Language teaching - Life :)

Flake news

March 3, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I definitely didn’t come up with that pun. It’s been a white week here, and a massive departure from our otherwise mild winter. Yesterday it was minus 17 first thing in the morning, or if you’re American, one degree Fahrenheit.

I’ve had my fair share of cancellations this week, seven I think, which in the not too distant past would have annoyed the hell out of me. This week I’ve just felt tired and unenergetic and have had bouts of sinus pain, so the slight reduction in workload has been welcome if anything. On Wednesday I had a severe attack and somehow muddled through my second of four almost back-to-back lessons, feeling that I had a screwdriver rammed up my right nostril the whole time. More often than not it’s my left instead. The extreme weather probably isn’t helping me.

This week I’ve felt pretty happy with the standard of my work, or to be precise, how engaged my students have been, and let’s hope that continues.

 

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Brass monkeys

February 26, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Thirty-six hours of teaching last week. That’s almost a whole page of lessons in my notebook, and it’s getting to be a problem. A nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. I need a day off occasionally. Time for myself. Time to sit in the square and have a coffee. Time to be served by that complete lunatic in the funny bar next to the market. Time to not have to think about time all the time. I see people fishing on the Bega and it all looks wonderfully relaxing. I’d like to take up fishing, but right now I know next to nothing about it.

For some unknown reason Ryanair have decided to close their Timișoara base as from 25th March, cancelling both sets of flights I’d booked to and from the UK (in early April and for my brother’s wedding in late May) in the process. My aunt and uncle from New Zealand were also booked on the flight from Stansted to Timișoara on 28th May. We’ve since rebooked all our flights with Wizz Air, going to and from Luton rather than Stansted. What a pain.

“Welcome to Romania. Please turn your clocks back fifty years.” Not if the availability of Bitcoin is anything to go by. The currency of the future is readily available in machines dotted around the city. So is Ether, another cryptocurrency. I had a play with one of the machines which had 2.5 Bitcoins available. How many would you like? Hmmm, 2.5? That’ll be 80-odd thousand lei, please. Ah. I’ve probably missed the boat there.

For a minute there I thought I’d dodged winter pretty much entirely, but we’re now in the grip of an icy blast. It is cold! The next day with a non-negative expected high is Friday.

Three games of Scrabble today. My first was a loss on an extremely tight board that I’d prefer to forget (I had a tiny lead but went into overtime, costing me ten points, and forfeited the game a minute later after failing to find an elusive out play). I then had a close game, clinging on a bit in the end to win by 17. In my last game I managed to play my first nine-letter bingo on ISC: UNrESTING, a double-double through ES for 86 points. I won that game by 56.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports

How low can you go?

February 19, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Not much news since my last post. I’ve had 98 hours of teaching over the last three weeks. It’s a challenge coming up with new and interesting material for my students each time, especially now that my preparation time is limited. This morning I described the business of whether to use gerunds or infinitives after certain verbs as BBI: Boring But Important. Yesterday I had the usual business of my ten-year-old student asking me at regular intervals what the time was so he’d know how soon he could get rid of me.

There was another school shooting in America last week. Seventeen people dead. It’s all messed up there on so many levels. And now we have Trump tweeting that if the FBI had spent less time on the Russia inquiry they might have stopped the shooting. How low can you go?

I spoke to my brother tonight. He got completely the wrong end of the stick when I said I’d like to do something other than teaching. It was my own fault – I meant to say that although I enjoy my work immensely I’d like the occasional day off to travel and do other stuff. At the moment I have some lessons every single day. I will have a short break in early April as I spend a few days in the UK.

I’ve watched snatches of the Winter Olympics (officially the Olympic Winter Games, which doesn’t sound right to me). I read something online which suggested that much of the success of the luge is down to the name. Luge. It’s almost onomatopoeia. Wouldn’t it be fun to do the luge in Cluj? (Have you ever watched – or, heaven forbid, done – double luge? Now that is a weird event.) Several of my students, or their kids, have gone skiing in recent weeks, often in Austria. Yes, my students tend to have money.

I played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three by margins of 157, 171 and 201, and losing the other by just five points. My scores ranged from 422 to 492. My favourite word was COMiX, making CRAP at the same time, for 65.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

Another terrific Tuesday

February 14, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On the weird off-chance that anybody from Romania actually read my last post, I didn’t mean to have a go at your country, which I absolutely love. It’s more that I really want Romania to succeed, and an upswing in tourism (return tourists, in particular) would go some way to making that happen. The present standard of service frustrates me because most Romanians I’ve met outside the customer-facing world have been extremely welcoming.

