Vladya

I started tutoring again this month. Filled my schedule immediately with lessons, as many as I could fit without going nuts, which comes to 12 hours a week.

I love tutoring. All the benefits of teaching with none of the drawbacks. Magic, really. If anyone has a person willing to pay me to tutor, I will be happy all the rest of my days.

A particular surprise has appeared in the guise of a red-headed 8 year old girl. She is my neighbor. Even by Moldovan village standards, she hails from a family of hicks. Imagine boondock Arkansas holler inhabitants. We met one day on the road after 7 months of my being here. She and her brother were barely dressed and covered head to toe in dirt. The took turns bumping a pram back and forth through mudpuddles. They had their smallest sibling in there.

I said "hi" they got curious and abandoned lil bro/sis. They spoke to me in thicker than thick village accents I barely understood. The girl, Vladya she introduced herself, picked up a used syringe out of one of the mud puddles, waved it around telling me what it was and promptly stabbed her finger with it. Horrified by all sorts of things, I tried talking and/or snatching it away from her but she moved too quick and tossed it to her brother who started running around with it.

Because she now had a puncture wound on her middle finger, Vladya cast around herself for a kiddie tournequette. She found a muddy candy wrapper. It was that super flexible tinfoil stuff that Japanese presents always come wrapped in.

Thus scarred, I've made a point of always talking to them. Tried talking with their mom, but if she's out of the house she's deep in gossip with someone. Vladya is the spitting image of her mother like no genetic copy I've seen anywhere else.

Her father I've seen once driving the family horse around.

So, I didn't even advertise my tutoring this year. People just started showing up to my office and I had to make a schedule damn quick.

Vladya was one such case, came in with two girls two grades above her who had been taking English with me for a year already. Within the two lessons we've had, Vladya can already speak, read and write better than them. She found herself a cast off text book and showed me how she's doing all the exercises on her own at home. I asked, she has no one in her family or whom she knows who speaks English.

She asked if she could sit with me all afternoon, practice. Sure. I have other lessons, you'll have to stay here at the desk and be quiet. Ok. Ok.

True to her word, she simply sat, translated stuff with her pirated textbook and listened in on whatever I was teaching the other kids.

Today, she decided she was done with English and asked if she could do her math homework. Sure.

Sums, obviously. However, she was only doing them asa:

54 + 73 = or 100 - 48 =

I asked about this structure:

54

+ 73

And she'd been taught, but didn't get it, besides, it's more frumos to do it all in one line like that.

Ok, well, do you want me to teach you this way? I think it is easier...

Ok.

It should be known that teaching math in a foreign language is crazy. And also, teaching English through teaching Math is equally crazy, but really, really productive and a highly effective way of using the language.

IE. it was a teaching goldmine.

Then I taught her how to use my iPod and she nearly died of happiness.

Otherwise, all my lessons (8 of them) today were a total frustrating waste of everyone's time.