last the whole hour because I got my first ever match which means we both liked each other, and then some chat thingy popped up on my screen. Uh, what happens now? She sent me a message, I replied, and we eventually agreed to meet at a café in the square on Tuesday evening after I’d finished work for the day.

Tuesday ended up being a pretty good day. In the morning I met up for coffee with a young couple who used to have boatloads of lessons with me, but worked over the summer. They’re about to start their final year at university. I met them at the same place I’d be meeting my Tinder match later in the day; that was a deliberate choice on my part. We had a lovely chat, speaking Romanian the whole time. I’m not sure if they’ll find the time to have any more lessons with me. After lunch I was off to Dumbrăvița for a lesson with my eleven-year-old, and when I arrived there all my lesson plans went out the window (that’s OK though; I can use them next week). My young student had a friend over to play Risk, or Risc as it is here, and they wanted to involve me. His friend was only ten, and almost entirely fluent in three languages: Romanian, French and English. I didn’t do a whole lot of teaching, and somehow got paid to play a board game with a couple of kids for two hours. They had some utterly bizarre house rules that I had an interesting time navigating. I won the first of our two games by sheer luck.

When I got home I had another lesson where I did my fortnightly fill-in-the-gaps lyrics game, this time with REM’s Losing My Religion, and then read and discussed an article on the obesity epidemic in the Western world, which I talked about last month on my blog. At eight it was time to meet my match. By five past, I wasn’t overly optimistic. She works in Corporateville, and when I told her how I make my living, her initial reaction seemed to be, what have we got here? As for her, she didn’t look quite the same as in her various selfies taken in exotic locations including Easter Island. But then everything, somehow, changed. We talked, half in English (hers is immaculate), half in Romanian, and we seemed to feel at ease with each other. When I told her that I shun social media and use a manual diary to organise my lessons, she called the hairy man opposite a hippie. I didn’t mind that one bit. We chatted for nearly two hours. We’re meeting again for coffee tomorrow morning.

Fishing - Language teaching - Life :)

Yes I understand, and no I don’t

September 16, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a lovely evening in Timișoara. At 8pm it’s a balmy 24 degrees. Looking at the forecast, the daily highs are a string of 29s, stretching out as far as I can see. The Bega boats are finally back in business after a delay of almost two years caused my Romanian bureaucracy.

After I caught that tiny fish last month, my next session wasn’t so good. The handle fell off the reel and into the river. Luckily it settled on a ledge in the water, so I could “fish” it out fairly easily, but the screw holding it in place was gone. That same morning I saw the repulsive sight of a dead dog floating down the river. When I told Dad about the reel, he put three screws in the post for me in the hope that one of them would fit, and it did, so I’m now back in business. I’m yet to have any success though. Most times I go down to the Bega, the banks are lined with fishermen, often with maximum roddage. But occasionally it’s completely deserted and I have no idea why. It’s like there must have been a public service broadcast on Radio Timișoara, loud and clear: “There are no, repeat, NO, fish in the Bega today. Seriously, don’t even bother.” One of these occasions was last Friday. Not another living soul. A woman came up to me and asked, “Was there, or will there be, anything in the Bega?” Sorry? Maybe I misunderstood the Romanian. She then repeated her question, which I understood but didn’t understand at the same time. It seemed so cryptic. I still don’t know what she meant. Today I got a much more sensible “Did you catch anything?”

Thursday was Firemen’s Day in Romania: Ziua Pompierilor. There was a big parade of firefighters and fire engines past the cathedral and my apartment block.

Yesterday was the Feast of the Cross, or Ziua Crucii. A crowd of thousands, many carrying candles, congregated outside the cathedral last night and gradually made their way inside to the sound of someone drumming on a wooden cross. The bells continued into the late evening (not just the usual quarter-hourly bells) and I could hear a sermon being sung at about five o’clock this morning. The feast has extended into today, with people snaking around the cathedral. I remember all this from last year, and I still don’t quite know what it’s all about.

Ziua Crucii video: click here

On Friday I had a good session with my new 17-year-old female student. This took place in Dumbrăvița, on Strada Pluto of all places. I posted some flyers on that street last week, for its name as much as anything. (I lived in a damp basement flat on a street called Pluto Place on Auckland’s North Shore in 2007-08, hence Plutoman.) After a chat, I gave her what I hope was a helpful explanation of the difference between the past simple and the present perfect, and then we studied a news article about a marathon swimmer. I was then prepared to give her little brother a lesson, but his mother said he was too tired. (I saw him, and he looked full of beans to me.) My next lessons with them are scheduled for next Saturday.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Little people

September 14, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Earlier this evening I paid my doctor the usual monthly visit to get my prescription. He commented on my new look: a beard and a load more hair in general than I used to have. He said I looked more manly. In truth I’ve always wanted to look like this, and it’s pretty bloody awesome that I now can.

