This blog has moved.

I have taken the time to move all my blog stories of life in Romania, and teaching in Romania to this site.

http://www.anysubjects.com


Please come and read the latest adventures I have had with teaching and being in Romania.

Time to Teach Academy

Time to teach is now expanding back into the 'real world' as it is now creating its own nursery for children in Romania. The nursery will be for children wanting a firm education, with a British teacher leading them.

We will also offer a year long booster course for children studying Year 6 - it is very exciting, purely as I think it is a skill anyone could do, and now the UK government offers so much for each subject.

The weather is getting hotter and I slept in the sun.

Peter

Welcome back to the world of Blog

I have been so busy since I last blogged, and now am a successful educational consultant, with my own pupils, 2 growing educational websites and lots of time on my hands.

The weather in Romania is getting warmer - the impact of this is that all the builders and roadworks which were frozen solid are now back to full flow. The street where I live was wonderful when I moved in - then the road works started - my car actually fell down the hole one night as the barrier didn't quite extend to the end...

This was an interesting time as the chap who pulled me out waited to be paid for his efforts, while I waited until he gave up - a shout from upstairs that supper was on the table was a big enough distraction for saving a few pounds

The following day as I jumped out the car, I lost my wallet - oddly enough was returned passport and all useful stuff - only money lost, so not bad.

I am now building a new site for teachers at http://www.freeducation.co.uk - which is well worth a visit.

Let me know what you came to read and I will tell you more about it.

Dr Fog

Holidays in Romania

I have just organised for some friends and family a wonderful holiday out here! It is a very different place to many other places you may have visited. It is however very much worth it! If you find a local family they generally don't like to tell you how many courses they have loving prepared for you and so as you think each is the last and are ready to burst, they bring out another.

They are also rather more embarassed by the subject of money, as this a bit of a hot potato, as no-one likes to think someone has more or less than them and so your Romanian host will do his very best to pay for everything, which in the UK would be fine. Here however you need to be faster than your host and try and 'visit the toilet' i.e pay the bill before they do, as then they can't be made bankrupt by your stay.

Another odd thing we noticed of UK visitors over here was their complete lack of desire of helping in the house so we would just watch the washing up build up until we could take it no more - and then have to wash it all and serve beers at the same time. However what many foreigners do get right is the bringing of great presents, as the one thing we do lack here are decent Western goods, and things like perfume go down a treat.

We then headed off to the mountains to get some walking, eating and drinking in. This was in itself an experience as I doubt many British people would know how to make a screwdriver into a gearstick and carry on driving... as the said stick happended to snap off at the point where you would least like it to, i.e up in the snowy mountains and far from much life, it was all the more interesting. Likewise they were very worried over how much snow or ice you had and so spent long times filling you up with hot wine to make sure you kept on going strong.

Due to a slight overbooking we came across another interesting difference between the British and the Romanians... the British had a clear rule of one person per bed unless of course you were a couple, while the Romanians viewed it all more like if you were sharing a holiday, you could also share beds etc...

On my first finding of this I was quite surprised as I even found teachers on school trips doubling up in beds to save on the cost of the places as you pay per room... then I got use to it enough not to complain but still enough to always get my own bed - which of course was great!

We had to search quite hard for decent snow in many of the places, but in Bran we found loads and so had enough to go sledging... as I reported however as the Romanians know what a Romanian hospital is like while the Brits assume they are like British hospitals, the Romanians are very risk adverse, while the Brits were all for launching themselves off silly slopes etc. Even a plastic bad sledge ride was considered a danger to the back for the Romanians... so we went off walking instead... but the hills were considered to steep so only the Brits were found at the top, while the Romanians remained at the bottom... only on my way down in rather slippery snow did I decide that perhaps the Romanians had a point...

Another odd thing here is when you buy plane tickets... if you buy them to come here they are so much cheaper than if you buy them to leave here and then return - all the taxes are against us... ironically though, if you travel by bus to the UK, which takes 3 long days, it costs more than the 3 hour flight... which I found really odd, as obviously you would expect keeping a thing the size of serveral buses flying at about 600 mph would require much more effort than a beaten up old bus chugging along the motorways of Europe...

Being ill and far from home.