Talking of frustration, the family who live in Moșnița Nouă cancelled both their lessons yesterday afternoon, less than an hour before we were due to start, depriving me of 160 lei. Their daughter “wasn’t in the mood”. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood either. I’ll have a chat with them if and when I see them next to let them know what my ground rules are. If they don’t like them, they can find another native English speaker in Timișoara to teach them. Good luck with that.

Today I had an early start with my beginner-level student. The clock ticked well past our 7:30 start time, and then finally the doorbell went. Phew. Waiting for that bell to go is the most stressful part of my job. I speak a fair bit of Romanian in my lessons with him. This morning we talked about our ancestors and where they came from. He was amazed to learn that it was summer in New Zealand and that people ski there, but not now. My next lesson was at noon: my 21-year-old female student has come on a lot. She knows how to learn, and that makes all the difference.

Next was the lolly-stick company. Last Thursday I gave two of my students a test, as required by the training company I work for. They both only managed percentage scores in the forties, and today I had to hand back their papers. I tried to reassure them that their results really didn’t mean that much (they’re more a reflection on me than on them). I even suggested that as a team they got an awesome score, but I’m not sure how that went down. The third student took his test today and I’ve yet to mark that. From the company I trekked more than a mile, including that muddy, rubbish-strewn track; every time I squelch my way through there I can see it’s been updated with more household junk from people who don’t give a toss. I arrived at Matei’s place just after five. In his room he now has a tank with two freshwater turtles; watching them eat was strangely fascinating. Every week he has something new. Last time it was a Google assistant. As usual, we didn’t do an awful lot of intense English. We read two chapters of David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy. I have the book in English; he just happens to have the same book in Romanian. For the first chapter, I read a chunk (a half-page or so) out loud in English and he read the same chunk in Romanian, and we took turns until we reached the end of the chapter. For the second chapter we swapped roles. Matei suggested a modification to the rules of my Space Race game – some sort of bonus if you get all three of your spaceships in a row – and it’s certainly worth considering. At the start of my lesson with Matei I got a phone call from a prospective student and I’ve booked her in for Friday morning.

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania

“Customer service” doesn’t translate into Romanian

February 12, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve got no real news, probably because work tends to get in the way of news. My most memorable lesson last week was one in which I complained about how Romanian banks (locally-owned or not) charge for everything: incoming payments, cash withdrawals, or even having just an account in the first place. Their commissions often run into several percent of the value of whatever payment you’re making or receiving, and many people must surely avoid the banking system entirely as a result (as I manage to do most of the time, because I usually get paid in cash). I expected my students to say, yes it’s bloody ridiculous, banks are just parasites that make far too much money, but instead they thought all the fees were completely justified. There’s a wider point here: by and large customer service in Romania is shit. Romanians are extremely used to it being shit, to the point where they don’t expect anything else but shit, so there’s very little incentive for anybody to provide service that’s non-shit. Except of course, when dealing with tourists. In her scrapbook, my friend described the “ice maiden” she encountered at the tourist office here in Timișoara; she might have been the same lady I dealt with on my arrival, who managed to be very aggressive and defensive at the same time when all I wanted to know was how the tram tickets worked. People’s customer service experiences in a new country have a huge bearing on how they view that country; Romanians don’t seem to have figured that out at all yet. (

I’ve got five lessons scheduled for each of the next three days.

 

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A potential problem I never expected to have

February 5, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I taught for almost 32 hours last week, my busiest week to date. It wasn’t easy as I battled sinus problems, diarrhoea, and general feelings of lethargy. At the last minute, my students asked me to postpone this morning’s lesson, so I hopped on the number 7 tram and browsed the bustling Flavia market, but didn’t buy anything. I went there several times during my first winter in the city; at that time there was an entrance fee of 2 lei, but that’s since been bumped up to 5. I also went to Shopping City, as much as I dislike malls, and at the checkout in Carrefour was an old student of mine whom I failed to recognise initially. We had our rearranged lesson this afternoon.

I’m very likely to beat last week’s record in the coming seven days, and may even smash it, but I’ve got to be a bit careful here. As nice as it is to have heaps of business, if it becomes stressful over a prolonged period then the purpose of my coming here in the first place is mostly defeated. I won’t be able to enjoy the city because I’ll either be stuck at home or rushing to get to my next lesson, probably in Dumbrăvița. I’ll certainly need to take some time off every now and then (at least I’ll be able to afford to), and on that note I’ve booked a few days in the UK over Easter. Not Easter as I know it, but Orthodox Easter which is the following weekend.

The face of Timișoara, or at least some of it, is changing quite rapidly. A monstrous 1200-apartment complex, complete with three schools, is going up at a rate of knots on Bulevardul Take Ionescu. A nasty triangular corporate behemoth with M-shaped sides sprung up last year outside Iulius Mall. And on a smaller scale, premises that don’t seem to belong are popping up all the time. “Go Nuts 4 Donuts” operates from a twee pink caravan, and looks totally out of place next to all the refreshingly untwee kiosks and stalls of Piața 700. A few days ago a shop selling Scandinavian clothing brands, but whose products have almost certainly been nowhere near Copenhagen, opened just 100 metres from me. Before long shops like that will probably be the norm.

