by Last week was lighter than usual. My biggest job, which took several painstaking hours, was creating a test for the people at the lolly-stick company: something that covered a good chunk of the course and had listening, reading, writing and speaking components and could be completed in 90 minutes and was fair and gave them a good chance of passing despite the ridiculously high pass mark of 75% which I had to enforce. In practice, this meant marking the subjective parts of the paper (speaking and writing) generously: saying or writing anything vaguely on-topic would have given them at least 8 out of 15 for each part. My students got 89%, 81% and 77%; had any of them fallen just short of 75% I’m sure I could have eked out an extra mark or two somewhere. They’re all lovely people, as far as I can tell, and I really wanted them all to pass. (This must be an issue that school teachers face all the time.) On Thursday our 40-session course came to an end, but they all seemed keen to do another course with me. There’s one snag however: the company I work for isn’t paying me nearly enough. To begin with I was happy to do it for the experience, in spite of the rubbish pay, but I’m past that stage now. I’ve asked for a 60% pay increase and will see what happens.
More of my students (mostly in their twenties or early thirties) want lessons in business English. I’m happy to oblige, but it isn’t my favourite discipline. I left that world behind ages ago. One nice thing about business English is that it’s fairly “by the book”: I can just dip into a textbook, including the one I used for the lolly-stick people. Occasionally somebody wants words and phrases specifically related to their line of business (such as construction or car parts) and that’s actually way more interesting.
I had quite a funny lesson last Monday (for me; not so much for my student). It was a balmy evening and she wanted to sit outside on the bank of the Bega. Great. We were sitting near a bar and she offered to buy me a beer. Fantastic. While she was away a small grey snake, perhaps nine inches long, appeared on the bank. It was almost camouflaged by the stone. I pointed the snake out to her when she returned, and she just about freaked out. When she recovered we moved down the bank a little way, to an area that was hopefully snakeless. But lo and behold, a larger black snake, nearly two feet long, swam towards the bank. That was it. Seeing that second snake was a truly traumatic experience for her. We moved away from the Bega altogether, and after about half an hour she was in a fit state to read the article from the Sun that I’d prepared. Where does that intense, deep-seated fear of snakes, rats, spiders and other creepy-crawlies come from?
Yesterday the temperature must have been pushing 30, but there was a pleasant breeze. I didn’t have any lessons. I rode my bike down to the frog pond, not that far, and just sat there for a while. It was very peaceful. The centre of town was heaving with people all weekend, with long snaking (!) queues for the Mr Whippy-style ice cream. The Timfloralis flower festival was in full swing, and because Tuesday (1st May) is a public holiday, many people are making a four-day weekend of it.
