This tutoring session was with Turki from Saudi Arabia. Turki is older than most of the CIES students I have met and is more serious about his work. He never fails to come without a list of topics that he wants to work on. At first I found these requests kind of intimidating as a tutor, but now I appreciate them for they allow me to prepare with materials and to do research on the certain lessons that he wants to focus on before hand. During this session we met at his apartment complex, something I was also a bit intimidated about at first; however, it was a very safe and comfortable environment and actually worked better due to the low level of noise. During this session we focused on prepositions of place as well as practiced using context clues to determine the meaning of a word. Although he likes idioms and funny sayings, he says in certain texts they can be difficult to understand. We worked through a number of different examples as well as with his homework assignment that had already been edited and graded by the teacher. It was a successful lesson and I looked forward to the next one.
My next tutoring session was with Turki. We met at the Starbucks on Tennessee Street, the usual spot, and started the session with a causal conversation about life and his short term English goals. Turki decided he didn't want to continue with the second session of CIES classes, and that he wanted to rather focus solely on passing the IELTS exam. He said he found the CIES classes to be helpful, but also distracting. He said he thinks he's gotten the most out of his classes and that it would be more productive for him to study on his own. Where I don't completely agree with his logic, it is his life and I trust his decision making. For this session he brought his own material that he wanted to focus on. This time it was a reading passage that I even found to be quite difficult, and I was once again impressed by his far reach in practice and ability. The reading passage was accompanied by a set of numerous comprehension questions that we reviewed and answered together. The qu...
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