No, Simona didn’t win. I only saw the tail end of the second set, where she was in the ascendancy. What a titanic battle it must have been. I saw rather more of the men’s match, which never really scaled the heights despite going five sets. Cilic played very well, especially on the important points, and I thought at the start of the the final set that there was every chance he could pull off the upset that I was hoping for. Alas, the protracted games at the start of the decider all went Fed’s way, and that was pretty much that.

Language teaching - Tennis - Travel: Romania

Happy memories

January 27, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Next week I could have over 30 hours of lessons, and that’s without that young couple with whom I had 12 hours a week until just before Christmas. They said that they’d be back shortly after 2nd February, when their exam session finishes. In other words, I face the imminent prospect of being totally knackered.

My travel companions from four months ago have sent me (as a present) a quite wonderful scrapbook of our trip, full of photos and diary entries. It must have taken several hours to put together. So many wonderful little things happened; I’m so glad that someone had the presence of mind to record them. I can’t believe how much I’d forgotten, like the time the car-hire man told me to maintain a good distance from the vehicle in front because the brakes might not be up to it, or the rubbery omelettes we had for breakfast, or the huge wedding party, out of the blue, at 8pm in a primitive village. And of course, just the wonderful scenery, pretty much wherever we went.

Twelve hours from now, another big opportunity to snatch her maiden grand slam will come Simona Halep’s way. I only saw her semi-final with Angelique Kerber from 2-2 in the final set because I had a lesson, but I was grateful to see what I did. For me it was literally edge-of-the-seat (and off-the-seat) stuff. Halep played noticeably more aggressively than I’m used to seeing her, and that bodes well for the final. Perhaps the fact that her very participation in the tournament has so often been hanging by a thread will relax her for the final. Wozniacki, her opponent in the final, has had a very precarious path too. In fact the two players have faced a whopping seven match points between them, including five for Simona in two separate matches. I’ll miss most of the final, or perhaps even all of it if it’s a quick one, because I’ll be working.

Language teaching - Scrabble - Tennis

Workload update

January 22, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I decided to actually count how many students I have. It’s 24. That number includes four couples (well three actual couples, plus a brother and sister), and two students (Matei and Timea) whose first names are anagrams of each other. I also have an initial Skype meeting with a potential 25th student tomorrow night. In other words, things are likely to get pretty crazy. I had a difficult session yesterday with a ten-year-old boy who described just about everything as nașpa, which is a slang word meaning “crap”. School was nașpa; learning English at school was total nașpa. I’m sure my lesson was nașpa as well.
My cousin said I should think about bringing somebody else into my “team”, but that would take things to a whole new level, and who would that person be exactly? (My point of difference is that I’m a native speaker. Where would I get another one from?) It’s something I could maybe consider in a couple of years, but right now I think it would be stress on a stick, which is precisely what I wanted to avoid when I came here.

I’ve only caught snatches of the Australian Open – I’ve been too busy to give a whole match my full attention – but much of what I’ve seen has been compelling. I didn’t see any of Simona Halep’s 3¾-hour match with Lauren Davis in the searing heat, but it must have been something. Women’s matches that go deep into an extended final set are a rarity, because of the relative lack of service dominance in the women’s game, so they’re invariably a treat when they do get that far.

I played two games of Scrabble this evening, winning them both. The first I won 462-331. I got rubbish in the early stages and swapped tiles twice, but I found three bingos in the second half of the game to run out a comfortable winner. In the second game (14 minutes, so some time pressure) I benefited from high-scoring tiles at the beginning, so when my opponent played a bingo I still held a slender lead. I was slightly fortunate that he provided a spot for a bingo of my own late in the game, and I won with something to spare, 375 to 299. My rating has reached 1101 (a new high) but if I do climb the rankings it’ll take a while – I don’t get to play all that often.

Language teaching - Scrabble

Monopoly (and a bit of Scrabble)

January 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I put up some more ads about ten days ago (online and at the university) and I’ve now got half a dozen new students, more or less, depending on how you count them. As for how many students I’ve got in total, I haven’t a clue. As far as I know, I have a monopoly – I’m the only native English speaker in Timișoara giving private lessons. It’s a mad situation to find myself in. As I recently mentioned, I did put my prices up, but perhaps I was a bit conservative.