After a long absence I decided that it was good to get back into writing this weekly log to see how things in life were rolling here. First my wife's grandfather became ill. He had for many years been told if he needed an operation but this would require him to stop lifting things for about 6 months... which was not something he was so keen on as he lived in the country and of course if you lack water, and need to chop wood and look after 3 cows 'not lifting' is just not going to happen...

This method worked for about 10 years, until one night he had terrible pains in his stomach, which required an emergency dash to the hospital and my first real introduction into the Romanian medical services. It is not somewhere you really want to become ill. He needed an emergency operation.... the doctor looked him over and muttered in Romanian words similar to'Important golf game today I didn't want to miss'... give me an extra 200 Euros to be in to see your grandfather... then of course we had to see the people administering the painkillers and gas... hmm they said, give me another 50 euros and I will pay attention... oh and I will go off shift half way through, and so you will need to also give 50 euros to my replacement...

The nurse then comes in - hmmm I will be assisting in this operation - put the money under the pillow for me...

So with all the relevant hands greased we could get underway, and the operation was a success... I then thought it would go something like in the UK - he would get well and off we go... I didn't realise each day he was in, another load of cash would need to be added to the nurses pocket (pushing it in or he would be ignored), and that it was a huge whole family affair to make sure he was fed, cleaned etc.

I had a problem with a toe - the very thought of going through all that however has left me with simply a very sore toe which I am now treating with a cream designed for cows (it is amazing what one can buy here!), followed sometimes by adding some boiling hot dettol on the wound to speed up recovery. The fear of what would happen if I say broke a leg or arm or something like that has cured me needless to say of any desire to go skiing or any other danerous sport...

The other problem however is when you are out here on very long term contracts like me, and something terrible goes wrong at home, you are equally isolated from it all. My step father has suddenly become ill and while I can do nothing for him, I would have at least been able to visit at weekends, here you just have to sit and wait and worry. It is for this reason I have set up this offering of my readers being able to send him a book (to chris@timetoteach.co.uk - click here as then I can at least feel as if I am doing something and it means on regular occasions I will be able to send him books, tapes and CDs to while away his time in bed while he recovers.

The Romanians try their best to avoid being ill and so have many less than certain ideas which include the current, where if you open two windows in a house and let the wind blow between them, you will become ill. Likewise if you sweat in the summer and don't change your shirt or wet your hair or have a bath and go outside, you will almost certainly become very ill. Each and every illness seems to be related back to current in some way. The downside of all of this is of course that those of us not brought up on the belief also have to play along. When the weather is boiling hot here, and I open a window or two in the car, a howl of protest soon closes it, so to save the health of 3 Romanians worried about getting the flu, one poor Brit is slowly melting away in heat exhaustion! Ce la vie!

The problem of course with all of this is you can't actaully avoid the corruption as if you were stupid enough to play the British card of 'Say no to corruption', you would simply be left in bed with no medical help and no nurse... the answer is probably higher wages so they do not have to resort to this, though rumour has it that only in Romania do you find nurses actually paying the hospital to be employed as the tips made on the wards are so good!

Would you like to regularly write about life as a teacher?

If you would like to join this weblog and write your experiences as an International Teacher or Ex-pat living abroad, the more obscure the country the better, please email timetoteach@timetoeach.co.uk and I will send you an invite to join. After that you can write and ask all your professional questions and add more details of things which work well for you, or just as important, things which go wrong - the more funny the better!

I only ask you write carefully as any contributer who is found to be writing anything libelous (so writing and naming terrible interational schools is out), as obviously I want this to provide a light relief to teachers who are really looking at this site as a way to relax.

Don't forget all poems are also need by my poem weblog site which is also hosted by Time to Teach.

Christmas play time!

Todays professional question: How do you do your shared reading?

Christmas play time is back on us at the school- I have never taught rich kids before. The Year 4 ego is such a sensitive thing. On my first day of getting m Year 4's singing and dancing (a bit like making them rub their heads and pat their tummies at the same time, can't be done at the age of 9!), I had 4 boys on strike in tears as they were not allowed ot breakdance to 'He ain't heavy, he's my brother'...

By the end of the day the boys were really liking it, and we were going great guns as they tried to outsing the girls in their solo parts - only for the song to change to fit better into the play 'The Ice Demon'... this had its own odd effects. One little boy became convinced that another child's mother had made the change rather than an annoying change by the music teacher to make our song more upbeat. So insead he launched into a few attacks on her daughter to show her he didn't like change... while I am tried to think of a new way to make the song 'Stand by me' a fun song for them! It will now require a triangle and some rattles for the boys who wanted to look cool and not dance, while the the rest sing and dance for all they are worth!

