by This week I’ve had five 90-minute maths lessons with a girl who is 16 coming 17. I taught her the basics of trig, which she took to like a duck to water. It’s always good on the (relatively rare) occasions that they just get something. In today’s session, after we’d been through some constructions with a compass and straightedge, we did part of a past paper. The question she struggled most with was what I considered one of the easiest. Sophie uses two-thirds of a litre of milk per day. A bottle of milk contains 2 litres. Show that she’ll need to buy 3 bottles to last her 7 days. Soon there was an opaque soup of fractions and common denominators and who knows what else on her page.
That’s a lot of time spent with one person in a week. Her parents clearly have no problem affording that many lessons, and it may well be more of the same next week. She turns up in a car that cost more than mine did, wearing clothes that cost more than mine, with a phone that cost much more than mine, and so on. I think she’ll do fine in her IGCSE next year. And in life. She’s fine, but she’s just the sort of person who becomes the kind of manager that I’d prefer not to have. I mentioned her car – well, in Romania you’re allowed to drive an underpowered “toy” car at 16, which is what she has. Only at 18 can you drive a standard car.
I’ve done a bit better with my Romanian of late. The odd extra YouTube video or phone call or chat at the market. Visiting the market in the evening, when it’s quieter, is better for that. Some of the stallholders are intrigued. I mean, us non-native speakers of Romanian are thin on the ground, so they want to know the story. The nice ones do, anyway. One or two take my imperfect Romanian as an affront to their ears.
Mum and Dad are suffering a bit from jet lag. More than they did when they arrived in Romania, and that’s despite them breaking up the journey. At least Dad had decent compression stockings this time, so his feet didn’t swell up alarmingly. He’d just been to see the doctor who complimented him on keeping his warfarin levels well within the safe range. If only Mum could see the doctor too. When I asked her about her regularity, she succinctly said, “my irregularity, you mean”.
I recently unearthed this blog post from February 2021 in which I said I was “all for” my parents’ move. Yikes. I really had no idea, did I? I seriously thought they’d be simplifying their lives by moving into somewhere smaller. I trusted them fully – they knew about houses and stuff, I didn’t. And I didn’t quite appreciate how good their old place was. And was it really 4½ years ago?
Some problems from the linguistics competition:
