For our next meeting, Sulaiman and I met at the Paper Fox café again. We talked about my graduation in less than a week and my plans to go home for a while before I went abroad. I mentioned that I really wanted to go to South America again after having gone to Brazil, and Sulaiman was really interested in learning more about my trip. We talked a lot about our dream trips abroad, especially to Brazil. He was really interested in hiking and seeing the natural sites of the region. Unfortunately, he does not really know anything about Portuguese, so that is a concern of his, but I told him that a lot of people in Brazil speak English, especially in the tourist industry. He did mention, however, that he was really interested in Spanish. Since the Moorish people ruled in Spain for a long time, a lot of Spanish vocabulary is similar to Arabic. Spanish words such as ‘azúcar’ (sugar) and ‘Alcázar’ (any castle built in Spain during Moorish rule) were identical to their Arabic equivalents. This subject was very interesting to me, and Sulaiman and I spent a long time talking about it. This is definitely something I hope to mention to my Saudi Arabian tutee, Somaia!
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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