by Not much news since my last post. I’ve had 98 hours of teaching over the last three weeks. It’s a challenge coming up with new and interesting material for my students each time, especially now that my preparation time is limited. This morning I described the business of whether to use gerunds or infinitives after certain verbs as BBI: Boring But Important. Yesterday I had the usual business of my ten-year-old student asking me at regular intervals what the time was so he’d know how soon he could get rid of me.
There was another school shooting in America last week. Seventeen people dead. It’s all messed up there on so many levels. And now we have Trump tweeting that if the FBI had spent less time on the Russia inquiry they might have stopped the shooting. How low can you go?
I spoke to my brother tonight. He got completely the wrong end of the stick when I said I’d like to do something other than teaching. It was my own fault – I meant to say that although I enjoy my work immensely I’d like the occasional day off to travel and do other stuff. At the moment I have some lessons every single day. I will have a short break in early April as I spend a few days in the UK.
I’ve watched snatches of the Winter Olympics (officially the Olympic Winter Games, which doesn’t sound right to me). I read something online which suggested that much of the success of the luge is down to the name. Luge. It’s almost onomatopoeia. Wouldn’t it be fun to do the luge in Cluj? (Have you ever watched – or, heaven forbid, done – double luge? Now that is a weird event.) Several of my students, or their kids, have gone skiing in recent weeks, often in Austria. Yes, my students tend to have money.
I played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three by margins of 157, 171 and 201, and losing the other by just five points. My scores ranged from 422 to 492. My favourite word was COMiX, making CRAP at the same time, for 65.