I am now also trying to get all the reports written, which is fun as I need to stop and think what each child is like in every class and not to use the same phrase as in other reports, which of course is always something I hve enjoyed in the past! I now have a week to get them all in. The parents are at least all pleased by what I do... but this doesnot get translated into top quality gifts. Last year it included an 'interesting' ashtray with a scary metal spider sitting on it, and a glass drinks jar (which I found later to be very expensive) which ended in the country as it looked like a chemical lab flask!

The race is now on to get to the country and back before the snow sets in and I get stranded in Bucharest for a few months as my Dacia has already shown it cannot go on ice or snow without slipping in a dangerous way down a hill (we got caught at a top of a mountain with the car as we drove a short cut) ...

On Wednesday it is Independence day, which is not where lots of space ships land but where everything closes including the schools for the day. So I guess it can be re-written as report writing day. I may even go out and do some Christmas shopping - though this is a real challenge as there is not a lot which is worth buying - so I will stick to buying crystal glasses, gold and silver and hoping my tastes in jewellery are improving!

The house conversion is going well - if that is the word. The costs for a door in nearly a third world country are amazing - we are having to import from Italy for decent doors and windows and kitchens - I had a great impression Romania was full of wood - but none seems to end up in good doors - I guess they are too busy exporting it to more backward countries, such as Bulgaria... as the prices are UK or at least european in there size, I am now not surprised the local houses we saw were in such bad shape - the doors are too expensive to replace! Still at least we now have a worker working for us. However unlike in the UK thisrequires a full service to the builders as you offer them baths, housing, food, clothes and heating to make sure they are happy. They live and sleep in the apartment so get all the benefits of a nice address, while we have to patiently wait.

Well a few more tales are now about to unfold as I await for the Christmas holidays to arrive and produce their own set of fun as we host a party for 9 people in the mountains.

Poems for all!

Time to teach is now about to offer a brand new service and needs the help of as many teachers as possible from all around the world to help. As you know, www.timetoteach.co.uk is a very easy name to remember, so when you tell them little George or Jane as a poem on the site, the parents are not likely to forget the address and can read and comment on their child's poem. You can also read the poems and comment as to how they could improve their writing styles or make them longer and better.

At the end of the year, if there is enough interest, the poems will then be complied by the Time to Teach team and made into a book which will be sold for about $20 (£10) per copy, plus postage from Romania. Parent all over the world will then be able to see their child's work in print, and to treasure and send onto grandparents etc, who are often many countries away.

I am happy for you to send whole classes, though would prefer you weed out the less brilliant or re-edit them in the class prior to submitting them here as we need to keep a certain standard if we are to publish them at the end of the year.

As I know teachers will be keen to exploit this new amount of exposure, if teachers or parents send me their email addresses, I can then send them an invite to become a free member of the poetry club and to directly add their poems to the site rather than having to email each set of poems to me.

Let me know if are interested or tell your friends about this new service.

Romance and foreigners

I am still working out quite where to go as a foreigner in Bucharest, as I have been to the ex - pat places and the food is infinately worse and more expensive than the local haunts.

I have found that the ex-pats seems to consist of only a few different types of people. There are those like me who make a huge wide bearth around all the other groups and try to live as simple a Romanian life as possible. These are the ones which have gone native, which is fine for some, though most would miss the luxury of being rich and spending in a cheaper country.

Lots of the ex-pat teachers here are an odd buch. I was surprised to see how much they spend and how little they save. Those which have a house or apartment somewhere to move back to is a very small minority. I do admit to worrying on their behalf as I ponder quite what happens when you reach a point you can no longer teach and so have to settle somewhere.... for those who are interested and from the UK - a little fact may have missed you in that you can still pay your state pension while out and about abroad.

Most of the teachers I know are single women. This is great fun and I enjoyed this fact tremendously before getting married as they are a very liberated outgoing sort. I heard one who fell for the line from a Romanian security guard 'I know I must not speak to you but I can't stop myself'... he got a date, she got a stalker... and drinking seems to be the order of the day.

