I had what hopefully won't be my last tutoring session with Manal. We chatted about how far she's come with her English skills, but again how much farther she still wants to go. We went over more composition assignments and she seemed to have a more positive attitude compared to the last tutoring session. Her composition mistakes were mostly made up of errors pertaining to subject verb agreement, as well as not her lack of including articles when needed to. I found these errors somewhat hard to explain to her, but she seemed to understand how to fix them. We ended the session with me asking her if she'd like to be apart of my Visual Rhetoric project where I interview Saudi Arabian CIES students about their experience in America so far. This led to a grander discussion about the misconceptions that the media brings about different cultures, and I could tell she was happy with me trying to break these existing stereotypes. Manal was one of my favorite CIES students and I hope to continue tutoring her in the future.
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 ...
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