by It’s been a bit of a crappy week from a teaching perspective: too many cancellations. Earlier today I phoned that utterly obnoxious guy who came over last weekend, on the off-chance he might want to come back, but I got a very decisive “no”. That was probably for the best. As a teacher it’s a great feeling to see my students succeed under any normal circumstances, but I don’t wish success on this person any more than I wish success on Donald Trump. After this latest “one and done”, I delved into my (entirely manual) records of my lessons and produced some stats on how long my students stick around. One in eight give up after one lesson. Plenty more call it a day soon after that: 35% don’t make it past lesson number five. After 15 lessons we’re into coin-flip territory: 49% make it past that point. When my students have put up with me for that long, we’ve normally built up some kind of rapport, and they tend to come back. By the 30th lesson, 36% of my students still remain, and 17% even survive beyond the 50th. These are still fairly small sample sizes and it’ll be interesting to see what happens to those stats in the long term.
It’s been a beautiful autumn day here. Not a cloud in the sky. I wandered back from Piața Traian, suddenly with all the time in the world after yet another last-minute cancellation, and met a part-British, part-Romanian family who were trying to figure out how the timetable for the Bega boats worked. They all seemed lovely people.
There’s a referendum on same-sex marriage in Romania this weekend. Oh wait, there isn’t; we haven’t magically been transported to the 22nd century after all. There is, however, a referendum on changing Romania’s constitution so that the definition of marriage explicitly excludes same-sex couples, i.e. so that it reads “between a man and a woman” instead of the current “between spouses”. (When the constitution was drawn up, “between a man and a woman” would have gone without saying.) If the vote passes, any changes will be purely superficial, because Romania is unlikely to recognise single-sex relationships in the lifetime of any of its current gay citizens, no matter what’s in the constitution. There will almost certainly be a whopping great majority in favour of the amendment, but the vote also needs a 30% turnout in order to pass. That sounds extremely low, and crazy, because casting a “no” vote could allow the threshold to be met and for “yes” to win. So the people who oppose the amendment are asking people not to vote at all. Last weekend I talked to S about this, and like me, she finds it insane that same-sex couples can’t get married in this day and age. That we agree on this bodes well. I want to write more about S in my next post.
Baseball: we’re down to the final eight. The Brewers, who have been involved in some seriously exciting games, are on an incredible tear. And the Yankees made it through their wild card game and face the Red Sox in a five-game series starting tonight.
I’m looking forward to the lessons with the kids tomorrow. Sunday will be the second anniversary of my arrival in Timișoara.
