by The English teaching course was fantastic. It was very thought-provoking. I won’t just be teaching English, I’ll be teaching a whole new way of life: supermarket shopping, making doctor’s appointments, catching buses, things I take for granted. There’s much much more to it than I ever imagined. I don’t yet know whether I’ll be matched with a migrant from China or Korea, or a refugee from Somalia or Ethiopia (who will have come through enormous challenges already – dealing with me might be the last straw). I’ll be focusing on practical English. I won’t be discussing nouns and adjectives, and I doubt I’ll be using expressions like “the last straw”. I will talk about pronunciation, but not as a planned topic. (If lots of “wh” words crop up and my student is struggling to pronounce them, I’ll mention that “wh” is usually pronounced just like “w”, and maybe talk about Maori placenames if I sense he’s in the mood.) I’ll make use of maps, photos, bus timetables, junk mail, perhaps even music. This will be a huge learning experience for me too: I’ll be learning about my student’s culture and learning how to teach. I’m so glad I’m doing this before I go to Romania.
There were thirty of us on the course. Probably half were born outside New Zealand and a good number had English as a second language themselves. The best bit was on the second morning when our Bosnian coordinator greeted us all with “Zdravo” and gave us all Cyrillic name tags. She then proceeded to give us a 45-minute lesson in Bosnian using pictures of faces, her own facial expressions and gestures and nothing else. No English whatsoever. It put us in the shoes of our learners (we’ll usually have no knowledge of their first language) and was amazingly effective. It was engrossing, it was simply fun. And you never know, Bosnia isn’t too far from western Romania, it might come in handy one day…
Won’t it be great to be helping people by doing something that interests me? With lesson plans I’ll probably spend four hours a week on this, but forty in my day job. I wish it could be the other way round.
My brother and his girlfriend will have just touched down in Christchurch – they flew with China Southern, via Guangzhou. Cheap but tiring. I’ll be seeing them on Friday – hopefully they won’t have already pushed off somewhere by then. They’re here for three weeks.
Mum and Dad have booked their accommodation in Romania. They’ll be flying from Milan to Timișoara where they’ll spend four nights, then taking the train to Sibiu (four nights there), before moving on to Bucharest (three nights). I saw my cousin last night and she said it was terrible of my parents to “steal” my adventure by going there first, and to the exact two places that had excited me. She then said they might go skiing in Romania next January and catch up with me.
I did the 6.5 km version of Round the Bays yesterday, although I certainly didn’t run it all. I treated it as a long walk – I walked home instead of taking the bus. I played tennis after that so it was quite an active day for me.
Things have improved a bit since my last post – I haven’t given him an ultimatum or anything of that sort – but gosh, it’s just too hands-on, too much interaction. I need a break.