Today I had only new students. I had my first appointment at 9am with a couple in Moșnița Nouă, one of several towns or villages that are officially outside Timișoara but, thanks to recent development, have now joined up with the main city.  I went to see them; getting there was a bit of a mission. There’s no bus or tram that gets particularly close. At about 7:55 I took the number 4 tram from Piața Libertății to the end of the line, which was even further from my destination than I thought. I traipsed along a main road, in the mud, past urban chicken coops, urban sheep pens, the milestone (or kilometre-plastic to be more accurate) telling me that I was 5 kilometres from Timișoara and 54 from Lugoj, then the one that said 6 and 53, and I wondered whether I’d ever find this place, even with the map on my phone. Maybe I should just walk to Lugoj. Streets were unnamed, houses un-numbered. Relieved, I arrived at 9:01. Not only were the couple present but their children (21 and 17) as well, all four of them in an upstairs study. We really just chatted. Next week I’ll have two lessons with them: one with the parents and one with the children, who are at a higher level than their mum and dad. Their dad drove me home, and said he’d pick me up in future. He told me that I might be able to get a new watch strap at the Bega shopping centre. I went there before my next lesson, and they did indeed have a leather strap that fitted my Swatch. It was pretty damn expensive: 80 lei. But I guess that’s to be expected when, as far as I know, they’re the only place in Timișoara that does Swatch straps.

At 2pm I had a lesson with an older man who said he was a quantum chemist. He came with a fairly long text about Hans Hellmann, a German quantum chemist who was executed in the Great Purge. My student wanted to practise reading a complicated text, and it was certainly that. I also think the piece had been slightly awkwardly translated from German. Then at four I had my first session with a 25-year-old Italian guy called Luca who works at the main hospital in town. When he phoned me earlier this week, he said, “My name is Luca.” I wanted to ask him if he lived on the second floor, but thought better of it.

I’m trying to learn the three-letter Scrabble words. There are 1300 of them, and because they’re only three letters long, they’re hard to distinguish from one another. It isn’t that easy to remember that KAM is a word but FAM and VAM aren’t, or that RET is acceptable and DET isn’t. But as much as I hate learning short strings of letters that someone has arbitrarily decided are playable, unfortunately they come up all the time so they’re vital to your success or otherwise.

Language teaching - Romania

A brief (but welcome) change of scenery

January 10, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Sunday morning I still didn’t feel wonderful. After the lesson I joined my students for a drink at Porto Arte, a bar by the Bega, five minutes’ walk from here. After sitting there for nearly two hours, I was prepared to go home. But then they asked me if I wanted to go to Herneacova, a place I’d heard of but knew nothing about and wouldn’t have been able to locate on a map. I said yes but my head was in a spin: I hadn’t mentally paced myself for spending who knows how many extra hours with people. Just how far away is this place? I was also dehydrated. If I hadn’t managed to get a bottle of water at Recaș, I’d have been really struggling. Herneacova is a fairly poor but typically picturesque Romanian village, while two kilometres outside the village is an arena which holds international equestrian events, and a domain (in New Zealand terminology) which is popular with families. The highlight, apart from the few horses, was probably watching somebody’s radio-controlled car being chased by a small dog. It was a beautiful day—it felt like spring—and when I did get home I was very glad that I’d accepted their invitation and got out of the city.

I guessed there were a million Johns or variations thereof who were celebrating their saint’s day on Sunday, but the number was actually two million, or one in ten Romanians. That day really marked the end of the festive season; yesterday, after being a fixture in the square for 5½ weeks, the Christmas market sheds were dismantled.

I now realise that teaching kids can be both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. My first lessons with those two new kids yesterday were definitely both in the latter category. I ran out of material both times, for completely different reasons, and because I wasn’t at home I didn’t have any emergency supplies. The 13-year-old girl (90 minutes with her) was even better than I’d anticipated, so we she got through everything (a lesson on London, where she’d like to go) in double-quick time without her really being challenged. The 10-year-old boy was mostly unenthusiastic and didn’t really want to speak English, but I actually think he’ll be easier to teach in the long run, because I already have material I can use with him. With her, I’ve got to come up with stuff that’s at an upper-intermediate level and is age-appropriate and doesn’t bore her: although she seems motivated to learn, that’s no easy task.

My students, or their parents, are often in a different financial league from your average Ion or Ioana. It’s extremely noticeable in my lessons with the kids in Dumbrăvița, just as it was in Auckland all those years ago when I did a spot of maths tuition, often in suburbs like Remuera. Last night my student wouldn’t shut up about both her and her husband’s German cars. I had a much more interesting discussion of cars with a student last week: the Yugo, the Trabant (with its two-stroke engine), and the various incarnations of the Dacia, such as this hopelessly unreliable one (the Lăstun, which means “housemartin”) with a 500 cc engine, which was built in a factory right here in Timișoara. It’s sporting a Ceaușescu-era Timiș County number plate.

My Romanian is still in need of some massive improvement. More on that next time.