Matei comments on my facial changes every time I see him. We had quite a busy lesson this afternoon. I finally beat him in the Formula One game, after four losses in a row. Tomorrow I’ve got four lessons planned, three of which are with kids, including the new sister-and-brother combination. My only lesson with an adult is on Skype. I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for teaching children when I came to Romania, and when I started getting calls from parents my initial reaction was, yeah OK, if I have to. But in general I’ve found my lessons with kids to be extremely rewarding. At times I’ve had to pinch myself: not that long ago I was staring at (or more accurately, straight through) spreadsheets relating to ghastly insurance “products”, and now my job involves playing racing-car board games with ten-year-olds. Vroom-vroom, baby.

This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. We chewed the fat once more over the events of the women’s US Open final, which had moved well outside the sphere of just sport. My parents and I were puzzled at how many people, especially in America, sided with Serena. The only people any of us felt sorry for were Carlos Ramos, who earned only in the hundreds of dollars for the “privilege” of umpiring that match, and Naomi Osaka, whose spectacular victory was overshadowed. For that matter, Novak Djokovic’s win – his 14th grand slam, which came less easily than the final score suggests – was spoiled a bit too. And then there was that Australian cartoonist’s take on it all. Cartoons work by exaggerating the protagonists’ features. Real racism happens, and it’s abhorrent, but this cartoon isn’t an example of it.

On Monday I went back to the cheap eatery I stumbled upon three weeks ago as I was posting flyers. I noticed the name of the place was Aditex, which I found unappetising: the -tex ending invokes something manufactured in a factory, a textile perhaps. Definitely nothing that should pass between one’s lips. Realising that it was just a word and I shouldn’t be bothered by such things, I sat down. My meatball soup was absolutely fine, but then I got the rest of my meal. My fork was dirty, and I should have sent it back, but I wimped out and tried to minimise my fork-in-mouth action until I finished.

It’s warm for the time of year, with temperatures pushing 30.

Language teaching - Other sports - Politics - Tennis

A cluster of random thoughts

September 9, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I didn’t watch the women’s US Open final, but now wish I had, for the sheer drama alone. Serena is an incredible player but she’s also a bully, with a “Don’t you know who I am?!” attitude. She has a history of using her bullying tactics at the US Open in particular, where she knows the crowd will probably side with her (as, shamefully, they did in this match). This time she also made completely irrelevant comments about being a woman and having a daughter. I’m pleased that Naomi Osaka played great tennis and got over the line, even if Serena and an obnoxious crowd robbed her of that special moment of winning her first grand slam. Osaka even felt the need to apologise for winning. I suppose I shouldn’t feel too sorry for Osaka – she took home US$3.8 million, which is a crazy amount just for being rather good at whacking furry yellow objects over a net with a bat.

This year’s US Open has seen its fair share of upsets and retirements; the searing heat has been a major factor in the latter. The biggest shock on the men’s side was Federer’s loss to John Millman. I remember Millman from my first day at Flushing Meadows three years ago. I was queuing with my cousin and his fiancée, and Millman (who I didn’t recognise, but I saw his name tag) was at the next-door kiosk, trying to sort out something quite important for his match that was due to start in half an hour. I thought at the time he was clearly one of the have-nots of tennis. With his win over Federer he’ll make the world’s top 50, and he earns nearly half a million for reaching the quarter-finals, so he’s starting to do quite nicely from the game.

On a different day, Federer would have beaten Millman in straight sets, but on this occasion he wasn’t at his best on the big points. On the same day as this match, I watched the Red Sox beat the Braves by the totally flattering score of 8-2, a game in which they were outplayed for long periods, with the result in serious doubt until the eighth inning. After these two results in different sports, I thought about the importance of clustering and sequencing, in sport (and in life too). There are different concepts from timing, which obviously has a profound impact on results as well – a double fault or a walk can range in importance from meaningless to game-changing depending on when it occurs. Sequencing, or the order in which events happen, is also very important, as is clustering. As a rule, you’re better off if good things happen to you one after the other, but you spread your bad things out a bit. That’s very true in life too – we can often handle one issue at a time, but a pile-up of problems can send us into a tailspin. On the other side, achieving a major success (say, a deal with a large record label) relies on a series of positive events happening one after the other. Baseball analysts have tried to figure out what determines effective timing, clustering and sequencing, and the answer (in that sport at least) is very clear: luck.