I am still trying to find where people hang out here and which clubs and groups there are. Any one with top suggestions for Romanian spots of interests for the foreigner should let me know so in future editions of this I can update the world on them and restuaruants to visit or of course avoid!

I have had all sorts of offers from local women here on the strength of my foreigner status, most of which were marriages of convieneces. Over 50% of the young population want to leave in anyway they can from here, while 75% state they don't want children in Romania as children are too expensive and jobs hard to come by... and as they have only 1 child each to begin with, the future does not look good unless they marry a foreigner. And of course this then gives them status, and a ticket out of here... The best offer I had was the chance to own huge amounts of land in return for a passport... unfortunately at the time she was sleeping with the boss and he was in the same nightclub as me so I let it pass! There are top quality women here though, if you meet a firm Orthodox girl, they have much more traditional values... saved me a fortune in food bills as they were all taught that if a man takes you to a restuaruant, he wants much more.... so I had a year of Romanian home cooking and being watched by the parents.

As Romanians are poor and cost of housing silly - if you do marry here and are Romanian you often move in with one of the sets of parents. The only real space you have is the parks. If you walk in the parks here, they are so full of couples who have no where else to go to be alone. I compare this to the UK where most of the parks were full of same sex groups.... here in the warm evenings the sight of so many happy couples wandering really do make me smile!

Then there is the marriage... this could be written in hundreds of ways. You pick the church nearest the restauraunt. You get paid in cash not presents, so no toasters, and it goes on for about 3 days. This year I am being a God father to a couple. This means I will be responsible for their moral well fare in the future...

The role of the male in Romania and more observations

I have married into a very traditional Romanian family. This is wonderful as there are still clearly defioned male and female roles within the family. However saying that, there is also a lot of equality before anyone thinks the women are hard done by.

However when the new son-in-law (i.e. me) comes into the equation, things have had to change a little. There are all sorts of interesting problems. One being as a foreigner, I command a much larger salary than a local... it is a strange inherent racism here which I have not seen anywhere else, where if you are a foreigner, purely for this qualification, you are considered above and beyond the local skills, even if they are equally well trained.. the problem with this is it can unbalance the whole tradions here. The ideas are based on the father having a little money (about $500 per month) and so the children should be earning less... but when they earn more they don't want to live on subsistence level, so they try to spend much more than the parents are use to. Of course as we are a close family, we also then spend on the parents, so they can join in our fun and adventures and eating out... the problem being now that the father who can't match the UK spending power feels less happy as now he is not the head of the family finacially. I have no idea what to do! After all I can't not spend as this would be silly as the lei is always slipping down and down, so saving here is tough. I love helping out the family as it is all so very unfair here, with top professionals earning not nearly as much as that of the West but the prices rising to match the West. (Reading itself for the EU). On further observation, I noticed that to make up for this, he still makes lots of major decisions, and I have to argue why I don't agree, being banker and the eventual person who will live in apartment etc. I am sure the lack of financial power is being replaced by the more difficult to control seniority power. Other ex-pat husbands admit this gets too much at time, as we all seem to have done quite well up until now!

Of course being a foreigner, I am also having to learn to behave like a Romanian husband, which is an interesting challenge in itself in the fact that I am now having to learn how to chop wood and slice the heads off chickens. Alas for me, I am one of those sorts who merely needs to lift and axe and a finger is lying helpless on the floor! I do try and it is coming together slowly, but I am still a long way off being practical! Still I am in the process learning all sorts of Romanian words as my family come and watch and then have to resolve the disasters I have got myself into. For this reason we have a man in the apartment we are now making to do it all, as I certainly would not like to live in a house I knew I had built as the electrics etc would be rather haphazard!

The other important job of the male is as driver. When your wife has a bad back, it is all the more important. Oddly my car seems to drift into each and every bump on the way, and so she is driving as it saves thar car! The problem is each bump is where you go most often in the road... when you drive on the exrpess way this is a real experience... imagine a skier doing the salom and then translate this in your mind to a 30 year old battered old dacia (which has oddly enouh be banned from travelling in the rest of Europe!), and you get the idea long trips are often taken by train!

My final observation of the day is the complete lack of trust in the banks. This weekend I had to complete a 5 hour each way car journey to pay for a deposit for a few days in a villa in the mountains. In England you would phone, give your credit card number and all would be done. Here credit cards are still a new thing, so you have to go loaded down with cash to make all arrangements... the advantage being you get to see the place and of course escape Bucharest for the weekend. The problem being it is a long way to pay!

