by Last week was a good one. I had 14½ hours of teaching, I had an interview (that wasn’t supposed to be an interview) at a language school, and it looks like I have a new student. Maybe this crazy Romania thing might work out after all. In a sense it already has worked out of course. I’m living in a city that I love, doing a job that I love, doing my thing, without all that mind-numbing nothingness that I experienced day in, day out, for years. I’ve totally revolutionised my life, and how bloody cool is that?! But for my own sense of self-worth and, let’s face it, bank balance, I needed more work (and still do).
For the first time in eight months I ironed a shirt, and at 2pm on Friday I turned up at the language school just over the river, supposedly for an informal chat with two relatively young women. “This won’t be an interview.” Great. I was pretty relaxed. The woman on the right dragged out a copy of my CV which had some words like “actuarial” underlined in pencil. Presumably she’d Googled them. She described my decision to teach English after all those years in technical roles as “odd”. I did my best to emphasise that I really, really want to do this job, even if my CV might suggest otherwise. That felt a little weird. I thought of all those damn interviews in the past where was I totally unenthused, or worse. She then asked me to describe a time when I’d had to cope with a difficult situation in my teaching. I then said, “But you told me this wasn’t an interview!” The woman on the left, who teaches both English and French, went a little bit easier on me. The, er, informal chat lasted 50 minutes. They said they’ll contact me in the next week or two and I’m hopeful they’ll have something for me. Perhaps I’ll be able to help out in the intensive courses they run over the summer. Dealing with a class of students instead of the one-on-one teaching I’ve done so far will certainly be a challenge for me, but it’s one I’m up for.
On Saturday night I met Cosmin, my new student (hopefully that’s what he is) at a bar in the square here. He’s about the same age as me, but is married and has a boy of eleven. He lives in Dumbrăvița, where I currently teach the nine-year-old boy twice a week. Cosmin is pretty cosmic; he’s tall, sports a beard and has tattoos down the length of both arms, and on Saturday he wore several bracelets and a T-shirt just like the ones you’d get in Cosmic in Cuba Mall. For a living he puts up shades and marquees, and he wants to move with his family to Australia in November. I asked him to rate his level of English on a zero-to-ten scale; he told me zero. He started school under Communism and learnt French, not English. I’ll have one hell of a job getting him up to speed in just a few months, but I’ll try. We must have chatted for over an hour, my longest conversation in Romanian yet. Wow, I’m sitting outside here on a beautiful evening in a beautiful city, drinking the local beer and speaking a totally awesome language that hardly anybody else learns. Dammit, this is cool! Cosmin’s wife and friends later arrived, and he bought me four beers in all. If things go according to plan, we’ll start a week on Saturday. It should be good for my Romanian as well as his English.
Last week I had three lessons with my Skype student, but only one of those was an English lesson. She wanted some help with statistics, which is a requirement of her psychology course. The stats wasn’t too hard, but it was all in German so I was frantically Googling terms that, being German, ran to twenty letters or more. I was glad that I was able to help her.