Politics is one area where clustering is of paramount importance, especially in first-past-the-post systems. The clustering of Democrats in urban areas was a big (and understated) reason for Trump’s win in 2016. Clinton ran up the score in those large cities, making her vote inefficiently distributed. It also affects the other branches of government. Because their opponents are neatly clustered in areas of high density, and because they’re arseholes, the Republicans are able to gerrymander effectively, and that’s why the Dems will need a hefty popular-vote win if they want to take the House in November. Clustering isn’t always bad for political parties, however. If you’re a big party trying to form a government, it harms you, but it’s to your advantage if you’re a small party trying to get some representation in parliament. An interesting case (and a terrible advert for FPTP) was the 2015 UK election, where 3.9 million people voted UKIP but they won just a single seat because they weren’t a dominant force in any geographic area. In the same election, the SNP managed to achieve the best of both worlds, by being entirely “clustered” in Scotland but very unclustered within Scotland. Their 1.5 million votes (half of all votes in Scotland) gave them a whopping 56 of 59 Scottish seats.

I spoke to my parents yesterday. The All Blacks v Argentina game was about to start, and they pointed the camera at the haka. It sounded like a great game. Mum and Dad had just spent a few days in a chilly Moeraki.

Last week I posted about 100 flyers in letterboxes in Dumbrăvița, and I got a reply. Hopefully this week I’ll be starting with a 17-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Insults, intensity and incredible finishes

September 6, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning I had my back-to-back lessons with the brother and sister in Dumbrăvița. On the way I got a coffee from the little shop with benches outside. On one of the benches was a slightly darker-skinned man in his twenties with his feet on the bench, and on another bench was a man of about sixty who didn’t look particularly healthy. The older man didn’t like the fact that the young guy had his feet on the bench, and told him, “This is Romania! We don’t put dirty shoes on benches. Go back to Turkey, you fucking immigrant!” The young man said only a few words and otherwise ignored him; he was soon in the middle of a voice call.

As for the lessons, well this time I started with the boy. He’s hard work, and he really doesn’t want to be there, but it’s only for one hour and he seems to find the motor racing board game at least somewhat engaging. It was a relief though when he was out of the way and I got to see his big sister who’s much less of a handful.

I’ve watched some extraordinary sport – both tennis and baseball – in the last few days. This morning I turned on the TV – it was well past midnight in New York, but you never know – and lo and behold, Nadal and Thiem were still out there. They were out there for a good deal longer too, Nadal squeezing through in a fifth-set tie-break, a few minutes past 2am local time. There was incredible shotmaking under pressure from both men. I only just managed to see the finale before heading to Dumbrăvița. Then this evening, after a high-intensity grammar workout with two beginner students, I saw that the Red Sox were down 7-1 in Atlanta, heading into the final two innings. In other words they’d all but had it, but hey, this is the 2018 Boston team and you just never know, and over the next 90 minutes I saw the most incredible comeback.

Books - Films - Life :)

Dipping my toe in…

September 3, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday I joined Tinder. My Skype student has been telling me about the wonders of Tinder over the last six months – that’s how he met his wife – and finally, just before my weekly lesson with him, I signed up. So far I’ve only just dipped my toe in, and I’m guessing it’ll be a while before I dip anything else in. I uploaded a selfie of me standing outside the cathedral, but I still haven’t completed my blurb, which needs to be in Romanian of course. I haven’t yet figured out the mechanics of swiping right and “super likes”, and besides, it’s all just a bit scary. At least I wasn’t forced to sign up using Facebook. (Someone “hearted” me earlier today. What do I do now?)
I would like a partner, but I’m not desperate. Most of the time I’m absolutely fine being on my own.

A film festival has been taking place here over the last few days. Some of the films have been showing at the small amphitheatre just two minutes’ walk from here. On Friday night, soon after my Skype lesson, I saw Coborâm la Prima (which I’d translate as “We’re getting off at the next stop”). It seemed very Romanian, being set almost entirely in one carriage of a Bucharest metro train, on the day after the Colectiv night club disaster of 2015. The train got stuck and the occupants of the carriage got to know each other quite well. Some of them even used Tinder. Last night I expected to be seeing a film about the massacre in Norway, but there was a technical hitch and they showed Jeune Femme, a French film, instead. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Neither of those films cost me a penny.

Station Eleven was a brilliant read. My only issue was that the flu pandemic, that wiped out over 99% of the world population, spread at an unrealistic speed. If you die within two days of catching it, with almost no incubation period, how could that level of contagion occur? That’s a very minor complaint though. It was a beautifully written book, and I highly recommend it.

My Skype student also said I should join a dance class, but we all have lines we need to draw.

It’s still pretty damn hot: we’ve had a high of 33 for the second day running.