Oh - and that leads me to hat buying here... while there my wife insisted in the falling temperatures I got a new hat... I looked at them and ended up needing a huge Russian hat, I enquired what it was made from... oh - the purest seal was the answer... so I obviously did the usual foreigner thing and stormed off in a huff that I was not having a half clubbed to death seal on my head... my wife lets me seethe before pointing out at -21C your ears drop off and he had an identical ecological version... he assured me this not the same hat as before and as I know my family would have bought me the hat at double the price in Bucharest, I acceeded to buy the ecological version... oddly since then I have developed a passion for raw mackeral and balancing beach balls on the end of my nose in public while going arff arff... so the seal lives on!

Christmas in Romania

I now have only 1 month left to go before we break up for Christmas. It is a great time of year as each day the weather gets colder and colder, it shouldn't be long before we have snow here, it is a joy to always have a white Christmas... by March the thrill wears off... unless of course you are driving the old Dacia I have, then the thrill wears off as the first few flakes touch the ground as the roads here are so slippery anyway... it is nice to see the drain covers as I have found as soon as the snow falls, people start coming and selling them for scrap as no one can see they are gone... more than once I have almost also disappaeared down one, as I still have a childish joy of jumping into puddles!

If you follow the Orthodox Romanian calander, you will now also stop eating meat or cheese, so your diet, already fat-rich, takes on new leaps as you try to replace all the proteins in your diet with something else... then of course there is the no sex, which extends to beyond Christmas day, as it is considered a major sin to share such pleasures on Jesus's birthday.

Then you have to decide what you want to buy everyone for Christmas. The shops are good for clothes and crystal. There is however also a lot of rubbish, like everywhere else. I have still to find the time to start. As a foreigner, you also have to avoid market stalls as all prices take on an extra multiple of 5 or 10. Still - with music everywhere, it is still a magical time here.

Professional question: How do people cope when their children who are well behaved in class go wild in another person's class? I have experienced this this week and would love to know any successful strategies which make sure the children maintain their good behaviour in all classes, regardless of the teacher.

After Christmas I will then join a group of friends and head into the mountains. This is another adventure as taking the Dacia in the snow outside the safety of Bucharest, is again something I have not done yet. I know some roads are cleared, but by no means all.

Good news for me is that the British Potatoe Board are considering my request to join their grow your own potatoe competition for British schools. I am hopeful though I am sure that with freezing winters and boiling hot summers, that our efforts will not go to far! But it will be fun for the Year 4 class!

Click on some of our links and see what our sponsors are wanting. Hope you like the additional literacy lessons we now have found for you to use. Over the next few weeks we intend to add science and the humanities. Any requests for certain subjects?.

House Buying in Romania

Well after a Year, I have finally bought an apartment here! It is a real challenge as everyone everywhere wants to steal all your hard currency off you for nothing at all! So far this year I would say there were about 4 houses out of well over 40 which I saw which merited any interest at all!

The problem is that Romanian housing stock is quite run down as no one can afford to make a decent house (after all every 30 years a huge Earthquake comes and knocks and weakens everything!). But not deterred, I thought that coming here with lots of UK cash would make it easy - I watched as prices doubled, but the quality did not. There is so much you need to be careful of, as you can't be sure who owns the house in many cases as it was taken off the original owners in the communist times, and there is no certainty that the original owner or a long forgotton relative will come back clutching the papers.

When you do find one, you are on your own in terms of structural survey, and only then do you appreciate the need of one in the UK, as you discover there are missing metal bands in the roof, which means it will fall down in a big shake, or the roof needs fixing and noone else in the apartment has any money to help you cover it...

As soon as you say, I would like to buy an apartment please, unless you say it with a Romanian accent, the prices really soar. I found one flat which started life at 65,000$ (About £30,000), and by the end of the sentence had magically soared to 90, 000 Euros, (about £60,000)... most apartments prices rose. Those which did not were next to places you really would not want to visit, let alone live, which meant everyone were keen to see them sold for anything... the best in this circumstance was a house so close to the cooling towers of the local electric powerstation, that 'we don't need to switch on the heating in winter (which gets to -21C) here as the Towers keep us warm... '. I decided living so close to the bealching source of pollution struck it off my list!

