Last night we had a thunderstorm, and that should take the edge off the oppressively hot weather we’ve experienced lately. I’m now getting ready for my trip, booking this, planning that. I’ve just booked two nights at a guest house in Gura Humorului, a small town which has a famous 16th-century monastery. One of my students, a really nice guy, thought I was positively mad when I told him about my 15-hour-plus train journey to Iași. (I’m saying plus from experience.) “Couldn’t you find a flight?” Flight? Everyone’s got to be bloody flying everywhere. I never even considered flying; for the purposes of this trip, slow is good.
I often wonder how I ended up here, washed up in some place nobody’s heard of. (As much as I’d like my brother to visit if and when Covid is over, I can imagine what he might say. What are you doing in this shithole? Come back to St Ives. I can hear his voice now.) I like it here, of course. My mind tends to focus on all the big, important, life-defining things that I’m rubbish at. It’s a pretty long list. I’m crap at building relationships. I’m crap at working, or even being, with groups of people. I’m crap at being with any people for an extended period of time. I’m often crap at motivating myself. I’m often crap at organisation. In the past, my memory and concentration would turn to crap as a result of all the other crap, and what ever job I happened to have at the time, which generally made me feel like crap anyway, became a steaming pile of crap and I’d have no choice but to get the crap out of there. Then I’d move on to another job, and a couple of years later the same crappy thing would eventually happen, and so on. Regarding my lack of motivation over the last 10 to 15 years, I wonder how much has been caused my parents’ affluence, as bizarre as that might sound. I’m sure it has been a demotivator to know that, short of winning the lottery, I’m taking a giant leap backwards relative to their position regardless of what I do, because of all the other stuff I’m crap at, and that (along with the crap with my apartment in Wellington which is now mercifully over) perhaps gave me the impetus to cut the crap and come to Romania.
But I’m not crap at everything. Giving thousands of English lessons to more than a hundred people has made me realise that I’m actually half-decent at a few things that are come in pretty handy in my job. First of all, I can spell. I pride myself on being a good speller, and I kick myself when I get a word wrong (as I did in a recent email!). When I was twelve, in the pre-spell-check era, Dad got me to correct his spelling (which, at the time, was atrocious) for a book he was writing. I can’t watch footage of a spelling bee, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s in the US, without thinking, damn, why didn’t we have these in the UK? I might have won something. Alas, I was hopeless at football and not a whole lot better at cricket. Spelling bees certainly were a thing in small-town New Zealand in the late eighties. When I went to school in Temuka, a girl from the top class did well in what must have been the South Canterbury regional bee. It was all over the Timaru Herald and I remember thinking, how cool is that? As a bit of a joke, our teacher tested us (a class of nine-year-olds, about three years younger than the spellers in the bee) on a bunch of words that had come up; most of them were impossibly hard. A girl and I tied for the highest score; we got barely a third of the words correct.
On a similar theme, I can look up a word in a paper dictionary in somewhere between five and ten seconds. That’s because I’ve had lots of practice. My parents bought me a dictionary as a Christmas present one time, and I was immediately fascinated by it. The best thing about it was the IPA (pronunciation) transcriptions; I quickly became fluent in the sounds that make up English. Of course, it’s 2021 and we have no end of excellent online dictionaries as well as Google Translate (boo!), so I could get by perfectly well without being a fast dictionary looker-upper, or even being able to spell all that well, but they’re extra weapons I have in my arsenal. Another is an ability to read upside down almost as well as I can read the right way up, and that’s surprisingly handy. I could do that from an early age. I loved the Mr Men books, and I remember that Mr Impossible could read upside down. Hey, I can do that too. It’s handy because my face-to-face lessons are often literally face-to-face. In the last few years I’ve often found myself in a less-than-ideal cramped kitchen or bedroom where I’m opposite my student. I once managed to impress a twelve-year-old boy by reading a paragraph in Romanian upside down. Occasionally I’ve even written words upside down in lessons, but that skill still needs some work.
So I possess some skills that are mostly useless in 99% of jobs in the 2020s, but what else do I have? Well, I’m reasonably creative. I’ve made a bunch of games and exercises that have kept my students engaged, and they have a manual, tactile quality to them that appeals, especially to the little ones. It’s nice to have a job that allows creativity, after having that beaten out of me during all those years in the office. Follow the process, don’t ask questions, and you’ll make life easier for yourself. Talking of kids, I’ve had more lessons with kids than I expected when I took this giant leap into the dark, and I’m better at teaching them than I thought I’d be. I can be quite animated, and I play games like Simon Says which they find fun, and it’s exciting to teach someone with a long future, a world of possibilities, still in front of them. (Whenever we do Simon Says, or Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I think to myself, this is mad. Totally mad. And awesome. I was supposed to be a bloody actuary, wasn’t I?)
I’m also better at thinking on my feet than I expected I’d be. It’s a skill I didn’t really have when I started out, but I’ve picked it up along the way. It just comes down to experience, drawing on what I’ve done before. For instance, last night I did a lesson on ordering food at a restaurant, and I pretended to order for a table of six. Sometimes my lesson plans go out the window. I can tell my student is tired or has had a tough day, and last thing he or she wants is to learn the conditional forms. Or they might tell me that they’ve got a job interview, in English, the very next morning.
Another important skill I’ve partly picked up is being able to communicate in Romanian. With kids it’s vital – they didn’t ask for a strange man to enter their territory and start babbling away to them in a foreign language – so being able to speak Romanian goes some way towards winning their trust. But with anybody it’s extremely useful. I constantly get asked what the word for x is. And very importantly, it helps me understand why Romanians say what they do in English. Please open the lights.
Finally, my most important skill, dwarfing any of the word-play stuff, is being personable, tolerant, and flexible. I sometimes fail here – I have little time for hyper-arrogant people or, right now, anti-vaxers (who intersect with hyper-arrogant people) – but I take pleasure in teaching people from all walks of life.
That’ll do. Apologies for making this so long.
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