This tutoring session was with Manal. She had been feeling unmotivated last time we met, but seemed to be feeling more positive this time. She is in her second session of classes at CIES and said the composition class is harder this time than it was last time. She said she does okay when writing paragraphs, but has been having problems when it comes to writing essays overall. She showed me a homework assignment that had been graded and asked for help with revision. We walked through the composition assignment together line by line and I asked her what she thinks would be the correct revision before fixing it directly for her. She usually picked up on her mistakes pretty quickly, but sometimes I would have to just tell her the answer. I found this tutoring session to be challenging for me because a lot of her mistakes were not simple errors, they were rather "advanced level" errors that even native speakers mess up on. I found this to be good practice in explaining english grammar rules; however, I wish I could have given her better responses than I did.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
Comments
Post a Comment