Then, just say you do find a house, while hiding the fact you are a foreigner (which stops you buying much anyway!), you then have the transaction. Romanians have no faith in the banks, which means you have to travel across the city, with more than the lifetimes wages of a local worker in your hand, to meet the sellers, who want to count the cash with you, but won't come to your bank as it is not at their solicitors office, and then when it is counted, need a lift back to the bank (which charged you huge amounts of commission for taking out hard currency!), to put it back in!

Then you need to work out quite what to do with the place, as it now needs completely gutting and making decent... The problem here is you are in a third world country, where quality is not high on the agenda, and getting anythin IKEA like is a difficulty, as much as living without it! So we are now needing to search high and low for the objects. The alternative is to pay 500 euros to someone who will happily redesign for you an Eastern Block flat, with all its furniture, with of course you then have to drive around trying to find... so I am using a magazine and lots of imagination.

However if you do buy, when it comes to renting it out to other foreigners, it is very simple as everyone now are charging so much to people coming to live in the city, that you can charge almost anything as Western companies are picking up the bill - but this of course would require you to go through the house buying process more than once - as you still need somewhere to live as the street children take offence at others living in the heating ducts with them... unless you happen to bring them some glue to sniff...

But now it is done - I am glad. I am just hoping we don't need to go through the process more than once!

Interesting gifts

Time to Teach is now gearing up for Christmas - if you click on World Visions catalogue, you can buy someone 3 chickens, a well or a pig - which will then be given to someone in the third world on your behalf. Your relative or friend gets a card telling them what you 'bought' them and then gave it away.

If you give to charity with us, you give like normal, but we give lots of the extra commission back to them. I think it is a great idea and also as with World vision, if you sign up for WWF, your friend will know you adopted an elephant for them.

Please consider and donate.

Back after the holidays to find the boss has left!

The Earthquake tremor here has been major news (Richter 5.9), with all sorts of experts being dusted off to explain how they had had visions of the quake before it all happened - science only managed to predict it 22 seconds in advance - just enough time for my father in law to make a mad dash across the room and hold onto the crystal display cabinet and hope that none were broken - a man made of much sterner stuff than I who stayed in a wildly rocking bed, with a terrified wife, until I suddenly remembered I should be sitting under a door frame - by the time I had us positioned in said door frame, all had stopped - and I was getting cold!

If you are reading this - please add a comment, as I am now getting an increasing number people reading my thoughts each day, and it would be great to hear how the rest of the world was also getting on - I would love to resolve your schools problems...

(I was once known as 'Dr Love' and had a following of loney hearts needing their emtional difficulties sorted out... )

The school continues to throw up amazing array of surprises, as I leave worried about a meeting I was having with the boss over some children who needed a firm talking to, and came bac to discover, after having sweated it out for 10 days, and thinking of witty defences, that the said boss was now back in the UK in unexpected circumstances, and the school had a new management team running it... my discovery of the day was never try to open a bottle of warm champayne in a dimlomats house full of glass - as I skillfully avoided firing the cork off into the glass lights scattered strategically around the room so they were not hit, the spray from the bottle managed to shoot out backwards, and destroy the sofa I happended to be sitting on instead... so I can't imagine I will be getting many more diplomat invatations.

This is having a weird impact on the school - a bit like a cork which has been tied down for a bit, making a mad break for the surface! I have no idea where it will all lead to, but it is certain to make interesting writing for this blog!

My latest amusement was a friend's teacher noticed a child was acting strangely, and so the parents were asking if they could get an education specialist to look at him. They then came to the stunningly sensible conclusion that if they had him checked, he could then be labelled as anything other than perfect.... so they are not getting him checked. This only is recommended in the International Circuit, where not having a special needs child is deemed crucial to the success of the moves. Instead it has been recommended to give him less work, so he does not feel he is not underachieving... this could only happen in the ex-pat world - most parents would jump in the nearest Learning support assistant to see if they could get grants and as much help as they could...

We are now building a 3 storey climbing wall up the side of the school - this has ensured I win at least one beer before Christmas, as I have bet that there will be at least one bone broken before Christmas ... it means the small playing area now needs extra watching to make sure none of the children try to climb up the wall without ropes at breaktimes - and of course that local children with little to do in Rich-Ville don't try to climb up in the evenings and weekends - I am sure it will all end in tears... I just hope the ropes arrive soon, and a helmet!

Speaking of helmets, being 6ft 3 inches here is proving tough as I seem to manage to wak into every low door in a building - my wife spends her life saying ' watch your head' as we have discovered I seem to get caught out by random pipes at head height across driveways, single low doors in normal flats, and garden gates. I have come to the conclusion that the Romanian are such a small size as all the taller ones get smacked on the head by all the low objects there seem to be here!

Get to holidays - no less stress!

Having got through the year to half term, I thought I would get to Greece and relax and sip a few drinks in the sun...

However I then found I should be house hunting and Romanian house hunting is a very unique experience. I have never had to consider before earthquakes as one of the things to think about. The house I saw was very nice, and so I got very excited... then of course I found out the roof was poor, and the whole thing would collapse in a shake... then going down stairs, I found the bottom neighbour was renting out the cellars to the local drug addicts in conjunction with the town hal to keep them off the street (and so on my future door way!).

We then looked at another unique style of housing - the office or bedroom without a window... I couldn't work out quite who would want a bedroom without any windows - obviously the Romanans enjoy their privacy! However again it was rejected.

The whole of the Romanian economy is apparently about to collapse as they devale their currency 10,000 times so 10,000 lei (worth 20p) will become 1 lei - last time they did this thousands lost all of their savings! Of course the great question is how will this affect the Romanian booming housing market which is quite without foundation in booming growth or booming salaries?

Then it comes to trying to work out quite how to pay for it all, as they are all very concerned over banks in general and want to be paid in cash - can you imagine paying for a whole house in cash? I am nervous if I am carrying more than loose change here - carrying more than a Romanians life times earnings in a suitcase will be a very nervous moment for me - though at least I will do it at a bank - they have the nervous job of getting it home and keeping it there!

Incidentally we are now selliing a great house for only £12,000 should anyone be interested! It has 10,000 m of land and a pond...

The trials and tribulations of overseas life!

Life in Romania just gets harder and harder, and it comes to a point where not having the protection of a Union just makes it worth coming home and living in a more secure, richer society.

I am now having to think of what I would like to do next - I would love to show my Romanian wife England as she has yet to spend much time there. The tales I could tell from abroad about Romanian International schools would provide you with many an hours long chuckle. A few well known disasters was the school which decided to save money by giving fake dollars to their teachers, another had its teachers fly out on fabulous looking contracts, only to meet the boss who simply smiled and took them off them and gave much less attractive ones, with the explanation - oh these things - mistakes from the office! When you are far from home after a long flight, what do you do? ...

However saying that, the experience of working aboard is also excellent. Where else could I eat a wild bear? Where else do you have to learn a new language or not be able to shop with the locals, and where the prices of flowers rockets if you are a foreigner? One crazy tradition from Romania is the insistence on giving an odd number of flowers - if you give an even one, your beloved has died and you are going to their grave... which is difficult to explain when you want to be so romantic you ignore the price and by a dozen roses!

An odd belief here is the 'Current' - if there is a wind blowing between 2 windows, and you sit between then desperate to get the air, and then get a cold a few days later, or weeks later, the dangerous wind is to blame - oddly if you stand outside, this same wind is harmless! So of course there is always a battle between locals and foreigners in hot stuffy cars - the Brits drive with all the windows down, the Romanians with all the windows up - I cooked for hours when I was over ruled on that one!

I have just found a really exciting maths website you must see!

Math and Reading Help for Kids is a directory of hundreds of original articles, tips, and resources centered on the topic of children's learning. Although the articles in this site are primarily written to help parents make informed decisions about their child's education, there is also a comprehensive Just for Kids section containing dozens of articles written for a younger audience.

http://math-and-reading-help-for-kids.org/index.html

It is full of useful advice for teachers and for parents and of course it also helps to show other links to help you extend your search in solving problems involving the teaching of maths.

I need more maths resources!

I have built up a huge number of links and resources for teachers to freely download and use. I have also organised for the website to have an endless amount of space to store of the resources I use. I now would like to see people donating useful worksheets, PowerPoint and excel spreadsheets which I can share with everyone else!

I would particularly like to start to develop a secondary maths website resource pack, as I have noticed while in the Primary schools there are so many different maths resources to use, the ones in secondary are generally of a much lower quality for the free to download stuff.

I would however recommend www.edhelper.com as a website for people to visit for more worksheets in the secondary sector!

Any more links would be very useful indeed!

Living as an ex-pat in Romania

This is a report from someone who lived here for 2 years. I love it here, the people are fabulous, and the weather great (compared to the UK), with very hot summers, and very cold winters.

Moving from the UK to here was a huge culture shock which took about a year to get through the system. I started out life as a very much ex-pat lifestyle with the cinemas, nice restauraunts and drinking to excess, and then slowed down as I became absorbed into mainstream Romanian life and now look forward to my weekends when I head off into the countryside and pretend to be a peasant! It is a nice life, with chopping wood, looking after the two cows and being far awayt from terrible TV!

I then married out here, which ensured it was a one-way ticket here, which is great as I am now just getting into the swing of living a life as an ex-pat teachers in one of the nicest schools to work for in Bucharest. I am still amused by the daily life of my year 4 children and the mishaps they seem to be able to generate, but all in all we are all working hard at getting them a British education in a less than typically British setting. The multicultural aspects of it all are certainly a bonus though and one in which I would recommend anyone else to try.

I ended up out here as I was bored of teaching in the UK. There are others who spend their entire lives travelling from school to school, but this is not my style. I have to work so very hard at getting any Romanian knowledge, that if I had to move countries again, I would never learn any of the cultures. Plus of course is that the snows are nearly upon us and when the snow starts, the snow remains here until at least March.

We are now gearing up to the joining of the EU, where it is good as corruption is now having to be made smaller, but there is so much to lose from joining (such as the simple peasant life I love) that I don't know if it is so good. We are like living at least 50 years behind the UK in many ways, except for the Internet cafes, and mobile phones!

Teaching Special Needs in Romania

There is a new job coming up which if you are interested you can write to me about at jobs@timetoteach.co.uk for an experienced special needs teacher to work with children in Romania with a British charity.

There are many HIV-positive children in Romania, in fact there are more than in any other country in Europe. They were all expected to die young and so no real provision was ever made for them, apart from ensure they did not attend schools and so not be able to apply for jobs of value.

However, due to advances in medicine, many are now living much longer than they previously thought. Indeed into early adulthood. And without the schooling they need, they are at a major disadvantage to the rest of the world. This is why the charity is keen to employ a teacher to teach them how to read, write and basic maths, so that they can operate more easily in the outside world.

I don't know what the salary for this position is, but I do know that it is considered 'good' compared to a local salary and any further details would be between you and the charity in question.

In Romania as a whole if you have special needs, you have an even tougher time than usual as the country's welfare system is not set up to support those in need, so you find them begging on the trams and in the town, all very sad indeed. However there are people dedicated to making a difference and this is a start...

Making money from home as a teacher.

Do you know of any great online work places for teachers to work in their spare time, sharing their skills while also benefiting huges from decent commissions?

To kick the ball off, can I suggest UK teachers look at this website from School Zone. Another good one to investigate is www.classroomresources.com which pay for original material.

Any interesting links will be added here as anyone adds them. If you know of any, please feel free to add them as comments here.

The use of text books in schools

In our school we have an interesting set of discussions, around the value of text books. I would be very keen to know what other schools experiences of text books are and if there are any amazing text books you couldn't live without.

I now use a computer projector as this has had the effect of reducing the need of worksheets and text books to almost nothing, hence the reason why the website was originally written. However this then has the problems of differentiation. If everyone is using the one whiteboard, it is much harder to differentiate between the high and low achievers.

I would also like to include many more maths resources on my site provided by other teachers, so that we can all benefit from each others efforts without any one in particular having to supply it all. If you do have resources you would like to share, I would be very happy to add them to my site. Likewise, if you know of any exciting webpapges, please send me the link so that others can also benefit from your discoveries, as there are so many poor sites to sift through.

Welcome to the Online Discussion

Time to Teach is now over 5 years old, and started as one of the first sites to offer a huge number of free resources to teachers. Over the years this website has grown and developed until it now contains over 500 different complete lessons, and has 300 teachers using it a day.

At this point I decided it was time this site could now be used as a really useful resource for teachers wanting more from the web. Somewhere where they can ask questions about how to teach maths or look for suggestions of where to find more resources.

I now would like to see this becoming a new teaching resource. If nothing else come back every so often and I will tell you about the life of an International teacher based in Romania, a country of huge contrasts.